Las políticas de desarrollo rural en la CAE: un balance

Since the beginnings of the 90’s, the public actions over the rural environment- besides the policies directed to the stimulus of the production and the protection of the agricultural incomeshave been gradually developed into policies of a territorial character whose declared objective consisted in promoting the development of the rural areas. And thus, with the awareness of the multifunctional character of the rural environment, the rural development policies have acquired an increased importance as instruments of territorial cohesion, with the objective to reverse the social and economic decline process, that the rural areas are suffering from, and thus to increase the welfare, not only the one of the rural areas, but also the one of the society as a whole. After more than a decade of the application of the rural development policies in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, and given the changes that are discerned as far as this matter is concerned within the E.U’s framework, and further than the evaluations of the applied programmes; the article expounds an analysis and a balance about the philosophy, design and application of the rural development programmes, and also about the contribution of the realized actions in terms of the aimed objectives versus the achieved ones.