Plataformas associativas, património rural e desenvolvimento local a contribuição do Parque Natural de Montesinho no nordeste transmontano

Abstract

El estudio analiza y muestra como, a pesar de las adversidades y obstáculos de las áreas referidas, los habitantes del Parque Natural de Montesinho (P.N.M.) y los gestores del mismo, proponen alternativas en una búsqueda continua de medios para fijar la población y mejorar sus condiciones de vida. La diversidad de recursos existentes, es un valor por sí solo para la puesta en marcha de esta estrategia. Resumen : What makes a region develop more than others? How does a region start developing? Is it possible to drive this process forward starting from the local level? These three questions are inextricably linked as well as essential for regional science. In a world in which globalization is on top of the agenda, what may be the future of the less developed regions as far as these dynamics of development are concerned? Can development be started from the local level? How? Starting from this last question, this work tries to discuss the importance of mediation agents, who may be used as links between various important actors for territorial development, in regions with a low institutional density. By describing the daily reality of the population of that region, as well as its natural conditions, and by reflecting on some solutions proposed for the problems found, one of the ambitions of this work is to widen knowledge about local development by means of the study of the case of the creation of a protected area, the Montesinho Natural Park, in the North East of Portugal. There, territory surges at the heart of the so-called "non-transactional interdependences", meaning the conventions, rules and informal habits which regulate the economic activity and represent the specific dynamic factors of every region. These are essential elements in the development based on four key factors: innovation, learning processes, networks and local authorities: innovation as a vehicle of growth, learning processes necessary to respond to the challenges of globalization, networks as the basic structure of local production systems and management as the organizing process of the other three in order to work out a development strategy. The problem for less developed regions is that they do not have enough institutional density to provide the public goods that would be necessary to organize local production systems. This, in its turn, would allow development processes based on the four key factors mentioned earlier. With new challenges, threats as well as opportunities, the "local" must be reinvented as a relational and productive space, insofar as it manages to put on the global production circuit its own strengths. With a whole of designs to be followed when elaborating local development policies, such as solutions adapted to the reality of the field, the community's participation and integration of national policies, there is a territorial tool of privileged development to conceive these policies and apply them on the field: the concept of partnerships, defined as a form of cooperation between all the actors involved in the management of each production factor, in a system allowing a local lasting development. This way, it is possible to make public policies of development possible in regions of low institutional density (called disfavoured zones), in collaboration with the so-called mediation agents or system integrators. Indeed, local development can and must be the basis for a new public policy in order to face problems such as the dichotomy between coastal and inland regions as well as other asymmetries which have been going on for many years in Portugal.