La programmazione dello sviluppo rurale nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia: un complesso intreccio fra istituzioni, capitale umano e visioni culturali

During last decades, the development of rural areas has become a central theme for scientific and political debate and for the strategic objectives of the community development policies, because of a set of issues each other highly correlated, due to three main processes: the deep structural changes in economy and society; the integration and enlargement of EU; the evolution of European Common Agricultural Policy and of agricultural model. The present paper aims to develop an analysis of main rural development issues starting from determinants of the success of the structural public policies implementation in the rural areas of the Italian ‘Mezzogiorno’, facing a lot of serious specific problems. These areas are still showing deep delays in development processes. The empirical evidence has been extracted from the case of internal areas of Campania: they showed strong lacks in productive assets accumulation (namely human capital, instrumental and structural endowments, service infrastructures) together with a wide institutional weakness. These problems caused the deterioration of social capital limiting the opportunities for the creation of new networks: the fall in socioeconomic growth rates has been worsened by the poorness in competences, managerial skills and generational exchange, linked in a vicious circle with a weak cultural model and the difficulties in local governance to be effective in bottom-up policies implementation. The planning of the 2007-2013rural development phase has to be developed in a context of policy vision changes to face the specific problems of these areas and to create the socioeconomic environment conditions for the effectiveness of the bottom up approach to development initiatives. The crucial potential role played by EARDF the development of the lagging rural areas of the Italian ‘Mezzogiorno’, need a strong integration with the structural (ERDF and ESF) funds, to guarantee the efficiency but also of the effectiveness of policies, to create and to implement innovative development tools. But it is not enough: EARDF, even if integrated with the tools of the cohesion policy, cannot break the perverse effects of the relation linking all principal weakness in institutions, human resources and cultural visions, the main factors of active decline.