Territorial identity as a strategic resource for the development of rural areas

Rural areas play a relevant role in the EU: their specific ecosystems, landscapes and cultures are a highly valuable treasure, which could be lost if the trends of social, economic and demographic marginalization characterizing many of them are not properly faced. The rural development policy for the period 2007-13 (Reg. 1698/2005) gave particular relevance to the "Leader approach" developed in the previous period 2000-2006, or to the "development and implementation of highly individual projects designed and executed by local partnerships to address specific local problems”. For the next programming period (2014-2020) decision makers should be provided with a framework of the actual situation resulting from such interventions, in order to overcome the problems that emerged in the previous phases and to propose innovative strategies and solutions. After an introduction on the issue of the close relations between local identity and European rural development policies, the paper presents critically the contributions discussed at Session 32 ("Rural development policy and local identities in the European Union ") of the Fourth Congress EUGEO (Rome, 12 to 14 September 2013), and collected in the special issue of this journal.