Towards a Meta‐Framework of Endogenous Development: Repertoires, Paths, Democracy and Rights

Although interest in endogenous (integrated, participative, bottom-up) rural development by policy makers, practitioners and academics continues to grow, the term suffers from an incomplete conceptualization. This prescriptive essay proposes a meta-framework in which to conceptualize the nature of endogenous development in the contemporary, contexts of globalization and Europeanization. The framework is built around three main components. Territorial repertoires and development paths encapsulate the nature of ownership and choice in the exploitation of resources. This derives from a more sophisticated understanding of territorial agency. A repertoire functions dynamically as a mediator between the local territory and the extralocal level and so the component rights focuses attention onto this flexible interface, through the support potentially available from extralocal regulation anti through a raising of consciousness within the local territory. Rights, by energizing a cultural and political dynamics, allow for a discourse on alternative paths of development to be pursued, which is itself operationalized through any or all of the three modes of democracy