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ABSTRACT Over the last two decades, there has clearly been a change of paradigm on the perception of how rural communities are facing structural challenges, questioning both the format and content rural policy should accordingly assume. Long-term rural competitiveness and sustainability have increasingly less to do with cost-efficiency along the traditional agriculture filière and more to do with the ability of firms and institutions to innovate in terms of its portfolio of goods and services, namely the way rural territories build up their competitive advantages on the basis of their heritage. The book chapter discusses the necessity to promote development characteristics based on the identity of the different spaces, their history, their material and immaterial resources. This redesign on rural policies should necessarily aim, too, with engaging with the right targets, namely the institutionalized inertia which characterizes many rural regions, trying to stimulate the whole milieu. In this way, this new approach can be seen as an instrument of establishing a learning framework for all partners involved in the construction of a collective socio-economic trajectory Territories marked by rurality need to reinvent their economies and broaden their economic menu, making the rural world more and better available to the market, at local, national and global levels.

Innovation has been assuming an increasing role in regional policy over the past three decades. Public policies have been moulded by “best practice models” associated with new technologies and successful urban-metropolitan areas. However, the lessons obtained from these examples are seldom convenient to other territorial environments, and less attention has been paid to the role regional policies grounded on the upgrade of the innovation potential are playing in peripheral regions with structural development problems. The main objectives of this study are to first analyse the main challenges globalization and the knowledge economy bring to those territories. This discussion will be situated in the main theoretical frameworks that may allow a better understanding of the relationship innovation-territory. With an overall view of the Portuguese innovation system and its regional dimensions, insights about the main implications for the design and implementation of territorially embedded innovation policies will be made.

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion