From the 4th to the 6th of July, the XII Ibero-American Congress of Rural Studies took place in Segovia, Spain, under the generic title “Global territories, diverse ruralities”. I had the privilege of participating in the final round table of the congress in a session on “strategies to combat rural abandonment”.
From my intervention I leave here some notes.
the late portuguese rural
As I wrote earlier, in the knowledge society all problems, or almost all, stem from lack of knowledge. If we do not know a territory well, its resource endowment will be underestimated and its development possibilities undervalued.
On the other hand, we are the ones who create scarcity by the way we organize ourselves. It is our greed and arrogance that creates artificial scarcity in order to concentrate wealth and poverty.
The late Portuguese rural is due to our ancestral bipolarity: on the one hand, the centralism of the capital where the national political aristocracy is concentrated; on the other, the municipalist localism surrounded by a court of small loyalties and clienteles that share among themselves the meager resources that the economy and the political-party system are managing.
30 years later, the causal link between competitiveness and cohesion
Thirty years after our entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), after so much public and private investment financed by European funds, in a country as small as ours, the internal imbalances that persist are a faithful mirror of our political options and ours. collective trajectory as a country and as a nation.
Between 1985 and 1999, the Portuguese economy grew by an annual average of between 3 and 4%, which made it possible to finance redistribution and territorial cohesion policies. The causal link between competitiveness and cohesion worked positively and regional convergence indices increased compared to the European average. Between 2000 and 2015, the Portuguese economy grew on average between 0 and 1% annually, public debt grew substantially, the country was on the brink of bankruptcy and was the object of an economic and financial adjustment program by the Troika between 2011 and 2014 .
The causal link between competitiveness and cohesion worked negatively and the regional convergence indices to the European average worsened once again. Evidence shows that the structural weaknesses of the Portuguese economy have not been resolved and that, below 3% GDP growth, the economy does not generate sufficient resources to permanently support the territorial cohesion policy. This means that the territorial cohesion policy loses autonomy and becomes an endogenous variable of macroeconomic policy as it presents itself today within the framework of the European Union's economic and monetary union.
Imbalances, abandonment and sale of assets
Territorial imbalances follow a well-known pattern. On the one hand, metropolitan, suburban and peri-urban areas, accumulating increasing external costs of a social and environmental nature that taxpayers socialize through the tax; on the other, devitalized and desertified urban and rural areas incapable of generating sufficient network and agglomeration economies to reverse this vicious circle.
The outcome is also well known, especially in a country that has a high public debt, very high bad debts and a low rate of domestic savings. Namely: the country is at the mercy of creditors and foreign capital and large parcels of national territory and many other valuable assets pass from hands, practically without realizing it. We do not want to talk about it, but it is a substantial part of our territorial sovereignty that is being called into question.
Indeed, between 2000 and 2015, the entry into force of the monetary union, the fiscal treaty, the great sovereign debt crisis of 2008, the banking crises and the Troika's adjustment programs left us a heavy legacy that still persists today : we lowered the share of labor in national income, we lowered the cost of labor, we lowered the levels of social protection, we increased the tax burden, we increased the precariousness of work, we socialized the losses of banks and public companies.
The consequences of this economic and financial adjustment program and this general impoverishment left an impressive mark on the territory. The great fires of recent years are due, to a large extent, not only to climate change, but, above all, to depopulation and rural abandonment and its inclusion in land use planning.
Territorial cohesion, some necessary conditions
Despite the fact that the causal link between competitiveness and cohesion is not very favorable, mainly due to a very austere European macroeconomics in terms of financial balance, there are some necessary conditions for the territorial cohesion policy that we can mention right away:
– Avoid creating a new vicious circle, this time a deficit of digital infrastructure in the most disadvantaged territories;
– Given the low capitalization of disadvantaged territories, it is necessary to create positive discrimination with regard to public investment;
– It is essential to move up the value chain of programming and territorial planning, promoting municipal federalism and network territories and reducing excessive municipalization;
– It is essential to promote a “desired geography” and a renewed sociocultural symbolism in the most disadvantaged territories, beyond the statistical territorial nomenclatures that divide the country;
– It is essential to create a rationality center for territorial cohesion policies at the level of the CCDR, with a view to contracting with the central administration a minimum stock of attributions, competences and financial resources;
– Finally, a change in the European Union's macroeconomic policy and a new territorial doctrine for cohesion policy based on networks of cities and regions is essential;
The smartification of the territory, a promise for the future
A new opportunity in terms of cohesion concerns the so-called smartification of the territory. We are talking about smart and creative territories and their connectivity and interaction. In the late rural Portuguese, and as paradoxical as this may seem, the best solution for disadvantaged rural areas is their polycontextual framework through networks of small and medium-sized towns in the interior.
The basic idea is the creation of new hinterlands and areas of influence through a flow regime that is capable of feeding a new network and agglomeration economy.
This polycentrism of the network of small and medium-sized cities brings together not only the various “business areas” but also the municipal ecological structures and allows for more effective planning of new “infrastructures and utilities common”.
In this way, we have more cities in the countryside and more countryside in the city, that is, a much more effective green economy, whether in terms of production or recreation. The digitization of the territory, using various geographical location technologies, also allows us to add “augmented and virtual reality” to the territory and, in this way, expand the symbology of territorial distinctive signs that are at the base of a “desired geography ”.
Final grade
There is a causal relationship impossible to ignore, one that links the European macroeconomics with the national macroeconomics and these with the regional mesoeconomy and the local and rural microeconomics. The so-called multilevel governance. Insofar as the first two prevail over the others, we have here a “general rule of conditionality” that makes the dominant orientations at European level fall on the territorial cohesion policy.
We are talking about the architecture of the eurozone, the financial rules of the budget treaty, the scarcity of the Union's own resources, the monetary policy of the Central Bank and competition policy, to name the most important. It is the political decisions in these matters that determine, to a large extent, the competitiveness of the European economy and national economies and it is through them that the “effects” for the territorial cohesion policy are communicated.
In this context, and within the margin of freedom that we are entitled to, we can only indulge our imagination and do our homework well. If we are able to increase collective territorial intelligence, we will surely be rewarded.
Author António Covas is a full professor at the University of Algarve and a PhD in European Affairs from the Free University of Brussels
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