Investigación para el Desarrollo (ID) organised on 7-8 November 2017 in Asuncion (Paraguay) an international seminar entitled “Strengthening the management for action and territorial development in Paraguay”. Representatives of UGR, UNS and UNIMOL took part to the seminar together to several other stakeholders from all over Latin America and EU. The findings of the seminar can be resumed in: 1) the necessity of capacitation of education in the field of rural development mainly in postgraduate courses under a pragmatic pedagogical approach focused on action and case studies; 2) the needs of research on the management and territorial development mechanisms at municipal and provincial levels, the generation of proposals of improving, the dissemination of good management practices and territorial development.
From the seminar was born the idea to develop the project to meet the education needs identified, the proposal was started by UNIMOL and UNS, then partnership has been enlarged. The other partners contributed to elaborating the concrete activities and introduced new elements.
The Project is fully inserted in an environment of academic and institutional reflection on territorial development in all the countries involved. In effect, the universities involved are at the centre of the debate on the orientations and strategies to be followed in rural development and the valorisation of territorial resources, both in Europe and in Latin America.
The truly new approach face to many other projects engaged on training/teaching and learning on planning and management of territorial development for rural areas is represented essentially by:
a) the fundamental intersection among natural and cultural heritage, animal breeding and traditional practices, landscape conservation and regeneration, ways of inhabiting and exploiting rural territories in a perspective of enhancement and development of economic and social welfare of rural areas;
b) the fundamental support of ICT, virtual renderings and galleries, digital repositories and platforms to a wider and community-based process of territorial development through a flexible learning essentially constituted by:
1) online, at distance and short in presence occasions of learning and research laboratories and case-studies;
2) a rich offer of different kind of tools and toolkit for training as well as i.e. manuals, tutorials, online classes and support, online library, tutorship on the ground, exercises on data collecting and cataloguing and on cooperative and expert intervention in rural communities;
3) strongly multidisciplinary approach and model of training, not only in terms of contribution of different disciplines (agrarian studies, legal studies, architecture and landscape planning, human geography studies, socio-cultural studies, economic studies, biosciences and so on), but a new model for the cooperation among all these different disciplinary approaches focused on a question-based methodology and in local specific case-studies.
