New conceptual references about the "rural" gradually came to be incorporated, albeit partial and contradictory manner, by public policies. Given this assumption, we investigate in this work, how public policies for rural development, in Brazil, in recent decades, respond, in terms of its formulation, to certain conceptual innovations. To sustain this argument, we investigate, in the light of a dense bibliographic study about rural development and public policies, the historical changes, conceptual and practice of rural development. With the search was possible not only to identify the "new" references for rural development and operationalization of public policies, but also the institutional changes in that process. Our last considerations showed that changes in theoretical conceptions about the countryside and rural development were substantially important to promote a change of perspective in State action.
public policy; rural development; institutional innovation