The debate on the rural development of certain regions and its external articulations is seen as an examples of a subjects areas that is brought back into debate in Brazil because of reflections increasingly interested in understanding the diversity of routes taken by the process of development and the social, economic and cultural roots that explain such diversity. The first section of the work examines the more general factors that condition economy's and society's restructuring process, in order to identify the relations and mediations between local processes and the changes resulting from the restructuring of contemporary capitalism. The second section discusses the new approach to rural development, based on the widening of the spatial, occupational and sectorial scope of the rural. The third section is aimed at indicating the need to strengthen the displacement of the idea of region to the territory, recovering both implications of and resistances to this operation, which come from geography, and the indications by some scholars, international institutions and governments that make a normative and operational use of the territorial approach to point out a new focus on regional development. In the light of such discussions, the fourth and last section intends to examine articulations and intermediations of local and territorial dynamics with the external environment, here understood as the economic and societal context in which social change processes take place.
rural development; territorial approach; regional development