While the rise of the category "family farming" was a feature in the 90´s for academic debate and for public policies, the same happens at the present decade with the so called "territorial approach" to rural development. The meanings of this new way to conceive the destiny of rural spaces and the policies to rural development have been studied by different authors. This article aims at to broach one aspect less emphasized in the literature: to know if the adoption of such approach is a process of institutional change or a process of simple addition of a new term to the vocabulary of planners, without the creation of new institutions capable to support an actual new conception. This second perspective offers the content to our hypothesis and it can be summarized by the following statement: the introduction of the "territorial approach" is an innovation added to the institutional environment of public policies in a typical process of path dependence, with the remaining of some elements concerning the old vision of rural development. The article brings a brief history of how such approach is adopted by multilateral organizations originating the "new vision to rural development" and how this "new vision" is transformed when adopted by Latin-American countries. Under a theoretical point of view, the article discusses the limits of the explaining about institutional change provided by the new institutional economics, offering an alternative vision based on the idea of embeddedness of institutional change.
Rural development; Territorial development; Institutional change