With the arise of Development Economics as a discipline after de Second World War, the agricultural sector in developing countries was perceived as having only a subsidiary role in the economic development of these countries. Thus, priority was given to industrialization while rural areas were expected to supply cheap labour, food, raw materials and to create a home market for domestically produced industrial products. Traditional agriculture was considered a backward sector, and the evolving and entrepreneurial character of this mode of production was systematically ignored during decades in orthodox development discourse. Thus, since the 1950’s, different strategies, generally consisting in sectoral approaches, have been tested and implemented aiming socio-economic development of rural areas in developing countries, which impacts have varied in effectiveness and space. Currently, the persistence of global poverty as being mainly a rural phenomenon in developing countries along with other social, economic, environmental and ethical concerns imposed mainly by agri-business corporations, have maintained rural development as a critical issue in development thinking. Moreover, if in early Development Economics, ‘rural development’ and ‘agricultural development’ were generally treated as overlapping issues or even synonyms, nowadays it is recognised that ‘rural’ is not synonymous of ‘agricultural practice’, as so commonly occurs, although it is recognized that the latter can play an important role in the development of the former.
This paper follows the theoretical formulation that rural development is induced by a rural web composed by actors (individuals, institutions, enterprises, state agencies, social movements, etc.), resources (natural, human, and immaterial e.g. as knowledge or markets), activities (of social, economic, political or cultural nature), and, most important, by the interrelations between them. Therefore, the rural web (a) consists in a conglomerate of actor-networks, (b) spreads from local to regional and national levels, and (c) is dynamic, meaning that it can evolve or regress over time, each having distinct socio, environmental and economic impacts in the rural area.
The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to address Cape Verdean rural development through the analysis of informal rural institutions and their associated actors-networks regarding land tenure and irrigation water management in Santo Antão - one of the main agricultural islands in this archipelago located in Western Africa - by showing that the failure of past rural political economy strategies in the island is part due to the fact politicians have overlooked these actors-networks associated with existing informal rural institutions, (2) to apply the theoretical model of the rural web to developing insular territories and Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to identify the different nodes of the web and their relations, and (3) to show how rural webs and SNA bridge science and society while constituting reliable scientific model and scientific method for an accurate holistic analysis of rural areas in developing countries as complex systems, to avoid the ineffective sectoral approaches of the past.
