Abstract EN:

The rural world is torn between the eulogists of the bygone happy days announcing the rural rebirth of a re-enchanted, ecological world, nurtured on beliefs about an endogenous development and the advocates of a rural refuge, intended solely for entertainment, marginalized and devoid of peasants. The analysis of the department of the Gers, an intermediate, deeply rural territory does not result in such a dichotomous view, for it displays the structural hindrances, the impediments to growth, and at the same time the factors of success and renewal. Most of all this investigation describes how the local elected representatives have grasped the new freedoms stemming from the decentralization laws to draw up their strategical guidelines or to conduct day after day their local development actions. In the process, it emphasizes the significance of ruralism, the cultural resistances and the typicity of this department. The constraints of localism and freezing identity claims weigh so heavily on the latter that we can talk of the insularity of the Gers. Thus, we remain with two main questions: what are the limits of interventionism in terms of local development in rural environment? In the second place, we can wonder whether the actors are determined to build a project of local society, aiming at submitting the department to a dimensional optimum and at promoting the conditions of integration, opening and adhesion to an actual process of development.