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The subject of this paper is the discussion about the concepts of rural development and local development starting from the different lines that tend in their making up: the Geographic epistemology, the politics based on them and the material processes of development. The issues of this discussion are: the difficulty of reflect this development processes in quantitative evidences (indicators) due to their rather qualitative character; the ambiguous definition of their scale, and related to that, their condition spread or concentrated; their suitability to make compatible objectives of both territorial and social cohesion; the limitations to be extrapolated the concept of stakeholders, own of local development, to rural development; the lack of coordination between economic planning and urban planning to the detriment of a true sustainability and, in the opposite, the threats that are to the rural space the application of sustainability politics designed from the urban context. ; El objeto de este artículo es la discusión de los conceptos de desarrollo rural y local a partir de las distintas líneas que convergen en su definición: las elaboraciones epistemológicas de la Geografía, los instrumentos de planificación en ellos basados y los procesos reales. Los términos de esta discusión son los siguientes: La dificultad de expresar en indicadores los resultados de estos procesos de desarrollo, dado su carácter más cualitativo que cuantitativo; la ambigua definición de su escala, y, en relación con ello, su carácter difuso o concentrado; su idoneidad para compatibilizar objetivos de cohesión social y territorial; las limitaciones de la extrapolación al desarrollo rural del concepto de «actores» propio del desarrollo local; la carencia de coordinación entre planificación económica y urbana en detrimento de una sostenibilidad real y, a la inversa, las amenazas para el espacio rural derivadas de la aplicación de políticas de sostenibilidad trazadas desde una perspectiva urbana. [fr] L'objet de c'article est la discussion ...

These days, Africa is seen as an underdeveloped or developing continent. (...) What is meant by this is that Africa as a whole lags behind other areas in terms of measurable economic output and general "quality of life" indices for its inhabitants. An evident paradox in the attempts made to solve the problem of underdevelopment in Africa is that the vast majority of the research into the cause of Africa's present condition emanates from research centres and universities located in the West. And what is evident about the majority of such theories is that they tend to focus narrowly on strictly economic issues geared towards "alleviating poverty" and creating piecemeal conditions for "sustainable development". The collection of essays in this issue approach the problem of development from a broader, more holistic perspective which analyses that explore Africa's present status theoretically, from the standpoint of all the social sciences, not just economics. (Afr Dev/DÜI)