Territorial governance and rural development trajectories: an exploratory comparative analysis of family farming in Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

The Territories of Citizenship Program (PTC), created in 2008, was the most emblematic territorial rural development policy implemented at the national level in Brazil. In parallel with this federal initiative, the state of Bahia developed and implemented its own territorial policy, initially following the territorial divisions established by the national program and subsequently expanding this approach to encompass the entire state. When the national program was discontinued in 2016, Bahia's state-level policy remained in place, allowing the territorial development strategy to continue independently at the state level. Thus, the objective of this study is to assess whether the territorial approach in Bahia was associated with differentiated trajectories in family farming. To perform this analysis, robust non-parametric statistical methods were applied to compare changes in family farming indicators between the Territories of Citizenship in Bahia (TC-BA) and those in the rest of Northeast Brazil (TC-NE). Our hypothesis is that family farming indicators have undergone greater evolution in TC-BA. The results support this hypothesis, indicating that TC-BA exhibited significantly greater progress for most of the indicators analyzed compared to TC-NE (p-value < 0.05). Overall, the findings suggest that the continuity of territorial governance in Bahia was associated with greater improvements in family farmers' access to public policies and with more favorable development trajectories. Nevertheless, as the analysis does not employ a full causal method, the results should be interpreted with caution and encourage further investigation.