The European Commission has been striving to achieve sustainable development in its rural areas for more than 25 years through funds aimed at modernizing the agricultural and forestry sectors, protecting the environment and improving the quality of life. However, is sustainable rural development really being accomplished? This study sets out to answer this question in the case of Extremadura, a Spanish territory with low demographic density and a gross domestic product still below 75% of the European average. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies have been employed, using principal component analysis, the result of which has provided us with a model that shows how various behaviors coexist in the region in view of the distribution of current funding from the EAFRD (European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development). The most dynamic areas have received the largest amounts of funding and these are linked to the agricultural sector and to the protection of the environment, leaving aside the more depressed areas and the implementation of the LEADER approach as well. Therefore, we have come to the conclusion that the current rural development in Extremadura is not sustainable enough.

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Abstract:Since the 1990s, a series of rural development aid programs (LEADER Approach) has been implemented in European rural areas, including Extremadura, in order to solve the demographic, social, and economic problems that rural areas experience. The main objective of these programs is to diversify the economy to reverse these problems. The purpose of this present paper is to study the distribution of the investments committed during the period of 2000-2013 in Extremadura according to the geolocation and to perform the analysis of clusters through Local Moran's I, Getis-Ord G i *, and Kernel Density in order to determine whether the results are related to the demographic and economic behavior of each territory of action and if these act as location factors for investments. We found that most dynamic towns receive more investments, leaving out the more physically, economically, and demographically disadvantaged ones.

The rural–urban dichotomy is one of the most debated topics by the scientific community in territorial issues. In addition, many public entities and scientific studies have established the distinctive elements of rural and urban spaces by relating the decline of the rural ones with factors such as aging, low birthrate, the primary sector, unemployment, or poverty, among others. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to spatially study the current model of territorial organization of Spanish urban and rural municipalities as well as their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. To this end, GIS (Geographic Information System) tools were used to carry out a spatial autocorrelation (SA) analysis and to identify homogeneous groups of the variables considered. In conclusion, there are different demographic and socioeconomic realities in Spain, an urban one located on the coast with a positive situation and, on the other hand, a regressive reality composed of rural municipalities, among which there are villages whose situation is worrying, mainly located in the north of Spain.

For 25 years the rural development policy has been implemented through the LEADER Approach in the EU to reduce differences between rural and urban areas, as well as to satisfy the basic needs of the population. In this paper, Extremadura is analysed, which is a Spanish region where LEADER has been applied since its inception in 1991. The objective is to assess if the distribution of rural development aids has been influenced by the diverse demographic and socioeconomic realities that Extremadura presents from the analysis of variables that represent these realities on the territory through a GIS. Following this methodology, it has been noticed that the largest investments have been executed in the most developed rural areas of the region.