Human capital and relational capital as sources of effective participation in cross border cooperation programs

Cross border and transnational cooperation represent source of knowledge and inputs for local development. Especially for less developed areas, these programs integrate the local and national public funding that, year by year, become lower. Meanwhile, the EU is setting new strategies that will probably take part in cooperation programs which are more difficult for organizations unable to build cooperative relationships strongly based on effective know-how, a larger territorial base (locally), well documented and motivated programs and projects. Future cooperators will need solid backgrounds, a fair amount of trained human capital, a strategic perspective and a good capacity to transfer the local operators’ and SMEs’ needs in transnational projects and vice-versa. Assets like updated information, experience, linkages with the social and economical tissues will be crucial in determining successful projects and follow-ups for both private and public agencies. Investments/stocks in both human capital and relational capital will increase their relevance compared to other forms of capital (financial and physical). We use statistics to make inference and to test this main hypothesis and several descending others, investigating the abilities of Local Action Groups, in applying to cross-border and transnational cooperation programs, and in building project proposals. Our paper represent a proposal, a working in progress aiming at studying and verifying the existence of a correlation between SC, network and transnational cooperation programs. The selected territory is a region of a Southern Italy - the Apulia region - the Italian 'heel', whose 25 LAGs cover the whole region and include all Apulia provinces. Our work ends up with a set of insights about the behavior of these organizations useful to deepen the knowledge about the real role they can play in fostering and exploiting the corresponding territories. The structure is as follows: paragraph 2 provides an overview of the literature concerning the link between social capital, networks and rural development. The third one is about the LEADER approach and the LAGs essence and its importance for rural development by also promoting cross border and transnational cooperation. Then we show and illustrate the database built and used for this purpose (paragraph 4). In paragraph 5, we analyze the LAG social capital and we structure a proposal for a survey. Finally we draw conclusions.