What is an agricultural park? Observations from the Spanish experience.

Abstract

In recent decades, an emerging literature on Agricultural Parks (APs) has described and theorized their variations in the different countries where they have been debated and/or implemented. This paper aims to conceptualize an AP in the Spanish context by analyzing case-studies. The review of the existing international literature on APs is followed by a set of analytical criteria to select pertinent case-studies and construct three analytical clusters consisting of several variables. The results of the comparative assessment of 19 selected case-studies are then presented. The analytical results obtained are compared against the available literature, highlighting several contentious findings which are contrary to the researchers’ expectations, including the quasi absent physical planning dimension of APs. The paper concludes that, counter to previous aprioristic and deductive AP literature, APs are not consistent across jurisdictions despite making use of the same name. By contrast, they merely share some soft features that are made explicit here, leading towards a final proposed conceptualization of APs.