This chapter presents an account of an intense personal experience in the launching and management of a Local Development project that occurred from 1985 to 1998.

In the early 1980s, when the work began, Local Development appeared as a detour that made sense in the context of the crucial and strategic contradictions of Portuguese society, and the region of Serra do Caldeirão, in the Algarve, seemed particularly adequate to this approach. It is a semi-mountainous territory which has provided the means of subsistence for the people who have settled there since time immemorial, but which nowadays is one of the many rural territories of Europe that have been marginalised and earmarked for gradual extinction by the "macro-architects" of the modern economy.

The RADIAL Project started in 1985. Four villages, and their rural surrounding areas, were selected for immediate action and three main issues were chosen as starting points for integrated local development: child care, training for self-employment, and support to local associations. Local meetings were convened and the whole population invited to debate "the future of our children." A decision was then collectively made to create village centers that would provide pre-school and out-of-school care as well as activities for the local children. In less than a year, four village committees were formally constituted as parish-level associations, each of them taking charge of the management of one of the newly-created centers.

At the same time, training courses for self-employment were launched in the villages. As a result, in 1989-91, 7 production units were created, thus providing an independent and paid occupation for the fifty women involved. Here, as in several other local workshops, each single product, be it a piece of craft or food produce, is not just an item to be sold, but an expression of a culture, of a local society, as well as an expressionn of the producers' and their families' determination to live and work in the area of their choice.

In 1988, as an offshoot of the original RADIAL Project, the "In Loco" Association was formally constituted by 12 founding members. It was created as a non-profit association of citizens concerned with the ongoing "mis-development" of the world as a whole and of the rural interior of the Algarve, in particular.

A new phase began in early 1992, when "In Loco" was invited by the Portuguese Ministry of Agriculture to draw up a "local action plan" as part of the preparatory stage of the EU LEADER Initiative. Now, "In Loco" could finally guarantee the necessary means-human and material-to pursue a coherent strategy of integrated local development. And the time may be ripe for "In Loco" to take a further step towards more participatory and empowering local structures and decision-making procedures.

Obviously, the future of this development will always depend on the global, political, and institutional contexts that shape the relation between the formal political powers, at their different levels, and the civic and solidary organizations.