Latent Territorial Resilience and the Fragility of Rural Cooperation: Evidence from Portuguese Cases on Project-Based Public Funding and Conditions for the CAP

This article examines how time-limited, project-based public funding instruments (the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), EU LIFE, and Erasmus+) mediate rural cooperation. Integrating policy instrumentation, innovation systems, and territorial resilience literature, it proposes latent territorial resilience: functionally effective yet institutionally fragile cooperative arrangements that deliver outcomes without consolidating into stable organizational forms. A multiple-case design examines 13 purposively selected Portuguese cooperative initiatives, with four illustrative shadow cases (Greece, Austria, Germany, and Hungary). Three candidate mediation mechanisms are specified: functional coordination below institutional thresholds, policy-induced misalignment and exclusion, and informal substitution of governance functions. The first is documented in all 13 cases, the third in ten, and the second in seven, all of them on one clause of the PRR notices, which is not recorded as having blocked formalization in any case. All 13 cases are rated Low or Medium on institutional consolidation. Eleven cases follow a trajectory linked to the project (A), in which joint activity is documented only within the funded period; two (Fruta Feia and Adopt an Olive Tree) continue beyond, or without, project funding (B); and none follow a consolidated trajectory (C). The post-funding phase is documented only for Fruta Feia. CAP-funded support is documented for three cases, and only one of them (Cultivar & Cooperar, under LEADER) involves a cooperation measure, so this study takes project-based public funding, not the CAP alone, as its object. The patterns are consistent with, but do not demonstrate, a role for such funding in institutional fragility. A provisional typology of cooperation trajectories is proposed, and conditions the CAP 2028–2034 proposal would need to meet are discussed.