Timisoara Journal of Economics | eISSN: 1844 -7139 | www.tje.uvt.ro | Year 2012 | Volume 5 | Issue 18 | Pages: 299–312 THE CROSS BORDER COOPERATION PROGRAMS: HUMAN CAPITAL AND RELATIONAL CAPITAL Francesco CONTO 1 , Mariantonietta FIORE 2 , Piermichele LA SALA 2 Cross border and transnational cooperation represent sources of knowledge and inputs for local development. Especially for less developed areas, these programs integrate the local and national public funding: the EU is setting new strategies for these reasons. Future cooperators will need solid backgrounds, a fair amount of trained human capital, a strategic perspective and a good capacity to transfer the needs of local operators and SMEs in transnational projects and vice-versa. Assets, such as updated information, experience, linkages with the social and economic 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 represents a proposal, a working in progress, aiming at studying and verifying the existence of a correlation between Social Capital, network and transnational cooperation programs. The selected territory is a region of the Southern Italy - the Apulia region - the Italian 'heel', where 25 Local Action Groups 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. Keywords: Social Capital, Rural development, LEADER approach, Transnational cooperation, LAG. JEL Classification: Q10, Q18, O15 1 Full professor, Department of Economic, University of Foggia, Italy 2 Research Grant, Department of Economic, University of Foggia, Italy