The territory of globalization; reflections on the Chilean regional system

Abstract

In this article we analyze the challenge of the endogenous regional-local development in Latin America in the context of the “territoriality/globalization” dialectic. To do so, we start from the need to understand globalization as a multidimensional phenomenon, acknowledging the dimensions most frequently considered in this, such as the political, economic, social dimensions, as well as one that is seldom explicitly included, namely: geographic dimension. As for the latter, the importance of including it in terms of an internal geographic dimension and also as an external geographic dimension.

Understating regional development from this “globalization territoriality” dialectic supposes recognizing the interactions between the internal and external forces of development, which have the capacity to reconfigure regions. In this context, the challenge for territories is to organize as pivotal regions, which articulate the external economic aperture and an internal political aperture, as well as the interpenetration of the public and the private in regional management.

Pivotal regions are territories with a complex organization, in which there exists a variety of subsystems hierarchized in nonlinear manners. Pivotal regions are also characterized by its identity-generating culture. From this conception oriented to regional development, regional culture synthesizes as a way to see the world and relate with it. These complex regions are also in need of modernization by the State in territorial terms, which to a good extent goes hand in hand with the capacity to generate and organize information.