The Crisis of the State and the Region: Regional Planning Questioned

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the political significance of the alternatives for regional development in which community participation and the decentralization of decisionmaking power are proposed. Although their discourses are similar, they have different ideological motivations and content. These proposals, together with the crisis in regional theory and planning are associated with the contradictions inherent in the economic globalization of the contemporary world: the conflict between the corporation and the state; the crisis of the state and the region; and the intensification of protest movements organized on a territorial basis. The central question is the sharpening of the contradictions of the state, which ensures bourgeois domination but is also (in countries of peripheral capitalism) the only force capable of (a) ensuring social investments on the necessary scale and (b) confronting global capitalism. This question is denied both in proposals for decentralization and in the criticism made of them by political economists, which thus hampers identification of political priorities. In Brazil, which is a country of continental size and advanced industrialization, economic crisis is accompanied by a crisis of legitimization of the state. The solution of the crisis and the democratization of the country demand not its fragmentation but a national power legitimized by full participation of all segments of society at different levels.