ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides some of the most important and devastating critiques of the “bourgeois” model of development, as well as of that of the classic Marxist model, is that they are ahistorical. It shows that “Jacobin,” top-down strategies, which adopt uncritically the basic—ideological, political, economical, and spatial—tenets of modernization theories, perpetuate the same exploitative structural relationship between social and territorial entities. The discussion focused on all factors—historical, ideological, political, etc.—that have a fundamental role in the creation and perpetuation of “regional dependency.” Rather, regional underdevelopment is fundamentally a political phenomenon, a by-product of given policies, which create it, reduce it or aggravate it. The creation of the “Commissariat General au Developpement Regional” confirmed the belief, with the return to the gouvernorat as the main operational unit for regional development policy.
