ABSTRACT

Societal transformation in Latin America is a multi-dimensional process. It has been influenced by internal pressures for state modernization and externally imposed conditions of access to international markets. As in other Latin American countries, decentralization and regionalization have been pursued in Mexico from the 1970s, but it is only in recent years that these policies have begun to operate within a process of multilevel governance - and not merely as a project of the central state. Events in Jalisco should reveal a wealth of information on potentials and limits of decentralized planning and regional development. The government of Jalisco began in the 1990s to spearhead initiatives of administrative reform and the modernization of its regional planning process. The new regionalism in Mexico has emerged from an autocratic neo-liberalism and heavily centralized political system. In addition, the federalist formula that is emerging provides an unclear institutional setting for new forms of local and regional governance.