ABSTRACT
In peripheral regions around Latin America, actors are actively reorganizing how they promote and govern local economic development. In this book, we have suggested that Latin American peripheral regions are often characterized by what we called fragile governance or emergent – and often informal – processes of planning, coordination, and collaboration that take place in weak institutional environments. Based on the experience of the cities and regions analyzed in the book, this concluding chapter highlights cases where a new capacity to learn, collaborate, lead, and manage change is emerging. We then discuss lessons for local economic development policy and institution-building efforts in fragile governance contexts. It is too early to characterize the cases reviewed in this book as successes, and indeed we cannot claim to have identified the causes behind these new governance capabilities. Even though governance is emerging, it is fragile and can easily disappear. Still, the story of how these spaces of experimentation developed over time has important lessons for other smaller cities and peripheral regions, in Latin America and beyond. We conclude that we need to rethink local economic development policy. A different kind of local and regional development policy is needed, one that imagines a multiplicity of development paths beyond the reliance on global city-regions theory and experiences. We also need development policies that take into account the role of informal institutions in local economic development processes, particularly in smaller cities and rural regions – yet avoids the trap of a one-size-fits-all policy. In doing so, we seek an audience not only among local economic development academics but also in the world of practitioners who seek concepts and tools that can be applied to the practice of local and regional economic development planning in small cities and peripheral regions, in Latin America and beyond.
