Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
industrialization. Certainly the development has been without the help of the
central state, and does not rely on it now. Compared with the rest of Spain, the
Basque region has a stronger social infrastructure, with traditional small-scale
communities having powerful internal links. In the Mondragon region, roughly
the Deva valley 30 miles south of Bilbao, there was the technical structure of
many small cooperating and competing firms, which could build on this social
structure.
Central power and the regional response
All the efforts at developing a theory of endogenous development in small
regions failed to address, or treated only superficially, some underlying problems
regarding the power structure of countries. Power in most poor countries tends to
be highly centralized, and decision-making is done by a few people in the capital
city. When this is true, the bias of investment and support is towards the interests
of the centre, commonly the bureaucracy, manufacturing industries, and the high-
quality services provided to the residents of the centre region.
This has been true for the former Third World countries, but also for the Soviet
Union and China where command economies were more fated to be centrally
controlled than the social market economies of the West, because of the greater
need for a state control system to handle all kinds of decisions about supply,
demand, prices, etc., in the absence of open markets. Even in countries such as
those of Latin America, where the written constitutions are modelled on those of
the USA, centralization over the whole Independence period has been the order
of the day, with no real power invested in the provinces, and power often
invested in a president alone, or a military oligarchy.
Here there is an imbalance between the elaborate theories of geographers and
planners for Development from Below and its variants, and the lack of any
models for decentralization as a formal undertaking by the state to endow
regions with power and resources. On the other hand, this decentralization
process has been observed by political scientists for some time now, and there
are real world examples of the process.
Decentralization
Decentralization clearly has a variety of different meanings. At a first level,
which is termed deconcentration, it may mean simply the removal of some
offices or factories to outer regions. Decentralization may involve the splitting-
up of decision functions between the regions, so that autonomous offices and
headquarters may exist in various places. In industry, deconcentration might be
for a beer manufacturer to set up various new factories in the regions,
while maintaining one headquarters for all research and administration.
Decentralization would involve possibly separate firms within a brewing group,
producing their own beer and having control over the process and the products.
