Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In government, deconcentration might mean moving one or two ministries to
different regions of the country. Decentralization is, by contrast, the changing of
the administrative structure for one or more ministries, so that regional offices
are given a greater role. The extreme version of such decentralization is
devolution, a wholesale granting of powers to regional or local governments.
There are examples in Europe of the devolution of power to regions, and given
that this is the largest form of decentralization, the effects might be expected to be
visible in such cases. A well-known version of devolution is that afforded by
Spain, where between 1977 and 1978 the highly centralized Francoist state was
formally moved to a system of 17 autonomous regions (see Ch. 6). In theory,
with the devolution which has taken place in this country, there should be
evidence for separate and different paths of regional development in Spain. In
reality, there are several reasons that it is difficult to identify a real differentiation
of regional paths, here as in other European countries. First, the central state still
holds the reins of economic power, with command over economic development
and major industries. Secondly, in the key economic areas, what has happened to
the regions has been constrained by a lack of economic development in the
period since 1978 in most sectors, giving no scope for new initiatives. Thus,
Catalonia has been hit by stagnation in its tourism income (already threatened in
1973 but affecting the industry severely in the 1980s) and by crisis in its
traditional textiles industry. Valencia has suffered closure of its steel mill at
Sagunto and reduction of employment at the Ford car plant at Valencia. The
Basque region has had a continuing crisis in its heavy engineering and steel
industries through lack of markets for the products, like the rest of western
European steel industries, overshadowing any progress made with newer
industries such as the light engineering at Mondragon. Agriculture, in regions
such as Castille-Leon and Castille-La Mancha, Andalucia and Extremadura, is
dominated by changing regulations within the EU and the reduction of support
for small farmers which is beginning to happen. Regional development processes
are hard to detect when there is no overall development going on. A third set of
constraints has been the degree of state ownership of industry. Under Francoist
Spain, the economic model was that of the corporatist state, intervening actively
to support and control certain activities. The best example of this was the INI, the
National Industrial Institute, which was responsible in the mid-1980s for 10 per
cent of Spain's GNP and dominating certain industries such as shipbuilding and
aluminium. This structure of state control and intervention is only now being
dismantled, and separate regional initiatives will take a long time to replace it.
Conclusions: putting scales together
Regions do have a separate identity beyond that of being a unit within a spatial
structure, and regional planning to suit each region is thus warranted, although
because it is a distinctive enterprise in each region, individual handling of the
problem is required. In theory this might be organized either from below or from
