Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
above. Development from Below does not have a good record as a planning tool.
It emerged as a desirable aim in the 1970s period of reaction to previous regional
planning, but never entered any country's planning mechanism as a permanent
institution. It may be true that powerful developmental impulses emerge in some
regions, like that of Mondragon, from local sources, but these are exceptional
and cannot be planned or projected. In the LDCS, it would appear that local-
based, broadly defined development initiatives are still a rare occurrence, and
tend to have only an ephemeral life.
Counterbalancing the arguments for locally based development are the many
observable facts about an increasingly global economy. The scale of many
important economic activities is far larger than any traditional region. Steel
manufacturing, for example, must be planned for on a national scale, or
preferably on an international scale for most small countries whose consumption
does not match the output of one large mill.
But most discussions of the subject have argued from one extreme or the other
in terms of spatial scale. In reality, and in practice in many countries, there is a
combination of scales used. While considerations of conservation, urban
expansion into rural areas, management of pollution, or the use of physical
resources, are discussed in local and regional debate, national and global-scale
activities are considered at higher levels. One type of organization does not
necessarily negate the other. From what was said earlier about the specificity of
problems for individual regions, it is not necessary either for each small region to
have its own agencies. Only where there is sufficient objective or felt difference
about the aims and interests of the region is a separate organization justified.
Many of the regional problems in development may arise from arguments
between the levels, about who should be in control. The forced development of
Catalonia's Costa Brava in the 1960s (Ch. 6) reflected Franco's centralist
government concerns for national economic development, and Catalonia now
seeks a very different kind of tourism development. The forced development of
the central Asian cotton fields in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (Ch. 7) reflected
Moscow's central concern to increase cotton production, against local concerns
for conservation of older ways of life. In these cases, the region lost for want of
local power, but the reverse can happen. In the UK (Ch. 6), the steel industry was
expanded by implementing huge new integrated iron and steel works in Wales
and Scotland in 1954, to meet strong regional demands within the national
government for investment in heavy industry. In Scotland's case the move was,
in the long term, poorly judged, as the Ravenscraig mill had to be closed in the
1990s as an uneconomic site. Massive restructuring of the local economy has
been the painful result.
These examples are not particularly about development initiatives from below,
but they do illustrate the fact that most development planning can be undertaken
at different levels, and that the privileging of one level to the exclusion of others
will create problems. They also illustrate another fact: that conflict between
different levels of interest is likely to arise in centrally ruled non-democratic
