“Regional Development and Forgotten Spaces: Global Policy Implications and Experiences”

(Edited by María Sánchez-Carreira, Paulo Reis Mourão and Bruno Branco-Varela; 2023, Routledge, London and New York)

I will make a brief presentation of the book on “Regional Development and Forgotten Spaces: Global Policy Implications and Experiences”

In the introduction to the book published, the editors make mention to the technical progress and advances occurred lately in transports and communications, which, according to them, are facilitating global connections and networks.  

Paradoxically, as they also claim, territory has not lost importance, but, rather, has become an important actor in the development processes. Adding that the global, regional or local spheres coexist, “showing uniformatization at the macro-level and more differentions at the micro level”.

This general context and the opportunities it seems to offer to lager or forgotten territories, as named in this book, are the backward motivation for producing this book, together with learning from several experiences around the world.

A few of those experiences are successful but there is mention to unsuccessfull ones, as one can learn from both, the well succeeded and the failed ones. 

This book, in particular, refers to regional development experiences from Africa, Brazil and other Latin America countries, in general (namely, Colombia and Mexico). In another book edited by the same editors we can find cases referred to the European reality.

I welcome both books and congratulate the editors for being able to accomplishing this quite hard working task of editing those two books.

In the book on “Regional Development and Forgotten Spaces: Global Policy Implications and Experiences”, mention is made to another book from Paulo Reis Mourão, ´Economia do Esquecimento`(Forgotten Economies or Forgotten Spaces), which looks to have inspired these broad approach to regional development around the world.

Following Mourão (2020), as cited, “those are regions (spaces) neglected/forgotten by most of the citizens of a country, rarely visited by tourists, with serious difficulties to attract investment, and with a threat of reduction of well-being perceived by residents”.  

“These Spaces tend to exhibit low levels of population density and a low level of income per capita and tend to be located in peripheral areas”.

Keeping in mind the link claimed between those two books, the one which is being now published and the one previously produced by Paulo Reis Mourão, since I could read it and participate in its public presenting a few years ago, I would like to reproduce some of the thoughts I have expressed on it then.

Namely, I would like to say that the book worth being read due to the issues it addresses, the one of Development, approached as access from people, in their places of residence, to employment and social well-being.

The author was taking as focus of analysis Trás-os-Montes, in Portugal, but, of course, he could refer to many other places around the world, from Africa to Latin America and Asia, even if the level of well-being could be sharply different.    

There, in the before mentioned book, Mourão (2020) underlines a lot the “concentration costs” in coastal areas or in the metropolitan areas, which he claims should be added to the “costs of being forgotten” of the inland regions of the country, Trás-os-Montes, among them.

And relates those costs with the kind of public policies adopted, and, following his approach, there is no solution to the “concentration costs” and the ones derived from “forgotten spaces” if they are not taken together in the policies implemented.

That is not an original claim but to insist on it goes on being a necessity as public authorities seem have learned little from past failed policy experiences. 

The statement that the future of those territories, including the forgotten ones, has to be build based on the commitment of the local/regional actors (local/regional stakeholders) and territories` endogenous resources is also present in his speech.

This drives me to some of the major ideas enounced on the book “Regional Development and Forgotten Spaces: Global Policy Implications and Experiences”, namely the one that, taking the socioeconomic, cultural and historical specificities of each territory, there is no alternative regarding polices to design and implement but approaching them taking those singularities as their starting point.

This means, as well, that, when dealing with the design of policies aiming to enhance the regional or local development, there is not such thing as one (policy/strategy) fits it all.

And, of course, surpassing underdevelopment and leaving the condition of being a forgotten space cannot be achieved without changing the priority given to regions and social and economic cohesion.

National and economic and social cohesion only can be achieved if the priority in the design of policies is given to people and the use of the regional endogenous resources, which often clashes with the short-term interests of the politic actors and their willingness to win the next election.

Development is a long-term goal, and for walking successfully that path sustained and hard effort must be pursued.

This is an idea clearly enounced by the editors of this book, which rely, of course, in the case studies included in the book, as book chapters.        

 

J. Cadima Ribeiro

Braga, 16th October 2023