Citizen participation and its link with territorial development, the pending challenge of local administrations in Mendoza-Argentina

Abstract

In the current scenario, we understand that the State and the citizenry need to reconfigure their relationship, thinking beyond the emergency and with a view to building a more committed citizenry and a more permeable State (Latour, 2020). Part of this reconfiguration is linked to the challenges posed by the construction of legitimacy in the exercise of democracy and places participation and development at the center of the discussion (Rofman, 2016).

This paper seeks to analyze how citizen participation has been in the local governments of Mendoza in the context of the implementation of the Land Management policy from 2017 to date. In this line, we start from asking ourselves how have participatory mechanisms been implemented in local managements? And if these mechanisms applied in the context of the Municipal Land Management Plans have contributed to generate elements for territorial development. For the study of the cases, the comparative method was used, which allows to know cases in depth, in historical perspective and from a series of variables and dimensions of analysis.

As a result of this research, it is concluded that the implementation of participation in the framework of territorial planning has managed to develop weak and unstable institutional capacities in local administrations; and in general, it ended up becoming a new "obligation" for management, bringing few benefits to citizens and little contribution to the development of the territory. It is therefore necessary to adopt a critical, multidimensional, historical-transtemporal and relational-trans-multiscale conception of territorial planning and development (Saquet, 2014, Sousa Santos, 2014) that can guide the participatory construction and definition of plans, projects and programs directly linked to the needs and desires of the inhabitants.