The Abolition of the Provincial Governor: Former Officials Assess Its Impact on Governance Quality in the Region

Abstract

This article presents the perceptions of former provincial governors in Chile regarding the impact that the elimination of this intermediate political-administrative position has had on regional governance. Using an interpretive epistemological approach and qualitative methodology, ten interviews were conducted with former provincial authorities of different political affiliations and territorial origins. Subjects were selected through an initial convenience sample and then a snowball sampling technique. The results were grouped according to emerging categories. As a result, it is interpreted that the former authorities value the important managerial and negotiating role that all subjects exercised at their discretion, as well as the diverse participatory spaces they convened. They also predict the low sustainability of the current political design of the regional government and coincidentally point to the poor quality of the decentralizing reforms implemented in Chile since 2018. The conclusion is that this type of institutional redesign measure requires pre- and post-modification evaluations, contributing through successive scientific approaches to reviews of theories of the State and its approach to territorial asymmetries.