Government decentralization and recentralization processes under the recent global context. The specificities of the Latin American case.

Abstract

The first issue of the Revista Desarrollo, Estado y Espacio presents a special edition that analyzes the processes of governmental decentralization and recentralization in the framework of the current international situation. The leadership of the United States, as the main promoter of decentralization strategies during the last decades of the last century, is challenged by different events that occurred at the beginning of the new millennium. Among them, due to the extraordinary emergence of China, a country that "promotes globalization" by participating proactively in the network of international and multilateral institutions, although with an institutional structure that recentralizes key functions in the national government. Likewise, in tune with this new context, the analysis of the Latin American case becomes relevant, where the specialized literature warns of a “recentralizing wave”. From different perspectives and methodologies, the works provide contributions to investigate the contemporary dynamics of intergovernmental relations.