Territory, institutional arrangements, and challenges for territorial governance: notes from São Paulo’s Southwestern Territory

Abstract

The decentralization of public management occurred in Brazil contributed substantially to the formation of local institutional arrangements, especially those of an intermunicipal and territorial character. The formation of these arrangements is expressed in different formats, such as consortia, associations, forums and committees. In a territory, different institutional arrangements can coexist and operate, each with its own development agendas. Therefore, strengthening the relationship between public, private and social actors - distributed in specific arrangements - becomes a demand and a basic element of territorial governance. Our objective is to analyze, through the Sudoeste Paulista territory, the performance of its institutional arrangements, as well as the relations and articulations between them in a supposed dynamic of territorial governance. This study used two instruments to collect the data, which were bibliographic searches and semi-structured interviews. Our analyzes considered two dimensions in the arrangements: the political and the administrative dimension. The results and discussions lead us to the understanding that the dynamics of territorial governance - in the Sudoeste Paulista territory and referring to the articulations between arrangements -, although incipient, already present relative results of cooperation, especially in coinciding agendas between the arrangements. In this study, the arrangement that best contributed to territorial governance was the CDR, which is strongly linked to Higher Education Institutions (IES) and Science and Technology (ICTs), which adopts participatory processes, which have agents trained to promote coordination and that, when compared with the other arrangements, he built innovative projects.