Las transformaciones de los modelos territoriales de desarrollo en el contexto de la globalización. Aportaciones desde la perspectiva del desarrollo humano local

RESUMEN:La globalización configura un reordenamiento de la estructura espacial. Es en ese contexto donde lo local emerge como espacio potencial para el desarrollo de un proyecto comunitario. Frente a la articulación convencional global-local donde las interconexiones y flujos globales subsumen a las economías locales, la propuesta de un marco de Desarrollo Humano Local (DHL) prioriza la construcción de la globalización desde los territorios sociales. Defendemos que el DHL posibilita el empoderamiento territorial y una globalización de abajo arriba. Sobre estas premisas analizamos la adecuación de las distintas corrientes de la economía regional y local al marco propuesto. ABSTRACT:The relations between economic spaces, between the global and the local, have already generated considerable academic discussion. Frequently, however, conflicting territory-based studies and differing concepts of local development have obscured the complexities of globalization, thereby reducing the local economy into something forcibly absorbed into the global economy with no dialectic between them. From this problem emerges another one, namely what is the real nature of development: its purpose broader than mere growth and macroeconomic stability. These debates generate continuous changes in concepts of economic space and diversifications of the way economies (local, global and those between) relate to each other.The purpose of this article is to reflect critically on the interrelations between local and regional spaces within the world environment. It is basically a theoretical reflection and so its methodology consists of reviewing the literature linking local spaces with globalization. This is in no way intended to be a general review; it is rather a selective discussion focusing particularly on local-global spatial relations, specially stressing the theoretical relevance of local human development (LHD). What we try to do is to construct an analytical model based on the proposals for local and regional development theory in the face of the social and economic consequences of globalization. In particular, the present great recession has seen a notable challenge for the development strategy of local territories. At the same time we also reflect on the theoretical adequacy of the concept of territory and the recent emergence of a concept qualitatively different from but linked to the concept of the social construction of territories. To be sure, the method of revision of the literature, which links local and global is based on the search for the drivers required to reformulate a consciousness of territory as a response to the complex processes of social and economic transformation now in course.The first step in our argument is a reflection about constructing a framework for the study of LDH in the context of globalization. To do that we look first of all at the study of global-local interrelationships, using a critique of the official positions about such interrelations, which conceive of it as a necessarily hierarchical one in which the global dynamic imposes itself in an top-down unidirectional manner on the local territory concerned. The proposal of converting this into its opposite (from the local base upwards) coincides with the need to consider local development in a communitarian perspective. This coincidence is a paradigm of local development which we go on to study.We next set out a theoretical reflection about the transformations which have taken place in the contents of the LHD relating them with the changing international environment and the consequent changes in models of accumulation. We move from this reorientation towards a competitive LHD model in which some regions gain while others lose. This takes place in circumstances of globalization and the rise of liberal economic doctrines. Then, we observe a paradigm of endogenous development, linked with proposals emanating from the regions themselves in a climate of crisis of traditional Fordist forms of development. Finally, we study new models emerging within the crisis of globalization taking as main concepts the socially innovative territories and the resilience of the territory, that is, its power for dynamic adaptations to the impact of economic, social and technological changes which these territories show over time.Based on studies which link the global and the local from the standpoint of LHD we suggest some results based on theoretical reflection. Beginning with the social construction of global-local spaces and its changing and evolutionary dynamics, we defend the need for a bottom-up formulation as opposed to the hegemonic model which condemns a territory to a merely receptive, passive role as the recipient of global flows and whose basic objective is the search for an adequate position in the international division of labour.The reform of the global-local which we propose is supported on two community pillars, namely that they receive feedback and that they make it desirable and possible. On the one hand, a local development community project is a privileged axis of action for the concept of human development. This expresses the capacity of a collective process which allows the creation and development of that common project. Such capacity is needed especially in moments of change and transformation as a result of its contribution to those who can challenge the resistance to change and strengthening creativity and resilience. Hence, local human development contributes to the empowerment of the local community, and is also at the same time an essential requisite for the emergence of territories as global subjects and a new more just international division of labour.On the other hand, the global-local model derives support from community development which allows the dynamic adaptation of the social, economic and institutional territories to the global socio-economic reality in a state of change and crisis. This local-global bottom-up articulation can be the opening to a different globalization with a social content which is sustainable and has a social content which universalizes not only the market but also social rights. The processes of local development, however, cannot avoid that the global model continues to be the privileged space for the accumulation of capital and that, within the transition to a new model of globalization, local communities continue to be highly vulnerable to the dynamics of the global system.Starting from this point of synthesis for LHD in the context of globalization, we analyze the suitability for this synthesis of the various schools of thought in regional and local economics. We show how the emergence of territory as an economically relevant concept, started as a functionalist vision and a proposal to concede to a local economy an increase in its production and income. Nevertheless, in a number of more recent contributions there is an incipient questioning regarding the incorporation of other criteria of welfare. The global insertion of territory is something which in most contributions is converted in an exogenous fact, and so the local economy is implicitly considered as a mere object of global economic processes. Only where the influence of institutionalism is stronger, in some contributions about endogenous development, for instance, territory emerges with at least some reactive capacity in the context of global economic insecurity.Finally, two contributions are singled out as being, in our opinion, particularly close to the model which we have been suggesting. Both of them bear witness to the different currents of territorial thought but suggest a qualitative change in the concept of the territory as subject. The first is the idea of the socially innovative region which departs from the community ontology, raising the question of economically and socially constructing the territory and promoting the satisfaction of individual and collective needs, which means that this proposal comes close to that of DHL. The primacy of social and institutional innovation also proposes a dynamics of community empowerment, which places it very close to the idea of the socially innovative region, with its processes of global-local articulation from below in such a way as to privilege the emergence of the territory as subject. In the second case, that of resilient regions, the evolutionist approach that joins with the approach of the social construction of territory, but also proposes a territorial change adaptive to other changes and interconnected with the world economy, but in such a form that it permits community development which is flexible in times of crisis and economic insecurity.