The Citizen Impact on Land Use Planning at a Local Level
摘要
This chapter analyzes territorial development on a local scale in Chile following the critical revision of the political-administrative decentralized procedures that the state has developed during the last 5 years. Also, their relationship with some of the mechanisms of citizen impact reveal the following paradox: the emergence of gross asymmetries between political and institutional power and the rights of the civil associations or intermediate groups. Specifically, it analyzes the case of the “province” as an invisible juridic-administrative space after the last decentralized reforms, where it produced an “emptiness” of the citizen impact, and from the intermediate groups into the development of democratic discussion. Consequently, since 2018, the province has been a controlled decisional space without counterbalance from the central government. This indicates that political and administrative decentralization cannot be approached only from a top-down technocratic perspective but must be done with consideration for the basic and natural rights of communities and intermediate groups in order to influence territorial public policies. Furthermore, the multiscalar approach in territorial spaces and the need for their democratic articulation must also be considered. The discussion purports to contribute to others undertaken in Latin America in light of the planning principles proposed by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)—the multiscalarity, the intersectionality, and the impact of citizen participation—in order to address the contradictions that have left the politically decentralized processes of citizen participation, involuntarily restricting the democratic construction of the territory.