The national spatial governance and planning systems in the LAC region: The structure of Brazil, Bolivia, and Cuba

The Spatial Governance and Planning System (SGPS) analysis was born in European studies, has reached a certain stage of maturity in Europe and can be adopted by researchers in other continents. Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries currently represent an interesting field to experiment with this analytical approach for several reasons. One of them is the ascertainment that LAC national SGPSs are deeply influenced by the ongoing national democratization which started after the demise of conservative right-wing authoritarian regimes, somehow belonging to the postcolonial political stream and pushed by imperialist and neocolonial pressures. By its own nature, democratization as a whole is an extremely complex, articulated, and multidimensional process that deserves to be treated ad hoc. Within democratization, this work merely considers the institutionalization of spatial governance and planning activities and processes and so, the Structure of SGPSs. Supposedly, the formation and functioning of institutions are central in the process of consolidation of a democratic state which ensures rights and redistributes resources to citizens. To do this, based on the reconstruction of the overall SGPSs of three different countries included in the doctoral thesis of the author, this article presents the analysis of the so-called “Structure” of the Brazilian, Bolivian and Cuban SGPSs. Arguably, the set of Structures of the SGPSs of these countries is especially representative of the wide range of the LAC national cases. In fact, Brazil, Bolivia, and Cuba are iconic cases of distinguished spatial configurations. Brazil, which has experienced industrialization, tertiarization and metropolisation, has become an emergent economy characterized by structured democratic public institutions. Despite a range of well-known redistributive policies, however, Brazilian society remains extremely unequal and stratified. Bolivia has experimented with the promotion of plurinationalism in political and social terms, potentially improving the reciprocal integration of different ethnic groups and cultures. Nevertheless, a great developmental delay is shown by social and economic indicators, if compared to other LAC countries. Cuba, which has experimented with its own form of socialism for decades, is still a socialist republic with tragic problems of widespread poverty in a flattened society. To analytically present the Structure of the three selected national cases, four main scope