Marquez Guerrero, Carolina
(1994)
Regional development strategies of a new regional government: The Junta de Andalucia, 1984-90.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
The creation of the 'State of the Autonomies', embodied in the 1978 Spanish Constitution, brought to Andalucia the devolution of wide political powers and administrative functions, and with this, the possibility for the newly created Junta de Andalucia of implementing a development policy wholly different from that of the central government and from those of other autonomous communities. Different from other historical regions, such as Catalonia or the Basque Country, run by conservative and nationalist parties, the Socialist party in Andalucia from the first moment linked political autonomy and regional economic development. Underdeveloped, marginal from main national and international economic circuits, and run by a socialist regional government that wanted to repair the comparative wrongs suffered historically by the region, Andalucia enjoyed at the beginning of the 1980's optimal conditions for implementing a self-reliant strategy of regional development. In order to identify, interpret, and analyse the evolution of the strategy of development of the Junta de Andalucia during the 1984-90 period, the thesis reviews policy and resource allocation in three policy-sectors: road, railway, and industrial promotion. In each case, a genuine self-reliant philosophy appears at the beginning of the period, which is, however, abandoned in the middle 1980's and substituted by a development strategy based on functional integration into larger-scale systems. Using policy documents and interviews with decision-makers and researchers, the thesis attempts to explain the observed shift and to interpret the logic of the regional development strategies pursued by the Junta de Andalucia during its first decade. Political legitimation, during the period of economic recession, and economic accumulation, when pressures to support the internationalization process of capital appeared, guided regional planning policy of the Junta during its first decade. The thesis ends by relating the evolution followed by the regional planning policy of the Junta to wider debate about decentralization and regional theory and policy.
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