Qualitative Analysis of Learning Territorial Planning: The Case of Management of a Local Plan of Territorial Laws in Chile

Theoretical Framework

In this sense, the ordering of the territory has taken an unusual force. According to Gaspar, it has been carried out as a result of the adequacy of the communities to the available terrestrial space (Gaspar, 2000 cited in Ferrao, 2011). However, for authors such as Ferrao, one of the fragilities of territorial systems lives in the fragmentation and lack of dialogue between scientific and professional communities. This demands to offer solutions or alternatives, which do not disappoint the legitimate public, collective, and private interests where participation, dialogue, and communication are fundamental values of the praxis of the territorial order. Idea shared by Senge, as it will see later, which, by the way, comes from another disciplinary area, not precisely concerned about territory issues.

Based on the objective of this study, it is pertinent to ask: What do we know about these planning instrument management processes? Are the different municipal actors responsible for their implementation? Are there explicit negotiations between actors with different interests? Does the local community have any practical impact on them? How much and How do municipal organizations learn from these processes? If so, how and whom do they manage these learnings?

This research arises given the limited information on how public organizations in Chile, in general, and municipalities in particular, learn from the territorial planning processes that they carry out. So, they can hardly recognize efforts and parameters of efficiency or knowledge of good institutional practices, make invisible spaces of creativity and public management innovation that can increase efficiency and quality to these planning processes, whose activation can even take years and enter into true latency processes.

Today, for any public policy in governance contexts, dialogue, and social consensus-building among the various social groups involved in decisions are required. This is accentuated when generating public policies on territorial and regulatory systems in the use of communal land since there is a higher possibility of increased environmental or ecological conflicts. As Martínez-Alier points out, as the economy and population increase, more natural resources are used, and more waste is produced, affecting the sustainability of the territory, emerging concepts such as possible environmental conflicts (Martínez-Alier, 2007).