Regional Integration and Development: Experiences of Local Development in Mercosur

Abstract

The association of regional integration and development as the foundation for the organization of integration groups in Latin America has been a constant and recurrent direction in Latin American theory of international relations and foreign policy, even if the models actually implemented reveal different approaches and sometimes even contradictory as to the goals, methods, and agents of development. A line of argument held in Mercosur since the beginning of the third millennium puts forward local development as a model that includes the territorial dimension, and the goals of social development in a process moved by the advancement towards decentralization, empowerment of local communities, and the creation of new links among diverse spatial scales: global, regional, national, and local sub-national. The article examines the scope of the experiences of the model of local development in Mercosur process of integration, in its territorial, socio-economic, and cultural dimensions, and the role played by local initiative. It adopts the concept of “local” not just as a copy in reduced scale of determinants of systemic nature, but as a reality having specific aspects and its own identity, shared values, initiative capacity, and internalized norms.