https://doi.org/10.37955/cs.v6i3.275

Received: November 23, 2021 / Approved: February 09, 2022 Pages: 68 - 101

eISSN: 2600-5743

The situational state in perspective

of jurisdictional-territorial

governance of Manabí

El estado situacional en perspectiva de Gobernanza

jurisdiccional-territorial de Manabí

Rolando Fabian Zambrano Andrade

Bachelor's Degree in Local Management and Master's Degree in Endogenous

Development Projects, Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, Researcher, Chone, Ecuador.

fzambrano0404@yahoo.es

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-1628

María Ivonne Guillem López

Bachelor's Degree in Educational Sciences and Master's Degree in Public Administration

and Children's Literature, Research Professor at the Instituto Superior Tecnológico San

Pedro de Portoviejo, Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador.

ivonne_guillem@hotmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5880-5125

Raúl Alberto Andrade Naveda

Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and Master's Degree in Latin American

Studies from the University of Salamanca, Chone, Ecuador.

raulalbertoandrade@gmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6501-9659

José Abelardo Negrete Rodríguez

Degree in Local Management, Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, Quito, Ecuador.

josea_negrete@hotmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-0506

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses governance in a territorialized manner in the

province of Manabí in the republican path of Ecuador, which since

1830 to the territory made it political jurisdiction that has governed

the institutional state with powers for local government levels, in:

provinces, cantons and parishes, it is in these spaces where it has

been printed programmatic senses that have provided common

goods, more in the population, than in the territorial, central point of

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the tracing carried out in the present work through the documentary

review as a research method, which approaches each level of

government, which determines whether this local governance has

taken effect and put it in value, in terms of: population and territorial

cohesion provincially in Manabi.

RESUMEN

El presente trabajo aborda la gobernanza de manera territorializada

en la provincia de Manabí en el trayecto republicano del Ecuador,

que desde 1830 al territorio lo hizo jurisdicción política que ha regido

el Estado institucional con competencias para niveles de gobierno local,

en: provincias, cantones y parroquias, es en estos espacios donde se ha

impreso sentidos programáticos que han dotado de bienes comunes,

más en lo poblacional, que en lo territorial, punto central del rastreo

realizado en el presente trabajo mediante la revisión documental como

método de investigación, la que acerca a cada nivel de gobierno, que

determine si está gobernanza local ha surtido efecto y ponerla en

valor, en cuanto a: cohesión poblacional y territorial provincialmente

en Manabí.

Keywords / Palabras clave

Governance, local management, participation, local-territorial

planning.

Gobernanza, gestión local, participación, planificación local-

territorial.

Introduction

Governance is a neologism adopted by political science adapted to

various scenarios, from the macro planetary and regional, as in the

meso national, to the micro at the local level, discursive narrative that

is not alien to Ecuador, because this is a State under permanent

construction, hegemonic in its monoterritorial centralism, although it

is declared by Constitution (Art. 1. 2008) to be governed in a

decentralized manner through autonomous governments (GADs) for

the jurisdictions: provinces, cantons and parishes; just with the

permanent constitutional reforms since 1830, it has not found the

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institutional formula to govern the local efficiently and

democratically, because with the instances so far tested are still weak

in territorial impact, restrictively limited to regulatory frameworks,

lacking citizen mandates, only legitimized by universal suffrage

without programmatic subjection.

In spite of the above, with the institutional devices called GADs,

statehood gained importance in the internal political jurisdictions,

forming the set of administrative divisions, with their limits,

territories or cells projected on the map, drawing the image of a

network with its threads and meshes (Gondard, 2005: 45); this

jurisdictional status to the territory it covers has given it political

representativeness with a sense of statehood.

But these GADs, their action, more than political, is administrative,

making it insufficient to better manage the State despite their

population-territorial proximity, which continues to dispute the

participation/dependence assistance from the national treasury that

satisfies its deficit and essential basic goods, at . Although the local

through the institutional Spanish colonial Cabildo has been present

throughout the republic, it is the recent legal level of government

since 1966, effective functional instance for local control in the

unitary republic and dependent on the state centralism that has

lasted until now.

This sectional regime, present in the 20 Constitutions of the unstable

Ecuador until 2008, granted "autonomy" since 1946 and specific laws

for each level, without achieving the configuration of a multilevel

governance with territorial relevance, promoting multiple

interventions interfering and contributing to the dispersion and

fragmentation of state management, pretending to organize it

institutionally through the Organic Code of Decentralized

Autonomous Territorial Planning (COOTAD, 2010), assuming to

harmonize the management in and between local government levels

up to the national level.

From these GADs, governmental management is carried out, subject

to the discretion of whoever is elected to direct it, sustaining deficient

basic goods and services, levels of development without territorially

organized spatialities; persisting in this form and levels of

government contrary to the demands even with pandemic risks such

as COVID 19 that paralyzed human activities, manipulating the

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reality that substantially affects the life of the population and

territories.

Basic goods and services, being essential, show socio-territorial

backwardness with local political action that differentiates it from the

national one, the latter being more complex and abstract; the local

one is direct, concrete and pragmatic, an advantage that distances it

from the dispute of interests of the national one; here is where the

local must be more assertive in its competences with capacities of

population-territorial responses, taking advantage of the

strengthening of decentralization in relation to the national

government, weak in the incidence of its local economy; the latter

requires key improvements that effectively create "a system of action

on its territory, capable of producing common values and locally

managed goods" (Arocena, 1995: 9).

The installed Local Governance is governed by the current political-

constitutional-normative-institutional framework, lacks citizenship that

promotes management with a strategic sense subject to a long-term

political project that contributes to territorial management,

overcoming practices of subordination or institutional-territorial

colonization. Here the normative is not only a legal instrument, but a

basic input that achieves harmony between the various levels of

GADs, and with their local societies.

In Manabí, a Provincial Government, 22 Municipalities and 55

Parishes share unequal and dispersed governmental responsibilities,

disjointed among the multilevel and with the decentralized executive,

objective conditions that sustain the central incidence of the national

government, hindering an integral management of the provincial,

cantonal and parochial territory in a harmonious manner.

The aforementioned keeps pending essential solutions that have

installed resistance to change and rejection to politics, but more to

politicians, because governmental-state action has had no effect on

the common good, attacking them permanently, without leaving the

comfortable privatized decision-action to socializing spaces that

democratize the socio-territorial.

Ecuador and Manabí have not finished structuring themselves; to do

so, they must recognize themselves internally from their diversity and

jurisdictional differences, which is where their limit or potential lies;

a structural situation that has not yet been strongly corrected,

sustaining the uniform and monoterritorial centralist hegemony,

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making necessary an adequate and agreed territorial governance that

substantially modifies the fragmentations and weak dispersions that

respond to the interests of the population through desired models of

jurisdictions and local governance as an integrating source.

Materials and Methods

The present work constitutes a research challenge for and at the local

level in Ecuador, which is subject to competencies and supposed

public policies without configuring an institutional architecture

governed by means of a pertinent socio-territorial governance. The

work analyzes the state installed from its approaches and practices

implemented through documentary review as a research method, it

approaches each level of government: provincial, cantonal and parish,

identifying its limits and potential, subordinations or positions that

hinder or make viable the socio-territorial management. In the contextual

approaches, differentiated practices, lines, political and/or programmatic

pragmatics of each level of government are identified, identifying

schemes of interest and intentions of the ruler in office.

The documentary references are generally based on the current

development and land use plans, specifically the provincial one,

determining whether the state of affairs has been altered by or with

the formulation and implementation of programs with a socio-

territorial scope. The conclusion highlights the factual probability of

implementing a governance model as a key factor for the

organization of democratic territorial management that facilitates the

construction of organized spatialities, rather than political

jurisdictions in Manabí.

Results

The jurisdictional evolution of Manabí.

The republican Ecuador of 1830 was formed through the pact

between four colonial localities: Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca and Loja,

each of these gestated their independence, a conditioning factor that

has interfered to consolidate the national state, surviving a central

state hegemony superimposed on the local; a constant that is

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reinforced in the 70s of the twentieth century. This constant was

reinforced in the 70's of the XXth century, which entered

prematurely to the de-statization since 1980 influenced by the

planetary neoliberalism deteriorating the statehood, trying to re-

statize since 2007, without having achieved it, because the State as a

national project is still in dispute between the national-local

centralism-polycentrism reproducing and/or sustaining inequalities

that hinder making regions, provinces or localities as constitutive

parts of the national project; in spite of that, the political leadership

and dominant elite have mutually benefited each other, leaving out

the substratum of the people, eroding the lasting state-government

legitimacy.

It is Maiguashca (1996: 185-223), who makes an analysis of the

gravitation or relationship between the State and the regional powers

given in three cycles: from 1830 to 1925, where Quito, Guayaquil and

Cuenca become the epicenter of territorial identities, meaning a setback in

terms of consolidation of national unity. The other from 1925 to 1972,

characterized by the presence of centripetal social forces that made the

consolidation of a strong national state impossible; and the last one

with neoliberalism since the 1980s, which lost all state perspective

delivered to the market with which autonomist pretensions arose; a

fourth cycle of state re-centralization would be added between 2007-

2017.

Maiguashca (1994: 357-358) analyzes the role of central power in the

process of national integration since the republican conformation,

proposing as a hypothesis the centrality of the State as a bureaucratic

institution as the main engine of national integration. Using the

dimensions proposed by Tarrow regarding the process of national

formation in Western Europe and the impact that central

governments have had on the peripheries, based on three indicators:

a- political-administrative penetration referring to the creation of

institutions to achieve military and administrative control; b-

normative homogenization consisting of the creation of laws and; c-

the social incorporation of marginal groups.

It is with the normative homogenization where the State as

jurisdiction is not at all synonymous with territory, only a

jurisdictional delimitation in which the political domain rules

through the GADs spread throughout the national territory, reaching

the socio-territorial daily life, making them necessary, arrogating

functions through public works and services; here the territory

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became jurisdiction, homogenizing space, dissolving differences,

unifying diversity and simplifying reality (Pérez, 2016: 10), without

achieving the configured jurisdictional organization or

democratization, but rather the imposed state and national-local elite

dominance.

Manabí, in the national context of Ecuador, is unique, jurisdictionally

recognized in 1824 (Núñez, 2000: 27), conformed/fragmented in 22

cantons and 55 rural parishes in its 18,949 km2, making it vulnerable

to cohesion and organized integration with/by a territorially

provincialized governance. The cantonalist fragmentation is a direct

heir of the Spanish colonial Cabildo of local control and dominion

and urban centers, head of the republic, even with legislative

autonomy (Ordinances) that immediately solved daily issues without

requiring real decision. Useful in the colony, independence and republic

as an effective mechanism of representation of the local Creole elites

(Reig, 1985: 13-19) still in force today.

Cantonalism as a juridical-political determinant in and for Manabí has

occurred in four stages:

Before the republic: Portoviejo 1820, Montecristi 1822 and Jipijapa

1824;

With the republic: Rocafuerte 1852, Sucre 1875, Santa Ana 1884 and

Chone 1894;

In the consolidation of state modernization: Bolívar 1913, Manta

1922, Paján 1945, Junín 1952, 24 de mayo 1952 and El Carmen 1967,

With the return to democracy in 1979: Tosagua 1984, Pichincha 1986,

Flavio Alfaro 1988, Pedernales 1992, Puerto López 1994, Olmedo

1995, Jama 1998, Jaramijó 1998, and San Vicente 1999.

This provincial structuring initiated in the historical-colonial seat,

expanded with the republic from the capital of Portoviejo, extending

the statehood and capital; the last fragmentation occurred in the

northern province was gestated by/with the historical disconnection,

creating 7 of the 10 cantons since 1979, without having met the

assumptions of improvement in solving backwardness and socio-

territorial poverty, such as municipal strengthening that makes

complex governance between cantonal and/or parish pairs, as

between the multilevel province-canton-parish.

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This fragmentation for Ecuador is a constant, due to the fact that the

senses of coexistence, belonging and pertinence have had a practice

of confinement and reductionism, being this practice of construction

of space conflictive, prioritizing local interests, and not the product of

cohesive spaces, which had the decision to agree on a better

organization (Gómez, 1983: 365), so far unresolved; for Manabí it has

not only been conflictive, but violent for the territorial domain due to

the absence of state mediation, intervening in the republican period

for conceiving it as an 'ungovernable' society and territory in 1835,

replicated in 1963, up to the recent 2008. These "illegal" mechanisms

have been legitimized in the resolution of political, economic and

territorial conflicts, already part of the social imaginary, being

reproduced even cinematographically and partisan of the current

generations; relevant also in the liberal-altarist revolution with the

participation of the montoneros montubios (Hidrovo, 2011: 33-62).

This provincial conformation resulted from the natural

relationship/dependence of the colonial economic dominance of

Guayaquil, reinforced at the same time with the construction and

operation of the seaport in 1966 and the industrial installation since

1965 in Manta, which strengthened the relationship/dependence of

Guayaquil's import port; contrasted with Portoviejo, the political

capital that installed the centralist state dominance preventing

margins of self-dominance, accentuated at present by the territorial

deconcentration of the executive, which contributes little to the

governing jurisdictional organization of Manabí.

Centralization that keeps spatially and politically isolated the rest of

the provincial territory, only electoral quarry and provincial agri-food

reserve and part of the country, induced with the agrarian reform of

1963 and 1974, sentencing to sustain its traditional agricultural roots,

disconnected from industrialization, as well as from the international

market; economically fragmented with micro spaces of industrial

insertion, tourism and services; with a governance strengthened only

by decentralization in relation to the national government, with no

incidence in the economic-productive sphere; resulting in the same

poor spatial geography, but with greater control and/or provincial

political-economic domination induced by the national state in the

use of the territory, which expanded the reproduction and

accumulation of capital.

The centralization/fragmentation/dependence constitutionally

implemented in 1830, was born unitary, divided by departments,

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provinces, cantons and dependent parishes, with only administrative

faculties (Art. 53); the Department had a Prefect representing the

Executive Power. Each canton or the union of these would be

governed by a corregidor; and the parishes by lieutenants; 4 years

were fixed for these positions, with the exception of two years for the

parishes; here the mechanism of reelection was already contemplated

(Art. 54), as well as the creation of Municipal Councils exclusively in

the capitals of the provinces (Art. 56).

Although the economic power does not exercise local government, it

finances campaigns to favor or prop up elected officials; this internal

domain keeps the localities tied to the national-provincial domain,

which is why the GADs are not there to carry out the efficient exercise

of local government, but rather to support and reproduce the political

and capital domain.

The institutionality that governs the territory and population facilitated

the legalization of lands for private use and appropriation, a fractioning

condition that disfigured the dimension of territory, linking them to the

exploitation of mercantilist-industrial agriculture; as opposed to the

territory indissolubly linked to the roots and identity, surviving

reduced Communes in the cantons of Puerto López and Jipijapa,

resisting modernity from the autonomous-collective, different from

the predominant political-administrative jurisdictions: Puerto Lopez

and Jipijapa, resisting modernity from the autonomous-collective,

different from the predominant political-administrative jurisdictions.

The so far unstable Ecuadorian constitutionalism has not constituted

an effective internal political-jurisdictional regime, maintaining the

perpetual centralist domination that already designated a mayor in

1835, extension of Municipal Councils beyond the provincial capital

in 1845; the existence of Municipalities in all cantonal capitals since

1850; conformation of the municipal regime in 1852, with margins of

independence in 1906, until achieving autonomy in 1946; with the

latter, regulatory and budgetary generation was provided to exercise

exclusive administrative powers until now in force.

The contemporary local-internal context in Ecuador

The contemporary transition from the oligarchic landowner State to

the "modern bourgeois" urban-industrial with the developmentalism

of the 50s of the twentieth century, highlights aspects related to the

Municipal reconfiguration since 1967, level of government in charge

of the Council, whose members are elected by direct and secret ballot

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since 1945, for: Provincial Councilors, mayors and councilors, and

since 1969 the Prefect is elected as the executive figure of the

Provincial Council in office since 1970, culminating in 2010 that the

common regime is configured to the levels of government of the State

through the Organic Code of Decentralized Autonomous Territorial

Ordering....

This normative and institutional culmination of internal Ecuador was

influenced by the post Second World War, which should consolidate

the national State with welfare for its population in central countries

to be rebuilt, and in the periphery with the developmentalism of

ECLAC since 1948, adopting the national and local planning

approach in the backward and poor Ecuador, without having solved

the structural problems, but should expand the state domination of the

territory globalizing the national State that implemented a new

geography of planetary domain.

The above brought about the typology of "welfare state", utopically close

to the one coined in 1945 by Europe after the Second World War, closely

linking the state and the economy that offer a socioeconomic

environment capable of guaranteeing the "welfare" of people; uniting

politics with the economy achieving mutual benefits (Boaventura,

2012), "territorializing economic and political relations, leaving a

state of social and territorial inequality", installing governmental

instability.

This perspective of state management implied making local

development transferred to Latin America with the return to

democracy at the end of the 70s of the 20th century, which

"counterposed" the globalizing process due to the insufficiency of

macroeconomic development policies to solve problems associated

with the creation of employment and the improvement of social

welfare, aiming to give a greater presence to local and regional levels

through development planning, a local development trend

implemented in Europe in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century

(Carrión, 2003: 24-29).

This local reinforcement of the central State was given with the

sectional governments as a necessity of the developmentalism of

CEPAL, approving the laws of the Municipal Regime in 1966 and

Provincial in 1967 without having consolidated the national State,

also substantially interrupted with the neoliberalism of the 80's of

the XX century, weakened in social incidence, and more in the

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territorial that have contributed to the political instability that

Ecuador sustains.

The "autonomous sectional regime" was formed, necessary not to

give Ecuador a territorial regime of government, but as a mechanism

of national extension of internal domination that disputes

participation in the budget of the deficient national treasury. This

sectional led by the dominant municipalization inherited from the

Cabildo, which continues demonstrating insufficiencies due to the

sustained inequitable basic solutions, without having been

democratized, lacking socio-territorial existence; of the current three

levels of local governments, the subordinate are the parish councils,

without the normative frameworks having achieved any

governmental innovation, distributing competences without reaching or

underpinning local development.

The sectional was not granted the capacity to alter the traditional and

hegemonic state centralism, because the "autonomy" was born controlled,

in that lies its weakness that have motivated autonomist claims from the

periphery for greater budgetary participation, and outline a certain

destiny with self-dominion that balances, integrates and cohesion to

the national state adapting a necessary autonomous regime, so at the

end of the 90s of the twentieth century, promoting autonomous

electoral consultations favorably voted in Manabí (El Universo,

2000). XX the centrism State was losing hegemony, promoting

autonomous electoral consultations favorably voted in Manabí on

September 17, 2000 (El Universo, 2000), and in the same year:

Guayas, El Oro, Los Ríos and Orellana, which did not produce effects

that would reinforce autonomy and decentralization; to cushion these

pretensions the participation of the central government budget to the

sectional governments was increased through the Laws, of:

Decentralization of the State and Social Participation, and that of

Distribution of 15% of the Central Government Budget in 1997,

truncating the autonomisms by the "loss of the monopoly of the

national as an instance of cohesion and representation of the

population" (Ramirez and Ramirez Gallegos, 2001: 113).

The "autonomist" bids, the only thing they outlined was the

constitution of provincial, cantonal, even parochial electoral

movements pretending to mark distances with the national domain,

but without the support of solid political-territorial projects, although

they returned to subordination with the recurrent national elections

that underpin local electoral triumphs, also reconfiguring the

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dominant traditional caciquism, demonstrating that the internal

national State, although electorally destructured, continues

responding to the national domain, as indicated by Panebianco

(2009: 83), that, if the genesis of the political party occurred through

a territorial penetration from a cohesive center to the peripheries,

this propitiates the emergence of a stable dominant coalition,

composed of both national and local leaders, whose power will derive

from the control of the "zones of uncertainty".

Subsequent to the aforementioned claims, a certain territorial

governance was installed via budgetary incentives, and with the

decentralized executive diluting conjunctural resistances for

attention to the peripheral jurisdictions, institutionalizing

mechanisms of state financialization subsidized by the State Bank

(BEDE), in addition to ministerial programs that basically interfere

competentially and prevent the formation of jurisdictional autonomous

capacities; with the above, two ways of maintaining governmental

stability in the territory are installed, through budgetary subsidies, or by

agreeing on local development, of the latter there is still no evidence.

Up to this point, what has been identified was a product of the

internal jurisdictional invisibility due to the central conflict since

1979 with the struggle of powers (executive/legislative), which

continued until 2000, when the party regime dissolved, moving

towards the Executive vs. strong localisms installed in Guayaquil and

Quito, supported by the powerful business and media elite until the

present day.

This is in line with Boaventura's statement (2020: 73), that "in the

last forty years, the market principle has received absolute priority to

the detriment of the State and the community", that even with lethal

viruses such as COVID 19, these 'pandemics cruelly show how

neoliberal capitalism has incapacitated the State to respond to

emergencies' (Ibidem: 74), leaving aside its essential reason for being,

to implement socio-territorial welfare.

The dominant state reinstitutionalization.

The reforms as a state maxim in Ecuador have not achieved collective

welfare, these reforms so far have not provided socio-territorial-

institutional democratic capacities because "power is increasingly

centralized in the State, while the citizenry becomes more

autonomous" (Domingues, 2020: 275). What has been affirmed is

tendential, without having been done by the electoral progressivism

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of the XXI century that has returned the statist supremacy since

Venezuela in 1999, up to the present, without the neoliberal anti-

statists flinching, because the State continues to be necessary for

national and territorial-population domination.

Because the institutional-normative statehood is not neutral, but

responds to political-ideological visions in permanent dispute in

Latin America, because the dominant bloc is not monolithic, it is

expressed in factions that, while governing, reform the rules of the

normative game that destabilize and hinder the configuration of the

"welfare" State, factors that continue to favor the elite from power,

despite the fact that Ecuador with its neo-constitutionalist revolution

of 2008 recognizes through Art. 95 other forms of democracy: Direct

and Communitarian, but subordinated to the representative

government, the only one that emanates from the "sovereign" people

and legitimizes the government of the State, very much in tune with the

fact that "democracy is not the government of the people but of the

politicians" (Nun, 2000: 21).

The consequent constitutions of 1978-1998-2008 have not shown

improvement in the system or political regime, nor in the quality of

representation, without granting effective social control of public

power, only reinforced the political actors and the government,

leaving no room for territories such as Manabí to conceive a

provincial project with its cantons and parishes, where basic

solutions are still pending, not even overcome by the rehearsed

revocation of mandates of the successive mayors: Luis Mendoza of

Junín, and Doris López of Jaramijó, and to José Rivera President of

the Parish Council of San Lorenzo de Manta, all in 2011; which in no

case were linked to the competence context and/or governing

performance, but for political revenge that in nothing have

contributed in the governmental exercise; ceasing to use this

mechanism of control to local rulers, following untouched the

practices of political-governing corruption; that to implant the state

as political imaginary, only endowed with frameworks: institutional-

normative will continue to be an unethical armor that acts

surreptitiously, unveiling accusatory crosses without achievement in

social and territorial justice.

The constitutional and organic accountability has not had a place,

and could have become an honest exercise of transparency of the

political-governing, plagued with platitudes, and personal

condescension towards whoever governs in turn, transforming into

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plausible advertising, a situation that causes public boredom, more

for the absence of auditing and political control that revert in

democratic improvement, rather it has been configured the citizen-

governor separation; social immobility allows them to continue

deciding and even harming local societies by increasing taxes for

deficient services, squandering or committing public resources

without contributing to lowering basic deficits, much less

encouraging local economies.

The described costs are not ethically managed, underestimating

electoral trust, negotiating support from Councilmen who easily join

the majority of Mayors without having been elected in the same

electoral grouping; support without support in a project, agenda or

governance agreement of local benefit, undermining ethics,

contributing to the distrust that socially declares that "all are the same

or all are the same", delegitimizing local statehood.

In this statehood, the democratic sense that goes beyond the electoral is

still pending, especially when the local governmental action is not framed

in the normative mandates nor minimally inserted in the political-

territorial dynamics that process common agreements of the social

demand, and adapting response capacities of the three levels of

Ecuador's GADs that make feasible a governability according to

Bobbio (1995: 12) "between the demand and the answers (Crisis of

Democracy), the ungovernable is seen as the deficient, inept and

incapable power. Therefore, the State is (or enters) in crisis when it

does not have enough power to fulfill its duties"; reminded in each

election period that makes visible the non-fulfillment of the sustained

basic deficits.

State duties that do not comply with the exclusive competences, due

to the fact that the actions of the GADs respond discretionally to who

"governs", adjusting to what Castoriadis sentenced "that the political

class can cling to cynicism and irresponsibility because it is not

subject to any control nor to any sanction" (1994: 133-127), worse

some resistance, since neither "the educational system is no longer

capable of producing the individuals that make it work or in any case,

of producing citizens". A very fashionable concept as a political

slogan, rather than real citizen incidence.

In the transition to the "modern" developmentalist central bourgeois

state since the 1970s, a new geography of power for internal

domination was redefined. XX a new geography of power was

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redefined for the internal domain, determining spatial categories and

subcategories for the central and peripheral jurisdictions-territories,

depending on the specific economic and political weight; in Manabí,

Portoviejo and Manta were constituted as intermediate urban centers

of provincial domain, and the others as local urban centers:

Portoviejo and Manta were constituted as intermediate urban centers

of provincial domain, and the others as local urban centers, anchored

to a continental territory as a subspace destined to agro-export

(Deller, 1978:100-102); adjusting to what is defined by Restrepo

(2011: 352), that "geography is not a physical framework within

which economic growth, employment or welfare takes place.

Geography is the materialization of the expansion of political,

economic and cultural relations among men. It is in space that power

and marginality are organized, structured and distributed. Power

always structures space. This new geography of power deepened the

social and territorial division of labor, redistributing the social and

jurisdictional division of poverty in Manabí.

The apparent provincial Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN) as of 2010 (INEC)

was 76.8% (63.89% urban and 95.9% rural), decreasing to 31.15% in

2021 (22% urban and 57% rural). Income poverty in 2021 affected

27.7% of the population, dropping only 7.3 points compared to 2008;

the incidence of poverty in the same year was 5.1%, decreasing 2.9

points compared to 2008; the national Gini Index as of June 2021 is

0.493, urban is 0.478, and rural is 0.477; for Manabí it is 0.45 (INEC,

2018), determining inequality measured by income. The

aforementioned decreases have occurred as a result of the temporary

neo-developmentalist return of the central state between 2007-2017;

demonstrating that without it, no reduction is possible, let alone any

definitive solution.

The Latin American Center for Rural Development (2011: 2) also

identifies the Latin American municipalities where two thirds of the

population has not grown economically. In a little more than half,

with two thirds of the population, the incidence of poverty has not

decreased. In a little less than two thirds with 60% of the population,

there has been no significant progress in income distribution. And in

one third, with almost 40% of the population, there is no economic

growth, poverty reduction, or improved income distribution, a

situation that has not been overcome due to its structural nature.

With this evidence, it can be concluded in advance that the solution

to basic problems does not depend on the degree of autonomy

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developed in a given jurisdiction and level of government, as long as

the centralist State continues to behave in an exclusive manner due to

the supposed autonomies granted, and abstracts itself from key

responsibilities, foisting ineffectiveness on local governance.

This single State is the one that should and must tend to

polycentrism, concurring responsibilities between the central and

local levels through the solidarity and subsidiarity proposed by

Boisier (2004: 28), each social organization is competent to intervene

in its own sphere (functional or territorial), transferring "upwards"

only that which the common good or technology establishes as the

responsibility of the greater entity; nothing certain in the periphery,

which aspiring to raise the level of political jurisdiction would solve:

poverty, inequalities and institutional/territorial democracy; achieving

an unstructured fragmentation that accumulates parasitic bureaucracy

that consumes the reduced allocated budget, without having improved

the equitable redistribution of resources from the national treasury, nor

developed capacities in local governance.

Because this internal Ecuador is not governed by a political system,

but by an apparent regime of government similar to the

presidentialist one at the local government levels exercised by the

Prefect, Mayor and President of the Parish Council, who have not

installed the territorial regime of government, due to their low

management capacities, based on the sole normative force, without

being led by real actors with political projects; therefore, the

territorial regime continues to be a challenge to anchor to the

national State.

Encouraging and promoting that locals "reach certain previous levels

of development and that, in addition, have a certain critical mass of

strategic capabilities, they can have access to use the new

opportunities for their benefit. In other words, globalization would be

an opportunity especially for territories at medium levels of

development and endowed with relevant strategic capabilities"

(Bervejillo; 1996: 18-28); adopting a strategy of territorial

competitiveness systemically intercepted, so: environmental, social,

and political at equal levels that overcomes local backwardness, here

autonomy should be a strategic resource to be decentralized from

national political and economic domination, that modifies the

territorial jurisdictions of the periphery into truly autonomous

communities, allied with their civil societies that exercise a clear and

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strong governance that responds to the territory-jurisdiction of

Manabí.

The governance scenario in Manabí

To have democratic territorial governance, from the conventional

way it has been institutionalized through the GADs and decentralized

executive, also dependent on the changes of local governors every

four years, and to the permanent mobility of the civil servants of the

decentralized executive, aspect that does not contribute to a

sustained provincial, cantonal and/or parochial development, nor

with the continuity of reelected; the correctly sustained is the way by

the civil society to the perspective of Arocena (1995: 31), which is "a

system of action on a limited territory, capable of producing common

values and locally managed goods"; being the most stable and

territorialized, it really sustains a lasting proposal in Manabí.

The one that not only generates demands, but also responsibilities that

affect local governance by exercising co-responsibility, testing a new

provincial social contract, where the citizen is the only one capable of

expanding its space for participation as a civic exercise, which also

promotes the return to the State as an organization of citizens with

the objective of materializing effective decisions in matters of public

good (Mora, 2009: 338).

With political, social and civic rights and duties, this civil society

expresses itself at various levels and scenarios (local, national and

even supranational); the local one, for the most part, bases its action

only on the mechanisms institutionalized by current regulations,

requiring a rethinking that alters the traditional functional-clientel

State-civil society relationship.

The participation of this civil society must stop being only in the state,

especially if it is fulfilled as a regulatory requirement, relapsing on

citizens who respond to the local ruler of the day, avoiding

institutional democratization and capacity building in local social

organization. Beginning to debate from the moment a work or service

that benefits and affects a certain population segment is decided, for

example, with the empty chair (Law of Social Participation, Art. 77,

2010), which should be permanently promoted at all levels of GADs.

The existing institutionalized citizen participation is weak and

dispersed, absent from public affairs, functional to the management

circle of the GADs that justify expressions of: deliberation,

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consultation; disjointed from accountability, less from the social

control that observes rectifications and improvement in the essential

basic and/or social goods.

Here in Manabí it is necessary to achieve a balance of functionality in

the institutional aspect, expressing itself in equal conditions between

the executive, be it the Prefect, the Mayor, the President of the Parish

Council with the legislative-supervisory ones: Prefect, Mayor,

President of Parish Council with the legislative-supervisors:

Councilors, Councilmen and Parish Council Members; the latter are

supposed to be genuine representatives of the local civil society; if the

normative mandates were fully complied with, they should constitute

counterweights to the dominant executives, which continues to

postpone the institutional democratization contributing to the

territorial democratization; aspiring the normative minimums of the

COOTAD given in 2(f) with the objectives, 3(g) principles, and of the

surface application of Chapter III (Arts. 302-312).

On the side of citizen participation, being the bearer of specific demands

referred to the sector or specialty it represents, its leadership is not

an interlocutor of integral demands that modify authoritarian and

patrimonialist practices of local rulers, which do not contribute to

diminish socio-spatial inequalities that induce the necessary socio-

territorial equity.

This participation is not, nor should it be the result of the

voluntarism of people or institutions, the result of chance or luck,

especially when this participation is not measured or made in

meetings, discussions, workshops, assemblies, however good or

numerous they may be, it is made with democratic meanings; an

intentional event that requires guiding approaches, the use of

minimum procedures that demand the use of instruments and

techniques, all of which are apprehensible, that is, knowledge and

skills available to all people and that can be improved in practice. The

constructions around power point to the need for orderly paths and

systematic steps to exert influence, accessing local resources; that is

to say, the collective construction of power calls for participatory

methodology (Ramón, Galo. Torres, VH, 2004: 182).

The foregoing is regulated as Citizen Power under the Participation

Law (Art. 29), the result of the process of individual and collective

participation of the citizens of a community, who participate in a

leading role in decision-making, planning and management of public

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affairs, as well as in the social control of all levels of government, the

functions and institutions of the State, and natural or legal persons of

the private sector that manage public funds, provide services or

develop activities of public interest (2010).

Although it is contradictory, since "today we are facing a world where,

despite the fact that the obligation of governments to render accounts

is regulated, they are less committed to process citizens' demands"

(Mora, 2009: 338). The accountability that is obliged is still in the

good intentions of democratization, disconnected from social

demand, and much more from local programmatic agreements;

therefore, the constitutional and normative purpose of citizenizing

public power as an institutionalized mechanism with social control

has been reversed, controlling the citizenry by the public power that

renews political domination.

In Manabí it is worrying, due to the scarce, diminished, disarticulated and

demobilized organizational expressions of the civil society that has not

radically demanded to the local State, but to the national State, because

the latter centralized the sectorial worker-peasant expressions

preventing the constitution of a local social movement; although the

neoliberal tendency to continue decentralizing the social demand,

without social action; in order to exist it must have a diversified sense

that overcomes the capital-labor dichotomy, including the socio-

territorial demand.

Powerful citizen action must go hand in hand with installed

governance, becoming decisive and active with autonomous exercise

in the political-territorial sphere, dismantling the central dominance

of state power, outlining the 'good governance', which refers to the

role of institutions, their form of action, their legal representativeness,

transparency, legitimacy, credibility and equity, in addition to the

effectiveness and efficiency of their actions (Romero and Farinós,

2011: 56).

Where Governance, being "a complex set of actors and institutions,

which do not belong only to the governmental sphere, and which is

capable of translating the interdependence between power and

institutions linked to collective action" (Lazarev, 2009: 198). In this

notion of governance, institutions make up the local network in a web

of actors that coordinate public and private initiatives with a common

purpose, shared by the local community (Ibidem); a vision to be

installed provincially in Manabí.

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From this perspective, "governance must be a process of coordination

of actors, social groups and institutions to achieve collectively defined

goals in fragmented environments characterized by uncertainty" (Le

Galés, 1998). Governance theory designates a specific form of public-

private interaction based on non-hierarchical coordination to find

new opportunities.

Requiring a type of institution, which encloses or concerns "a

symbolic network, socially sanctioned, in which are combined, in

variable proportion and relation, a functional component and an

imaginary component. Alienation is the autonomization and

predominance of the imaginary moment in the institution, which

implies the autonomization and predominance of the institution in

relation to society. This autonomization of the institution is expressed

and embodied in the materiality of social life, but it always also assumes

that society lives its relations with its institutions in the manner of the

imaginary, in other words, it does not recognize in the imaginary of the

institutions its own product". (Castoriadis, 2008: 137).

Here the constant statehood must be made societal imaginary

through institutionality, but rather it has been emptied of satisfiers,

tending to arrive through governance that has institutionalized

citizen participation, without the devices having satisfied the demand,

nor lowered social conflict, because they have removed the essential

to the imaginary, replaced with the character that governs, clashing

the purpose, with reality.

This character focuses its priority on the scenarios of population

concentration in the significant urban electoral area, to the detriment

of the rural area where local-national state action is absent;

correcting, it must conceive a horizontal intervention that balances

the action of and between GADs, as well as that of the polycentric

central government agencies in the territory.

This local governance should essentially contribute to the guarantee

of rights, although with the minimum levels of development, the

GADs should be provided with purposes and means to articulate

territorial actions in coordination between GADs and stop being

punctual, focused mainly on contributions from the

provincial/municipal to the parish, being necessary to institutionalize

this form of concurrent relationship, which does not depend on

whoever serves as Prefect, Mayor or President of the Parish Council,

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but that the state action is preferably focused on the population and

the territory.

To present it as an innovation in the jurisdictional, the case of the

Electoral Districts (urban and rural) that conform the current

Municipal Councils, electing Councilmen of both scenarios, until now

no changes are perceived in the management of the Municipal

Government, because this continues to be conflictive in the Municipal

Council between Mayor-Councilmen, without it being a product of

the district origin of Councilmen, but of the dominant exercise of the

strong executive vs. the weak legislative-fiscal; this type of

relationship continues to hinder the action by the dispute in the

control of the management. Even more so when it was supposed that

the electoral districts should support a territorialized representation

that differentiates and integrates the urban from and the rural,

improving the quality of representation, an assumption that has not

been fulfilled, because personalization continues to prevail, which

prevents the exercise of local governments from being properly embodied,

ratifying that the Executive-legislative union should no longer be

sustained as an institutional formula of local governance.

This innovation has neither modernized nor democratized Manabí,

sustaining political primitivism among its actors, without giving

room for the intervention of actors other than those established by

the state, lacking moral, social, academic and cultural referents or

observatories to influence or call attention to the decadent provincial

state-political action.

Another failed aspect of the new constitutional innovation of 2008 is

given by the hinge action of the mayors who must fulfill the functions

of cantonal governor-legislator, and of Provincial Councilors;

configuring the paradox that they resist to be supervised by their

Municipal Council, a function that they must fulfill in the Provincial

Chamber.

Therefore, the Provincial Council does not configure the condition of

government level, being only the aggregation of the executives of the

three levels of local government, which could be articulated for the

effective intervention in the province and avoid fragmentation and

dispersion; then, due to the absent and evident legislative generation

and effective provincial supervision, they must become the genuine

meeting of the provincially integrated multilevel government project.

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Due to the absence of provincial legislature and supervision, the

current territorial regime is weakened, requiring with force to

conform the exclusive legislature that arises from the electoral

suffrage through a Provincial Legislative Assembly, without being

annexed and directed by the Prefect of the province, even changing

the nomenclature so that, instead of Ordinances, there are provincial

laws. This legislature must be the only one in the provincial territory,

disappearing for this purpose the weak and even invisible Municipal

Councils and the collective of Parish Councils; detaching the

unproductive marriage even in the presentation of joint candidacies

of Mayor and the subordinate list of councilmen, and the

presentation of a single list for the Parish Councils.

Those elected to govern the GADs in Manabí in 2019 were: 1 Prefect, 1

Vice-prefect, 22 Mayors, 100 Urban Councilors, 38 Rural Councilors

and 275 Principal Members of the Rural Parish Councils (CNE, 2019);

most of them were not chosen by militancy and outstanding cadres, a key

requirement in political action, reduced to the candidate guaranteeing the

election not by relevant personal characteristics, but by solvent personal

financial backing.

This ascription dynamites the implementation of a democratic

provincial governance, especially when the movements or political

parties are linked to personal or group economic interests that take

advantage of the discretionary management of the budgets of the

GADs that monopolize the provincial capital, intervening with

anticipated campaign financing, with the consequent recovery of the

significant public contracting of: 1 Provincial Council, 22

Municipalities and 55 Parish Councils.

On the other hand, those elected once in office dissociate themselves

from party loyalties, without holding on to the grouping or

ideological line that nominated them, contributing to the excessive

personalization of representation without consolidating the necessary

political system or regime that democratizes the State in the

territorial sphere, this fact dissolves the link between the elected and

the grouping that promoted them, distancing them from the voters,

and even more from the territory.

Therefore, "the party system is a cartel, so that elections have ceased

to be a contest between opposing political options to become a simple

selection of public managers" (Mair, 2013: 176); more so when the

parties-movements that promote candidacies get rid of them without

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assuming co-responsibility, which in a Constitutional State should be

typified as a punishable act, since the party-movement is the vehicle

that leads the elected to become imbricated in the State,

depoliticizing governmental action.

In addition, all programmatic perspective is lost as a core link-

contract between elected-electors, reduced only to be fulfilled in the

registration of candidacies, without being binding on the action of the

elected, becoming one of the many deviations of electoral democracy,

being a failed cultural product, since the relationships between voters

and political parties tend to be personal rather than programmatic or

ideological (Mainwaring and Torcal 2005; Kitschelt et al. 2010: 1-4).

The dominant political tendencies in Manabí that have exercised and/or

exercise governmental representation are predominantly right-wing,

center-right and populist-progressive, as shown in the following table.

Table 1. Elections of Manabí 2004-2019

PREFECTS ELECTED BY POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

YEAR

NAME

Party /

Movement

# of votes

% valid

votes

Number of

applications

2019

Leonardo Orlando

Social

Commitment

210.687

28,51

2014

Mariano Zambrano

AP-Unit First

311.926

55,66

2009

Municipalist-

Unity First

276.584

46,26

2004

PSC

242.208

49,26

YEAR

MAYORSHIPS ELECTED BY POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

2019

PSC-UP (7)

Si Podemos

(7)

AP (5)

ID (1)

Opportunity

and Change (1)

Best City (1)

2014

AP-UP (8)

ADVANCES

(6)

SUMA 5

PS-FA (3)

2009

Municipalist and

AP (11)

AP (6)

PSP (3)

Mantense

Unit (1)

PSP (1)

MPD (1)

2004

PSC (9)

PRE (6)

PRIAN

(4)

DP (3)

Social Christian Party (PSC). Partido Roldosista Ecuatoriano (PRE). Democracia Popular

(DP). Patriotic Society Party (PSP). Alianza País (AP). Democratic Left (ID). Popular

Democratic Movement (MPD). Unidad Primero (UP).

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Source: CNE, 2019. Prepared by: Author

The table demonstrates the right-wing predominance of the Social

Christian Party (PSC), through the figure of the Prefect who

consolidated a political-electoral flow during 3 consecutive periods

2004-2019 (15 years), the longest in the provincial history, reaching

to form his provincial political movement Unity First (UP),

controlling electorally the prefecture, mayors and parish councils;

transcending to the election of Provincial Assemblymen aligned to

the dominant presidential binomial of the period in reference, only

interrupted because the legal norm prevents indefinite reelection.

The result of the mayoral elections is evident in the predominance of the

national political parties in the indicated period, altered only in the

2019 elections where there was incidence of the provincial and even

cantonal movements, assuming a sort of test that stresses the

sustainability and predominance of the national parties, to the detriment

of the provincial ones.

The centralist electoral scenario as the only democratic path in

Ecuador is delegitimized by the separation of the government-

governed and rulers-governed link, it closes possibilities related to

concrete action, since the institutions of democracy must be

transparent scenarios open to public debate if they are to remain

legitimate (Habermas, 1998b: 381-392).

Where electoral legitimacy at the three levels of local government has

not been achieved with strong endorsements, justified with legal

subterfuges through simple methods that quantify only valid votes,

and not the electoral universe of the jurisdiction; This crucial aspect

of representative democracy is not assumed by those elected, nor

administered in the governmental period, being diluted by unethical

practices, resulting in disenchantment, distrust, abstentionism and

even punishment of the electoral vote; it also does not increase the

citizenship of the governmental administration, referring to a

mechanism similar to the second round of the presidential binomial

if the legitimizing percentage is not obtained.

This reaffirms the non-existent provincial political regime, which is

why it has been substituted with administrative approaches, guided

by mechanisms inscribed in the instruments of strategic planning

and territorial incidence decided from the institutional point of view,

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without translating into real agreements that strengthen legitimacy

with the actors of the province.

Even more so when the institutional framework is subject to the

elected officials, and these are focused on carrying out works of

supposed socio-population-territorial necessity for economic and

electoral returns; a workerist approach removed from the

competency mandates, with no impact on the overcoming of basic

deficits, nor contributing to the construction of organized specialties

due to the absence of territorially integral projects.

The period under review is part of the alleged uninterrupted

democratic reinstitutionalization of Latin America since the end of

the 70s of the twentieth century, where Ecuador was expanding and / or

granting rights with the constituents of 1997 and 2008, without

reaching the establishment of a stable democratic regime and welfare.

XX, where Ecuador was expanding and / or granting rights with the

constituents of 1997 and 2008, without reaching to establish a stable

democratic regime and welfare, nor has it meant an evolution in the

intervening actors: political parties or movements, less in the ruling

ruling class, without more than producing constitutional norms,

structuring constituted powers, as ordering the constituent power as

a subject, regulating democratic politics. (Negri, 2015: 27). Here the

constituent power is not only omnipotent, but also expansive, its

unlimited character is not only temporal, but also spatial (Ibidem:

29). With the constituent spatial expansion of the internal State, this

has not outlined substantive changes in and for a territorial

governance that configures the political system and regime, because

it lacks the substantial population and spatial existence.

Mortati also reaffirms that the juridical constitution is erected on the

social constitution, while the latter is formed by a set of groups and

forces: "Every society from which a particular state formation arises

and to which it is joined possesses its own intrinsic normativity,

which is given precisely by its arrangement around forces or political

ends". (2000: 145). With three levels of sectional government until

2008, each one was governed with its own regulations, opposing

competencies that caused a disorganized social and territorial

intervention, creating disputes for the clientelistic control of the

electorate, adding the Parish Councils in 2000 as another level of

local government; not having more levels of government in the same

territory is directly favorable to a better territorial organization and

local governance.

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More when the provincial political geography is structurally

dispersed, weak, fragmented, asymmetric, unfocused its action to

solve the substantial problems for the population, divorced from its

socio-territorial context, even with the pandemic of COVID 19 ratified

the State-society divorce, taken advantage of more to print domain

enacting rules, protocols, or policies without debate, consultation,

decision, or knowledge of society, applying them coercively without

processing democratically.

Without a project, with only the political and economic exploitation

of the elite that owns or is related to the capital that it is not

convenient to overcome: backwardness, poverty and develop

democratically integrated scenarios, with evident social and

jurisdictional inequalities, urban and rural of the province, is not only

responsibility for the "capable" and incapable local rulers, but it is the

capital that concentrates and deconcentrates the wealth, as well as

distributes provincial poverty; making complex to translate the caciquist

governing action, which prevents installing a democratic governance in

Manabi, less stripping the current state dominance and let install a

binarism between representative democracy and community self-

government.

The formula of equality of and between levels of government has not

been favorable for building adequate territorial governance, with

evident asymmetries that cannot be overcome with constitutional or

legal reforms or more elections, nor by increasing levels of

government, especially when the elected actors will continue to be

people who are not linked to the political sphere.

With the existing governments: provincial, municipal and parochial,

if they were to leave the electoral dispute/control and focus on

planning and organizing the territory regarding the provision and

administration of basic goods, in: roads, mobility and urban-rural

transit; water resources and environmental sanitation; support to

human development; productive promotion and the articulation of

international cooperation to the territory; strengthening and testing

concurrences and commonwealths with the intervention of the

deconcentrated national government, it will contribute to dissolve

incompatibilities that prevent solving population problems, and

territorial organization.

With the aforementioned, it is complex to effectively decentralize

what is structurally centralized, let alone alter national domination.

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For this reason, decentralization is not the most adequate strategy to

have a creative and political impact on the territory, more with

simple coordinations of the central State with and between levels of

government that sustain minimum margins of governability.

On a par with the constitutional postulate that foresees building

territorial equity among the different localities, reducing centralism,

concretizing participative democracy, cohesion of the national State,

improving the quality of life of the population with the failed

incorporation of four substantial changes: the creation of a Regional

Government; the creation of the National System of Competencies, of

Special Regimes and decentralization, although this must be adjusted

to the varied approaches of the National Territorial Strategies of the

governments in office, such as the current ones focused on a supposed

integrality and complementarity that territorialize public policy, whose

guidelines: 1. Territorial support for the guarantee of rights by accessing

services to reduce gaps, with sustainable land use, improving habitat and

living conditions, comprehensive population care with priority to early

childhood; 2. territorial management for the ecological transition with

sustainable governance; and 3. articulation of the territory to take

advantage of local potentialities, with deconcentration and

decentralization and collaborative governance, (SENPLADES, 2022:

24-41), the current TNCs revolve around management that submits

the territory to greater exploitation of its potentialities, with which it

resolves its problems on its own without relying on central

subsidiarity.

The aforementioned TNCs alter the normative mandate of the

COOTAD, which assumes that planning is not only technical for all

the GADs (Art. 241), but a central and articulating axis from the

central-local-central, converted into local-central-local, where the

center will tend to disengage while maintaining a certain governance,

without local self-dominance, although it complies with the following:

participatory, concurrent and relevant, with territorial planning,

trying to be binding to the exclusive competences (Arts. 262, 263,

264 and 267, numerals 1). Establishing a new governance contract

that preserves the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, territorial

equity and integration, exceeding governmental periods with lasting

public policies.

The described state domain does not leave room for the territory to

preserve the community as an agent of social change; here the

territorial planning should be an opportunity to order the physical,

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and local-provincial life, altering better living conditions, inscribed in

tangible mandates with a strengthened institutionality and

citizenship, that the strategic and territorial planning continues to

remain in the technical-methodological formulation inapplicable,

fulfilling the constitutional mandate (Arts. 262 to 267), and more the

planning approach of the Central Government that fails to apply the

substantial criterion of complementarity, in addition to the territorial

concertation with and between the GADs and their civil societies.

Manaba-style governance

The model of state territorial management tested since 1979 requires

an essentially democratized public institutional recovery and

revitalization that improves state goods and services and facilitates

integral territorial development. Equipped with a management model

that is effectively deconcentrated and decentralized, participatory, with

continuous improvement, open and audited socially and politically under

equal conditions, accountable, responsive to participatory planning,

which is part of the constituent revolution cited by Negri.

To reconfigure the national territorial organization, through a strong

deconcentration as a way to strengthen political decentralization,

without parallelism that disputes the central-local territorial control,

starting and finishing point of a substantial transformation process,

containing the following decisions:

 Eliminate the overlapping of functions in state management

between local and national levels of government;

 Budget for highly efficient deconcentration and

decentralization that makes local development;

 To configure the intermediate level of government that

articulates the center-periphery;

 Implement intelligently integrated territorial units;

 Achievement of socio-territorial justice;

 Exercise practices of governing counterweights in the GADs:

Executive-Legislative, GADs-civil society.

This provincial Management Model should contain: principles,

approaches, tools, moments, tangible and intangible achievements

and actors that build them at each territorial level: provincial,

cantonal and parish with effective participation, overcoming: "the

problem of disarticulation, isolation, fragmentation; the capacities

are there, the resources are there; the only thing missing is the vision

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that it is possible, all together, cooperatively, to start new

development processes, from below, from the local level (Coraggio,

2004: 66).

What has been developed should become the necessary support to

configure, once and for all, from the socio-territorial relevance, the

effective practice of a "new policy" of territorial management, which

essentially privileges the access of all socio-territorial groups, even

those excluded from the "political goods", starting with the key basic

and public goods horizontally in and for Manabí that undertakes the

postponed second stage of development in the third provincial

centenary.

Conclusions

The revised performance of the internal institutional State in Manabí, its

jurisdictional condition of its almost 200 years as a province is still not

enough to have managed to configure a community: political, spatial

and population organized, but it has induced a common identity

rooted belonging.

This process of provincial political configuration has become

fragmented, a bottleneck that has not allowed overcoming

backwardness in social and territorial justice, in addition to the

capitalist use of the territory that expanded the domain of the liberal

state that distributed inequalities in spite of the supposed autonomy,

which has been conditioned and controlled, making local governance

with multilevel participation complex, due to the fact that electoral

control continues to be disputed, invalidating the configuration of a

local governance with competitive utility.

This condition has not intervened to bring about changes in the

sectional institutionalism, which has weakened the effective

fulfillment of competencies that achieve local government efficiency;

only focused on attending micro spatialities and sectors that have

fragmented management, leaving this form and governmental level

unaltered, sentencing to local immobility that has perpetuated the

control of the local levels of government to the central domain.

In addition, it is shown that the instituted territorial regime has not

contributed to the polycentric approach, and that as local

government levels are conceived as equals, working mechanisms:

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cooperative, concurrent and joint in the multilevel that strips the

institutional, political and territorial colonization.

Therefore, the challenge of having a relevant territorial governance

for the province of Manabí is still pending, being complex, having

repercussions on the evident asymmetries: spatial, social, sectorial,

etc., which still lacks the special organization of the territory by virtue

of its own cohesion and integration at all jurisdictional levels, up to

the communal level.

The constituted does not contribute to redirect the approach to

implement a provincial governance in and with its three levels of

local government, if it is proposed to do so, it is required to assemble

an effective political unit as a socially organized entity in Manabí,

possible if it stops prioritizing the political jurisdiction anchored to local

governors, and anchors to cohesion with the internal population-nation

of the province.

Redefining the political-territorial organization of the province, with its

cantonal and parish cells in equal and differentiated conditions;

equal from a polycentric logic, which achieves territorial equity in

socioeconomic terms, where those who have greater advantages,

make the sacrifice of ceding opportunities to the less developed;

differentiated, specializing the population and institutions based on

the potentialities they have or count on.

Preserving the advantages of ancestral knowledge, levels of cohesion-

integration, or degrees of development achieved in the modernizing

process since the 70s of the twentieth century, adding the

opportunities ceded and gained from national political-economic

centralism.

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