Territorial planning in Central America in the 21st century: advances and limitations for building resilience

Abstract

During the first two decades of the 21st century, Central American countries have made significant efforts in territorial planning, including the development of instruments at the national, subnational, metropolitan, and local levels. In addition, as part of the regional integration process, policies, strategies, and agendas have been prepared on issues such as land use planning, housing, roads, rural development, and risk management. All of this has been driven in part by international agreements that promote sustainable development, comprehensive risk management, and resilience building. This paper explores how territorial planning in the region has limited or contributed to promoting resilience by studying five emblematic planning experiences in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. To this end, it starts from a theoretical framework based on Bourdieu's structural constructivism, which allows territorial planning to be understood as a field of social life with agents, relationships, rules, and resources. In addition, it reviews various perspectives on the concept of resilience and its link to sustainability and vulnerability. The study applies a pluralistic and qualitative methodological strategy based on a case study using document review techniques and interviews with key informants. Despite the stated commitments to sustainable development, four tensions emerge from the study that explain the main limitations of planning to build resilience in Central America: the lack of coordination between economic development strategies; the fragility of planning systems; the difficulties of managing metropolitan areas; and the limited participation of stakeholders. Two principles seem to explain this dynamic: disputes over control of the territory and struggles for the exercise of political power in the space. All of this invites deeper reflection on the relationships between actors, the weight of international agendas, and ultimately the conflictive nature of territorial planning.