Search

This paper examines some epistemological changes of the concept "development" and its connections with the ideas of resilience, utopia and freedom. The term is usually used from a merely economicist perspective, disregarding social or cultural nuances. In order to understand the implications of the different meanings of the term, this paper considers the different conceptions, without involving conceptions which are stagnated in history, but as a way to understand the dynamics of the concepts and their epistemological implications. We intend to expand the idea of development to more social borders, revisiting concepts from the economist Amartya Sen, who centers the proposals of development in the internal abilities of society. Moreover, we introduce the idea of freedom, as a way of expression of societies, and of how the exercise of this freedom should be taken into consideration when it comes to establishing parameters of development measurement of geographical spaces. We also approach the concept of "resilience", as necessary, or rather , indispensable to achieve a kind of development from a wider perspective. This more humane view of the concept "development" leads us to include variables such as "happiness", "satisfaction", which lead us to understand the subjective dimension of development. Once the social dynamics is thus understood, we will be able to value the primary causes of the differences in the regional development of the diverse geographic spaces. As part of the research project "El desarrollo local en la gestión del territorio. La sinergia entre lo agropecuario y el caldenal. Departamento Loventué, La Pampa, Argentina", this paper offers a theoretical and epistemological contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at approaching the local development of the region South of the Maracaibo Lake from a a geo-historical perspective and in relation to its spaces of influence, considering that the organization of landscapes has been transformed by the presence of man since the moment of space occupation, in this case during the XX century and predicting developent processes during the XXI century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The productive exploitation of the "territorial near west" since the end of the nineteenth century was based on the natural supply according to the priority bestowed by the prevailing development model, within the framework of the insertion of the Argentine Republic in the international division of labour. This paper determines the production cycles defined from the use and transformation of the ecosystems (pasture, forest extraction) or their substitution by farming, and holds the hypothesis that the former was limited with regard to the process of exploitation and plundering to which it was subjected. Overloading the fields with livestock, as if they were the rich grasslands of the province of Buenos Aires, agricultural practices and deforestation caused, within a few years, soil exhaustion and erosion resulting from trampling and dryness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]