Conclusion

Abstract

Contemporary territorial management and planning practice was introduced relatively late in Galicia, in 1956, while strategic planning was not introduced until 1992. Thus, the development and implementation of spatial plans or strategies did not always imply positive results. On many occasions, such a practice did not take into account the real characteristics and complex nature of Galician territory, often giving relevance to the province while neglecting the comarca and the parish. Faulty or simply non-existent methodological approaches came to deepen a series of structural problems, such as the coastal/interior dichotomy, issues on localism-clientelism (caciquismo) and the politisation of society and territory, the lack of administrative and territorial coordination, the lack of general/national spatial plans, or the disarray between the territorial socio-economic and cultural reality and administrative spatial organisation. Not even the Galician administration, since the recovery of self-government in 1981, has been able to correct such problems; at least not up to the end of president’s Fraga administration, in 2004. In fact, Galicia has not been able to optimise economic and social transformation in terms of urbanisation, industrialisation, technological revolution, counter-urbanisation, and fund allocation from the European Union. Galicia has constantly ‘floated in the stream’, without actually taking advantage of ‘the current’. Rural change and modernisation are a reality, but Galicia faced these processes in an unorganised, even ‘chaotic’ fashion. It can be argued that the fundamental dilemma resides in the failure to actually establish a framework of reference, in effect, a general development plan or spatial strategy capable of co-ordinating and integrating all the different social, economic and territorial actors. The Galician administration has been especially incapable of providing a clear territorial model based on consensus, in spite of extensive literary and academic debate on the matter. Only timid references to strategic planning are to be found at an official level. As a consequence, municipal and provincial authorities have often pursued particular and personal agendas, deepening clientelist practices, territorial imbalances and maladjustments, resource wastage, and an overall lack of territorial administrative coordination. Municipal individualism is rampant, thus degenerating in the feísmo and