Governance and Development: The Importance of Legitimacy and Institutional Change

Abstract

Bert Helmsing was a pioneer in the application of regional development theories, as well as what was later termed ‘institutional and governance approaches’ to complex problems in emergent countries such as Colombia. He was my professor at the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Regionales (CIDER) at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, the first, highly successful interdisciplinary research centre for the study of regional and local development problems in Colombia. Bert played a very important role in its success with his creative research approaches to problems of development. In the early 1980s, I had the opportunity to collaborate with him in his research on the impact of the cotton agroindustry in the Cesar region of Colombia. In that research, Bert was trying to understand the social and regional impact of the cotton value chain in the Cesar region. Although the word governance was not common at that time, he took an institutional approach to the problem. His concerns were the implications of the value chain for the ‘campesinos’, and his desire to gain an understanding of the role of land rights on the productive systems at that time. The analysis of the spatial and regional effects on an intermediate city and an important region were also at stake. In retrospect, the result of that development process was not completely successful. Violence and social conflict erupted, and thirty years later, it has still not ended.