Advanced Diploma in Planning, Territories and Public Policies

The aim of this diploma program is to critically analyze the conditions that enable the development of medium- and long-term public policies in Latin America. Significant case studies from Latin American countries will be used as a reference, and the regional framework as a whole will allow for a discernment between the capacity of states to structure long-term public actions with planning and a development perspective, and the current realities that hinder sustainable institutional practices over time.

The Diploma program offers planning and public policy analysis tools with a territorial perspective situated within the current regional and global context. We believe that Latin America's integration into the global economy is conditioned by relationships of dependency; this condition shapes public policies in the countries of the region. Therefore, it is important to consider regional integration processes not only as institutional arrangements between states, but also as political and territorial projects that are built and challenged from within the territories, scales, and actors themselves.

At a time of intense questioning of the state and the significant role of diverse social sectors as drivers of new demands and transformations, this diploma program proposes a reinterpretation of the division between state and society to analyze the practices and disputes of state, social, and political actors within the framework of concrete public policies. In this sense, the various social movements—youth, feminist, peasant, indigenous, urban, and environmental—are addressed not only as demanders of public policies, but also as subjects situated in a particular territory, and as producers and bearers of alternative projects for development, integration, and sovereignty.

We aim to diagnose the actual capacities of states, public management, and the development of medium- and long-term guidelines. Specifically, we will analyze concrete public policies of governments in the region, seeking to obtain better tools and greater effectiveness and efficiency through the participation of social actors, policies aimed at youth, the construction of a state with a gender perspective, and a review of strategic policies for socio-ecological transformations and the transformation of the productive matrix.

The diploma course concludes with the development of a viable public policy proposal based on one of the problems analyzed or the creation of a monograph that addresses one of the elements covered.

Over the past four decades, the West has experienced a period of significant transformations in social, economic, and political relations. Broadly speaking, these transformations allow us to establish a divide between, on the one hand, wage-based societies modeled around the Welfare State and full employment, and on the other hand, contemporary societies, which exhibit new forms of capital accumulation, renewed formats for labor relations, and fluid social ties mediated by a digital environment that generates diverse subjective emergencies. In Latin America, these processes have been articulated with dependent and extractive development models, whose impacts affect specific territories, generating inequality between dynamic regions and others that are marginalized and suffer the impact on their territories with little or no benefit. This scenario raises a major question about the roles the State can adopt through public policies, particularly regarding its capacity to intervene in territorial inequalities, when in many cases it is one of the actors that produces inequality.

Latin American social and political thought has developed various attempts to interpret these transformations, placing at the center the need to embrace heterogeneity as the starting point for any understanding of social dynamics. Hence the prominent place that the notion of hegemony has taken in political theory, since the formation of social subjects capable of enabling processes of change is no longer satisfactorily conceived as an “objective” expression of certain social determinants, but rather as a contingent—though not arbitrary—result of processes of political articulation. Within this framework, social movements acquire a central role as actors that contest meanings of development, the State, and public action, as producers of alternatives.

From a critical perspective, the "imposition" of a development model based on economic growth, implemented as hegemonic development policies without considering the evident territorial heterogeneity, is considered a problematic factor. Implementing development policies without taking this heterogeneity into account leads to their unsustainability and can even generate territorial inequalities.

However, despite this, forms of citizen participation transcend electoral contests and are fundamental for deepening processes of inclusive social transformation. Likewise, to transcend this constant drive, it is essential to have tools that allow society as a whole to foster new forms of political imagination. This requires creativity, political will, and planning and forecasting instruments that, in addition to constructing possible scenarios, outline viable and territorially situated paths toward those scenarios, considering power relations, spatial asymmetries, and the differential capacities of local and regional actors.

The analysis and debate surrounding our current circumstances, the stage we are going through, and the present situation allow us to address the core of this program, which focuses on the conditions that make possible a set of public policies capable of meeting the challenges of Latin America's future. To this end, it will be essential to revisit fundamental theoretical contributions from the social sciences, such as the notions of planning and prospective analysis, understood not as technocratic instruments, but as tools that allow us to respond to the structural relationships of inequality and dependency at national and regional levels. The crisis of neoliberal hegemony and the impact of the pandemic have given rise to a climate of uncertainty about the future, in which apocalyptic visions proliferate. Hence the centrality of valuing prospective analysis, of reviving key debates on futures studies, of learning to methodically and rigorously foresee possible scenarios, and, fundamentally, of reclaiming the category of strategic planning as a state capacity, which has been harshly attacked in previous decades.

Finally, it is necessary to delve deeper into the concept of the State as an essential force for driving social change, not only from a theoretical and conceptual perspective but also through a situated interpretation. This entails analyzing the State in relation to territories and their actors, evaluating its actual capacity to address persistent inequalities, and understanding the historical, political, and institutional conditions in which it emerges after a long period of neoliberalism. Likewise, a deeper understanding of the basic concepts of administration, public management, and the development of medium- and long-term guidelines is proposed, incorporating the participation of social and territorial actors as a prerequisite for building more democratic, effective, and socially legitimate public policies. 

GENERAL OBJECTIVES

• Strengthen the training of public policy implementers in strategic and prospective planning.
• To analyze current debates surrounding the State, democracy, and territorial development, based on an approach to study methodologies about the future, from the perspective of public policies.
• To generate technical tools that allow the analysis of the sustainability of public policy in Latin America.
• To provide a tool for the design of projects in territories: social movements, collectives, foundations and associations.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

• Learn about foresight experiences at the regional and international levels.
• To create a space for collective exchange that is enriched by the contributions and experiences of each participant in the Diploma program.
• Consolidating knowledge about Latin American public policies from a prospective perspective.
• To provide notions for the knowledge of the different study methodologies on territorial development.
• To provide tools for the planning and design of public policies. To share experiences and lessons learned from public management.
• To deepen the points of articulation between popular and academic knowledge. 

The Higher Diploma in Planning, Territories and Public Policies is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students; teachers at all levels; activists and members of trade unions, social movements and political parties; public officials; members and managers of non-governmental organizations and professionals interested in the subject.

The program consists of weekly class modules, each taught consecutively and interconnected. The course combines synchronous and asynchronous learning.

Total workload of 128 hours.

The modules that comprise the advanced diploma are: