The dire circumstances the country has faced in recent weeks have sparked debate about decentralization and regionalization. It always happens that it is necessary to face catastrophes that affected populations, such as the fires of 2017.
Whatever the area – or areas – especially affected by natural disasters, the same complaints abound: the populations were forgotten, the firefighters took a long time to appear, the Civil Protection wanted nothing to do with them, the coordination of relief resources was a fiasco, the military went elsewhere, if it had been in Lisbon everything would have been resolved by now!
These outbursts, as a rule in front of television cameras, almost always give rise to the same reactions: “poor things” – the victims; “tricksters” – politicians; let’s send trucks with basic necessities – well-intentioned supporters; we throw a budget at them with lots of zeros (always less than necessary) – the government officials.
The few serious attempts to discuss the root of the problems disappear into oblivion and, months later, everything is practically the same. Until the next tragedy.
I have long believed that the Public Administration’s difficulty in facing natural disasters arises – in addition to their severity, of course – from our inability to think rationally about territorial administrative organization. At the outset, it is worth clarifying that the problem of decentralization is not a problem of laws. To solve it, economists, geographers and historians are needed more than jurists.
There is an intimate relationship between the distribution of public functions and tasks and the territorial and human dimension.
The more than 3000 parishes include one with less than a hundred inhabitants and several with more than sixty thousand. Of the 308 municipalities, one has more than half a million inhabitants, while others have less than two thousand. More than 250 municipalities have fewer inhabitants than the most populous parish (data from the 2021 Census).
It should be noted that Portugal has the entire continental territory distributed across municipalities and parishes, constituting two overlapping networks. To my knowledge, this duplication does not exist in any other European country.
The number of territorial public entities has a consequence: while Lisbon and Porto have the human dimension and financial resources to support a university, if they want, most other municipalities would hardly have secondary schools without State support.
Naturally, the ultimate reason for this difference lies in the unequal – increasingly unequal – distribution of the population across the continental territory, an aspect that cannot be ignored when implementing a truly decentralizing policy. Motorways with “fly” sections and the unfortunate and abandoned stadiums in the Algarve, Leiria and Aveiro, are there to certify the death of a pseudo-decentralizing strategy.
I will continue next week to talk about decentralization.
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