Rethinking Federalism through the Work of Milton Santos

• Autor(a) principal: Gallo, Fabricio [UNESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Melgaco, L., Prouse, C.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53826-6_8; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/245410

The geographical analysis of a national territory requires a research method that considers the multi-faceted nature of reality, especially for those territories where state organization occurs within a federal structure. This structure uses a policy architecture to resolve the problem of the organization of power in the face of specific regional diversities of each national territory. The concept adopted in this chapter is of the used territory, as proposed by Milton Santos. The hegemonic agent par excellence in the use of territory is the state. In countries of federative state organization (in other words, where the state's power is shared between federated entities of isonomic form) the national public budgets are often characterized by the transfer of tax funds from one federated entity to another. The geographical analysis of these transfers is one way to understand how the state uses the territory. To exercise power, the state uses the territory by imposing norms that regulate and create tensions among entities because some transfers can favour only one group of subnational entities. This brings into question the principle of federal isonomy and can lead to a war of places, animated by disputes for limited public resources. This chapter discusses how Milton Santos's dialectic between normed territory and territory as norm can be used to interpret the taxation disarrangement in the federation.