Esteban Szmulewicz gives presentations for Constitutional Council in Chile
Szmulewicz, a PhD candidate at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at Leiden University, gave two online presentations on ‘The unitary and decentralized state’ and ‘The need to strengthen the autonomy of the territories in the new Constitution in order to reduce regional inequalities’ for the Constitutional Council in Chile.
The focus of both presentations was: 1) the direct election of Regional Governors, and the consequences of this in terms of, among others, the recognition of full autonomy of the Regional Governments, the need to strengthen the Regional Councils as an oversight and deliberative body at the regional level and to maintain the presidential representative only at the provincial level; 2) strengthening multilevel coordination, both inter-institutional and with civil society; 3) enhancing regional regulatory powers; 4) the gradual and progressive transfer of competences to regional and local governments, through transitory provisions at the end of the Constitution; and 5) several provisions in terms of financial decentralisation and territorial equality.
In both interventions, the theoretical framework about the advantages and disadvantages of decentralisation and the critical variables of it, as well as the empirical findings regarding the functioning of decentralisation under emergency situations, were applied in order to develop the proposal for the Constitutional Council and the new draft Constitution of Chile.
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