Since the creation of the National Planning Board (1962) to date, suggestions and proposals have been presented to regionalize the country, in order to promote endogenous development that takes into consideration every corner of the national territory; however, the results do not show the objective for which they were designed.
Six decades later, the president has promulgated the Law of Unique Planning Regions of the Dominican Republic, after the Congress approved with an overwhelming majority the piece studied in the Bicameral Commission formed for the purposes; putting an end to ten years of discussions and disagreements that allowed building political consensus with the various forces represented.
This approval allows the construction of a new development paradigm, to transform the historical investment model that has fostered the concentration and expansion of the main urban centers; turning them into a bubble that only concentrates dissatisfactions which lead to social outbursts, due to the lack of response to the primary problems that human beings have.
The new paradigm of placing the region as the basic unit for the articulation and formulation of public policies in the national territory is a call to make visible the population, human settlements and existing resources within each region, to promote the endogenous potential and reduce the limitations that do not allow the full development of said territory. This in turn breaks with the myth of continuing to swell the main urban centers of the country, with a hopeless and dissatisfied migration that is expelled from their territories of origin to replicate the poverty of their communities both in vulnerable areas and on the periphery of each city; phenomenon that accentuates inequalities that lead to social and structural problems.
With this new perspective, it seeks to promote productive development in response to the vocation of each region, reducing the migration of its residents to other parts of the national geography and generating new opportunities, in order to increase the population that will gradually increase public investment for finance the construction of infrastructures and will supply the basic services that the projected population will require for this development.
This is how the recently approved legal framework with ten Unique Regions marks a milestone in the planning of the Dominican Republic, since this organic regulation of mandatory compliance by all government agencies, together with the Planning, Public Investment and Territorial Planning Systems, It will make it possible to reduce the existing disparities between the different points of the national geography based on the ordering of the territorial subsystems, the definition of the development model and the orientation of public investment.
Unique Regions, to improve the quality of life of the population, regardless of where they live in the territory and generating opportunities where people live.
