Regional Development in World Society
World Society · Regional Configurations · Regional Development · Amazonia
How do global societal structures become regionally specific, and how do these regional configurations shape the possibilities and limits of development?
Regional Development in World Society is my central theoretical research programme. It develops a conceptual framework for analysing regional development under conditions of a globally operating, functionally differentiated society.
The programme starts from an apparent paradox. Modern society increasingly operates through global systems of communication — including the economy, politics, law, science and education — yet the structures and consequences produced by these systems remain highly uneven across regions.
Rather than explaining these differences primarily through territorial characteristics, the programme asks how globally operating societal processes become selectively connected within particular regional contexts and contribute to the formation and transformation of regionally specific configurations.
Research Problem
Much research on regional development begins with territorially defined regions and asks why their development trajectories differ.
This project reverses the analytical perspective.
Regions are not treated primarily as pre-existing territorial units within which development occurs. Instead, they are approached as historically evolving configurations formed and transformed through selective connections involving places, organizations, populations, material conditions and the structures of world society.
The central problem therefore becomes:
Why do globally operating societal processes produce differentiated regional configurations rather than uniform territorial outcomes?
This perspective shifts attention from the region as a container of social processes toward the processes through which regional structures themselves emerge.
Explore the Theoretical Architecture
The theoretical architecture of Regional Development in World Society (RWS) is developed through four interconnected sections.
RWS Core Concepts →
Concepts developed specifically within the RWS framework, including selective territorialization, regionalization, organizations and regional structures, knowledge and decision relevance, materiality, and regional capacities and asymmetries.
Theoretical Building Blocks →
Conceptual foundations used in the development of RWS, drawn primarily from social systems theory and related theoretical traditions, including world society, functional differentiation, organizations, observation, decision-making, expectations, time, institutionalization and infrastructure.
Theoretical Dialogues →
Comparative engagements with social systems theory and world society, critical political economy, regional development theory, development theory, and society–nature and material approaches.
Open Theory Agenda →
Exploratory questions, unresolved theoretical problems and concepts that remain under development within the RWS research programme.
World Society and Regional Configurations
Following the theory of world society and functional differentiation, modern society is understood as a global communication system differentiated into function systems such as the economy, politics, law, science, education and health (Luhmann 1997; Stichweh 2000).
These systems operate according to distinct logics and cannot be integrated into a unified societal order through territorial political authority.
At the same time, societal operations become connected to organizations, infrastructures, knowledge, material conditions and institutionalized expectations that are distributed unevenly across space.
Regions therefore differ not because function systems cease to operate globally, but because heterogeneous societal operations become selectively connected under different historical, organizational, institutional and material conditions.
Regional differences can consequently be analysed as outcomes of differentiated patterns of connectivity, organization, institutionalization and material transformation within world society.
Organizations and Regional Structures
Organizations play an important role in the formation and transformation of regional configurations.
Companies, public administrations, universities, associations, cooperatives, regulatory agencies and other organizations operate through decisions, programmes, procedures, membership rules and organizational routines. In doing so, they selectively process heterogeneous societal expectations and references to different societal contexts.
Organizations do not integrate function systems into a unified regional order. Economic, political, legal, scientific and other societal processes continue to operate according to different logics. Organizations nevertheless provide settings in which heterogeneous expectations can become relevant to decisions and be transformed into programmes, procedures and coordinated activities.
Through these processes, organizations contribute to the selection, stabilization and transformation of relations within regional configurations. Their decisions may establish infrastructures, allocate resources, define access, implement regulations, produce knowledge or create new organizational capacities.
Organizations therefore constitute important observation sites for analysing how heterogeneous world-societal processes acquire regionally specific forms without assuming the existence of territorially integrated regional societies.
Knowledge, Observation and Decision Relevance
Regional conditions do not become socially consequential simply because they exist. They must become observable and relevant within societal processes.
Scientific research, statistics, maps, indicators, measurements, classifications, professional expertise and other forms of knowledge make particular aspects of populations, resources, infrastructures and ecological or economic conditions available for communication and decision-making.
Knowledge, however, does not translate directly into decisions. Organizations selectively process observations and information according to their programmes, responsibilities, procedures and problem definitions. Particular forms of knowledge may thereby acquire decision relevance, while others remain without organizational consequences.
Processes of observation, knowledge production, measurement and organizational selection therefore contribute to shaping which regional conditions become relevant to economic activities, political programmes, legal regulation, scientific research or other societal operations.
Selective Territorialization and Regionalization
World-societal processes do not relate uniformly to all places, populations, resources or material conditions. Economic activities, political programmes, legal regulations, scientific observations and other societal operations selectively identify and connect particular territorial conditions according to their respective relevance.
This process can be described as selective territorialization.
Selective territorialization does not create territorially integrated societies. It refers to processes through which places, populations, resources, infrastructures and material or ecological conditions become relevant to particular societal operations.
Regionalization concerns a related but analytically distinct process. Heterogeneous world-societal connections encounter historically established regional structures, including organizations, infrastructures, institutionalized expectations, patterns of resource use and accumulated inequalities.
Regionalization refers to processes through which such heterogeneous connections become related to these historically established structures and may become stabilized as elements of regional configurations.
Territorialization and regionalization are therefore not identical. Selective territorialization concerns the societal construction of territorial relevance, whereas regionalization concerns how heterogeneous connections become related to historically established regional structures and potentially contribute to their stabilization or transformation.
Materiality and Society–Nature Relations
A communication-theoretical account of regional structures must nevertheless explain how material and ecological conditions become relevant to societal operations.
Mineral deposits, forests, mangroves, rivers, climatic conditions, transport infrastructures and urban settlements constitute material and ecological conditions that may become relevant to societal observation and communication.
Materiality does not determine social structures directly. Ecological and physical conditions can affect the material environments in which societal processes operate, while their social relevance is constituted and transformed through observation, knowledge production, measurement, valuation, regulation and organization (Luhmann 1986; Edwards 2010).
This problem has become increasingly important in the research programme through work on natural-resource extraction and climate governance.
It raises a broader theoretical question:
How do material and ecological conditions enter the formation and transformation of regional configurations within world society?
Regional Development
Regional development cannot be understood as movement along a universal developmental trajectory. Regions differ not because they occupy predetermined stages of development, but because historically evolving regional configurations generate different possibilities and constraints for economic activities, political intervention, collective organization and participation in world-societal processes.
Regional development can therefore be analysed in relation to transformations of regional configurations that alter structures, organizations, institutionalized expectations and capacities through which development possibilities are generated, stabilized or constrained.
These transformations are historically contingent. Past decisions, infrastructures, organizations and institutionalized expectations condition present possibilities, while expectations about possible futures orient current decisions, investments and interventions.
Development is consequently multidimensional and potentially contradictory. Transformations may expand organizational, administrative, scientific, economic or collective capacities while simultaneously generating new dependencies, inequalities or constraints.
Regional development can therefore expand possibilities for future action without implying convergence toward a single model of development.
Empirical Research Fields
The theoretical framework is developed, specified and tested through four interconnected fields of empirical research.
Mining & Extractive Transformations
Research examines how mineral extraction, world-market relations, infrastructures, organizations and resource governance contribute to the transformation of regional configurations.
Society–Nature & Climate
Research examines how ecological and material conditions become socially consequential through observation, knowledge production, measurement, valuation, regulation and organization, with particular attention to climate governance and regional development.
Extractive Communities & Territorial Relations
Research examines how populations, material resources, livelihoods, labour relations and organizations become selectively connected within regional configurations, and how these relations generate differentiated forms of access, participation, capacity, dependency and inequality.
Policy, Evaluation & Applied Research
Research examines how knowledge, decisions, planning, evaluation and organizational capacities enter organized attempts to influence regional transformations, and why interventions generate different and often unintended consequences in different regional contexts.
Taken together, these fields provide complementary observation sites for examining how heterogeneous world-societal processes become regionally consequential. They are not treated simply as applications of a completed theory. Empirical research contributes to the continuing development, specification and testing of the theoretical framework itself.
Amazonia as a Comparative Observation Site
Amazonia constitutes the principal empirical setting in which these theoretical questions have been developed.
It is not approached as a territorially homogeneous region or as a self-contained social unit. Rather, Amazonia provides a comparative observation field containing heterogeneous regional configurations in which world-societal processes become selectively connected under different historical, organizational and material conditions.
Mining regions, metropolitan areas, agricultural frontiers, coastal zones, conservation territories and resource-dependent communities are connected in different ways to markets, political programmes, legal regulation, scientific knowledge, environmental governance and infrastructures.
These differences make it possible to examine how apparently similar world-societal processes generate different regional consequences.
The mining-intensive municipalities of southeastern Pará, for example, provide observation sites for analysing the relations between mineral extraction, world-market integration, rapid demographic transformation, municipal capacities and public policy. The coastal regions of northeastern Pará provide contrasting settings in which fisheries, mangrove ecosystems, extractive communities, conservation policies and climate governance generate different forms of regional connectivity and transformation.
Amazonia therefore functions not as a single regional case but as a field for comparative observation of how heterogeneous world-societal processes contribute to the formation and transformation of regionally specific configurations.
Research Development
Regional Development in World Society is the current theoretical synthesis of a longer research programme centred on the problem of regional development.
The programme did not develop through a linear succession of research topics. Its theoretical questions emerged through several overlapping trajectories of research on resource extraction and regional transformation, public policy and organizations, society–nature relations, and social systems theory and world society.
Early research on Amazonian development and resource extraction examined capitalist valorization, labour relations, environmental consequences and the uneven regional effects of economic transformation. From the late 1990s onward, these empirical problems became increasingly connected to social systems theory, globalization and questions concerning the limits of political intervention.
Research on public policy and governance subsequently intensified attention to organized intervention, institutional arrangements and regional capacities, while work on mining and resource governance increasingly addressed transnational corporations, international norms and global raw-material relations. Research on sustainability, conservation and environmental change progressively expanded toward society–nature relations and global environmental governance.
These trajectories increasingly intersect around a common theoretical problem: how globally operating societal processes become consequential within historically evolving regional configurations.
Regional Development in World Society represents the current attempt to reconstruct this accumulated problem theoretically. It does not retrospectively redefine the earlier research as RWS; rather, it builds upon questions and observations generated through these different research trajectories.
Current Theoretical Questions
The programme currently concentrates on several interconnected problems:
- How can regions be conceptualized within world society without treating them as territorially bounded social systems?
- Through which processes do heterogeneous world-societal operations generate regionally specific configurations?
- How do organizations selectively process heterogeneous societal expectations and contribute to the formation and transformation of regional configurations?
- How do observation, knowledge production, measurement and organizational selection make particular regional conditions relevant to societal operations and decisions?
- How do material and ecological conditions become socially consequential without assuming that they directly determine social structures?
- How should selective territorialization and regionalization be distinguished, and through which processes do heterogeneous world-societal connections become related to historically established regional structures?
- How do historical sedimentation and expectations about possible futures shape the transformation of regional configurations?
- Under what conditions do regional transformations expand organizational, administrative, scientific or collective capacities while simultaneously generating or reproducing dependencies and inequalities?
Towards a Theory of Regional Development in World Society
The longer-term objective is to develop a theory capable of explaining the emergence and transformation of regionally specific configurations without abandoning the premise of world society.
Its central proposition can provisionally be formulated as follows:
Regions emerge as historically contingent configurations in which heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected, organizationally stabilized, materially conditioned and institutionally condensed.
Regional development can then be analysed in relation to the transformation of these configurations rather than as movement along a universal developmental trajectory.
From this perspective, regional development concerns transformations in the structures, organizations, institutionalized expectations and capacities through which development possibilities are generated, stabilized or constrained. Such transformations may expand particular capacities while simultaneously creating new dependencies and inequalities. Development is therefore understood as a multidimensional and potentially contradictory process rather than as progression towards a predefined societal model.
The programme thus seeks to connect the theory of world society with one of the central empirical observations of development research:
World society operates globally, yet its structures and developmental possibilities acquire regionally specific forms.
Selected References
Edwards, P. N. (2010). A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press.
Luhmann, N. (1986). Ökologische Kommunikation: Kann die moderne Gesellschaft sich auf ökologische Gefährdungen einstellen? Westdeutscher Verlag.
Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Suhrkamp.
Luhmann, N. (2000). Organisation und Entscheidung. Westdeutscher Verlag.
Pike, A., Rodríguez-Pose, A. & Tomaney, J. (2017). Local and Regional Development. 2nd ed. Routledge.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
Stichweh, R. (2000). Die Weltgesellschaft: Soziologische Analysen. Suhrkamp.
Selected Publications
Selected publications documenting different stages in the empirical and theoretical development of the research programme.
Mathis, A. (1998). “Garimpagem de ouro e valorização da Amazônia: a formação de relações de trabalho sob o quadrângulo mercado internacional, Estado Nacional, região e natureza.” Papers do NAEA, Paper 101, 1–20.
Mathis, A. (1998). “Política de desenvolvimento sob a perspectiva da Teoria dos Sistemas.” Papers do NAEA, Paper 111, 1–19.
Mathis, A. (1998). “O fim da supremacia da política: possibilidades e limites da intervenção do Estado na interpretação da teoria de sistemas.” Papers do NAEA, Paper 102, 1–11.
Mathis, A. (2004). “A sociedade na teoria dos sistemas sociais de Niklas Luhmann.” Presença — Revista de Educação, Cultura e Meio Ambiente, VIII(28), 5–23.
Mathis, A. (2007). “Inclusão, exclusão e cidadania como desafio para a política em regiões de modernidade periférica.” Novos Cadernos NAEA, 10(1), 217–240.
Silva, I. L. B., Farias, A. L. A., & Mathis, A. (2024). “Entre contradições e governança, grandes projetos na Amazônia e políticas climáticas.” In R. T. Folhes & M. Vecchione Gonçalves (Eds.), Para além da COP 30: Tópicos sobre desenvolvimento na Amazônia em tempos de emergência climática, 256–278. Belém: Editora NAEA.
Further Theoretical Exploration
Related Research
Mining & Extractive Transformations →
Resource extraction, world-market integration and regional structural transformation.
Society–Nature & Climate →
Research on how ecological conditions, climate governance and global environmental change become regionally relevant within world society.
Extractive Communities & Territorial Relations →
Resources, organizations, livelihoods and differentiated participation within regional configurations.
Policy, Evaluation & Applied Research →
Research on how knowledge, public policy, planning and organizational capacities shape attempts to influence regional transformation.