Los Procesos de Descentralización en el Ecuador: De la Autonomía Municipal a la Articulación de lo Local desde el estado Central

The Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador (2008), in its effort to achieve a democratic State that seeks the good living of the population, political impulses for citizen participation and decentralization of the State. However, and contrary to the decentralizing processes, which strengthens the lower levels of government (Decentralized Autonomous Governments, GAD, in the Ecuadorian case), the new Constitution makes it possible to build an omnipresent central government with a role, invested in the figure of the President of the Republic, preponderant in local, regional and national development. In order to understand this change of focus in decentralization policies in Ecuador, in this article, we propose to expose the factors that explain this change through the ideational model of public policy analysis. The study evidences a fundamental ideational change in the place of the central government with respect to local governments, which regained the powers of stewardship, planning, regulation and control corresponding to the Executive Power.