The regional universities and the challenge of descentralization. The case of the new University of Aysén in Chile

Abstract

In Chile, the debate on the potential of regional universities to favor local development has been accentuated with the emergence in 2016 of the new University of Aysen. Since the beginning of its activities, this public institution, located in the Patagonian zone of this country, has had to face the centralist inertia of the Chilean university management model, limiting its possibilities of favoring the endogenous development of this area. In this context, this article presents some of the main results of a research that precisely analyzes the problems of implementation and consolidation that the University of Aysen faces today.