Confronting health inequalities: impasses and dilemmas in the regionalization process in Brazil

The article aims to describe the renewed role of regional policies in territorial reconfigurations in the recent and predominantly neoliberal phase of globalization. It further aims to identify some of the impasses that such transformations produce with their multiple scales and dimensions for strengthening public policies focused on confronting health inequalities in Brazil. The article's discussion begins with a brief review of the characteristics of current territorial reconfigurations in a world in constant transformation, but oriented by neoliberal policy in its multiple dimensions. The article then discusses the changes in local management formats in developed countries. The authors go on to analyze territorial changes in Brazil in recent years, after which the debate addresses the reform agenda in health regionalization and the political cycles in the organization of the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS). Finally, the article systematizes some of the impasses in regionalization policy, based on recent studies in which the unit of analysis was Brazilian health regions in the country's different major geographic regions. The issues identified in the article, also emphasized in the specialized literature, show that the region/networks dyad has not been fully strengthened during the regionalization process in Brazil. A key task for the public policy of regionalization of health in Brazil should be to continue to push forward with the reform agenda in order to mobilize the territory's diversity and the directive coordination of strategic national policy.