Matopiba: Historical, geographic and socioeconomic aspects

This writing seeks to address the general aspects involving the history, geography and socioeconomic context of MATOPIBA. To this end, a brief theoretical explanation will be presented based on the contributions of Arilson Favareto, a brazilian researcher, in contextualizing the region. The dissemination of the territorial approach to development in public policies and development studies, especially in the rural context, throughout the 21st century, is a discursive line that is being used. Of particular note is the polysemy associated with the concept of territory and the predominance of a normative focus in research, which tends to view territorial development as an intervention project, with an innovative framework for understanding the evolution of territorial dynamics, based into a theory of long-term change, a medium-range theory of rural territorial dynamics and a theory of the articulations between social structures and forms of sociability. This framework is applied in empirical studies conducted by the authors in different territories in Brazil, aiming not only to describe, but also to critically analyze the development dynamics and the possibilities of overcoming the forms of domination present in these regions (Favareto et al. , 2015).