Strengthening institutions across the region will ultimately determine whether industrial policy delivers productive transformation, resilience and sustainable growth.
© Shutterstock/BearFotos | A worker in Latin America packs fresh peaches for export.
Across Latin America and the Caribbean, industrial policy is entering a new phase.
The challenge is no longer designing strategies, most countries have done that.
The harder question is whether governments possess the institutional capacity to deliver them: to coordinate action across ministries, agencies and levels of government, and to sustain that coordination through political and economic cycles.
From strategy design to implementation
This transition is at the heart of the joint initiative of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) on regional integration and industrial policy for transformative change and resilience.
Launched in Mexico City in May 2026 by UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan alongside senior government representatives from across the region, the initiative provides a shared regional framework to support countries as they move from policy design to implementation through stronger institutional coordination, regional cooperation and evidence-based policymaking.
Lessons from the Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic offers a compelling illustration of precisely this challenge.
Over the past decade, the country has built one of the region’s most comprehensive frameworks for productive transformation: a National Development Strategy, an Industrial Development Strategy, a National Semiconductor Strategy and the Meta RD 2036 initiative.
The strategic architecture is in place. What the next phase demands is not new strategies, but the institutional capacity to translate existing ones into coordinated, sustained action across public institutions with different mandates, time horizons and resource constraints.
This reflects a broader lesson emerging across the region.
Industrial policy succeeds not simply because individual measures are well designed, but because governments can align investment, trade, innovation, infrastructure, skills and environmental policy around shared development objectives.
In an era of green and digital transition, supply chain reconfiguration and deepening geoeconomic fragmentation, that alignment has become as consequential as the strategies themselves.
Strengthening institutions for delivery
The joint UNCTAD-ECLAC project responds to this challenge by combining complementary institutional strengths: ECLAC’s long-standing regional policy dialogue and deep understanding of Latin America’s structural conditions; and UNCTAD’s global perspective on productive transformation, trade, investment and industrial policy, helping countries position national strategies within the forces reshaping the international economy.
A national workshop held in Santo Domingo on 24 and 25 June brought together Vice-Ministers and senior officials from the Dominican Republic’s economic, industrial, planning, energy and environmental institutions.
Discussions focused not on new policy design, but on how existing strategies can be implemented more effectively through stronger institutional coordination; a practical step in a broader regional effort to strengthen the institutions that will ultimately determine whether industrial policy delivers productive transformation, resilience and sustainable growth.