Angelo Rondina Neto

The analysis on governance has been of great value to elucidate how the organization of production structures itself and the interaction between companies, institutions and the market in the Local Productive Arrangements (LPA’s) context. By governance, in the LPA’s context, it is meant the ability to control or coordinate that certain agents – companies, institutions or some coordinator agent – have on the productive, commercial, technological and others interrelationships, in a way of influencing the LPA’s development Within this perspective, the governance creates a greater security, reliability, efficiency and quality in the transactions of economic life, resulting, therefore, in extending the production competitiveness of the production agglomerate, i.e., the LPA as a whole. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the pattern of the structure of governance for the LPA of furniture of Arapongas, Paraná State, South of Brazil, at the beginning of the XXI century. Therefore, it was used as a methodological procedure a case study, allowing the presentation of the governance structure, as well as the application of a model to assist in the presentation of that structure. Were used, so, the data collected from field research with entrepreneurs and organizations in the LPA of furniture of Arapongas, as well as data released by other organizations, to assist in the goal presented, such as IBGE, IEMI, IPARDES, RAIS, SIMA, among others. The study revealed the importance of the Arapongas’ Furniture Industries Association (SIMA) as an important agent of coordination of the actions of the agents of the LPA, acting to increase the competitiveness of the LPA through actions that generate more capacitation to the local firms. The study concludes that the governance structure of Arapongas presents a more local context, with public-private, hybrid governance. The results show, also, that the governance structure of the LPA of Arapongas do not clash with the results observed in most LPAs of traditional sectors in Brazil, including in others LPAs in the furniture sector. Despite the relatively recent colonization, the efforts made by organizations at the LPA in conjunction with SIMA evidence the high importance of these for the consolidation and gain of competitiveness that led the LPA of furniture of Arapongas to be among the main LPAs of the furniture industry in Brazil. However, it can be verified the low presence of direct joint actions among firms, an element that was already presented in previous work. This factor leads to a weakening of the collective efficiency’s gains to the Arapongas’s LPA of furniture.