Bruno Nunes Vaz

Viable Space Governance in Latin America: A Processual Reading through Beer’s VSM

The space sector is evolving under the New Space paradigm, requiring governance arrangements that can coordinate institutional ambitions, operational capabilities, private actors, and regional cooperation. However, the existing body of knowledge still lacks an explanation of how emerging space-governance systems become viable, lose viability, or remain trapped in recurrent patterns of fragmentation over time. This gap is particularly relevant in Latin America, where national space programs combine high ambition, limited resources, uneven institutional capacity, and heterogeneous civilian–military arrangements. To address this gap, the paper asks: how can Beer’s Viable System Model support a processual understanding of Latin American space governance? A comparative case study is developed for Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and the regional architecture of the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency (ALCE). The empirical basis comprises 5,493 evidence records collected through an algorithm-assisted evidence-harvesting procedure from patents, academic papers, legal and regulatory instruments, agency primary sources, multilateral documents, and governance reports, as well as 278 coded events. Grounded in organizational cybernetics and informed by organizational process theory, Beer’s VSM maps how operational, coordination, control, intelligence, and policy functions are distributed across national trajectories and the emerging regional layer. The analysis shows that Latin American space governance is not constrained by a single regional deficit but by country-specific viability conditions. The study contributes to organizational cybernetics by extending the VSM into a processual framework for analyzing regional space governance ecosystems over time.