## 3 Methodology: Looking for Patterns of Governance in Globalized Latin America  
What types of governance challenges for sustainable regional development in Latin America in the context of globalization are more frequently scholarly discussed? Our approach was based on an assessment of the literature linked to the research topic in a typological multidimensional analytical framework and we aimed for a more nuanced reading of the phenomena taking place throughout the region. Epistemologically, this research design links to an interpretive line of thought [74]. The operationalization of this design followed a twofold qualitative-quantitative process by which the literature was mediated (that is, read, interpreted, and noted) into a quantitative array of data. Figure 2 presents the overall methodological process that the article follows:  
This section provides details about the data selection and coding procedures that were undertaken. The first set of potential articles was selected by performing a keyword search in academic databases such as ProQuest, EBSCOHOST, Jstor, Google Scholar, Redalyc, Scielo, Web of Science, and Scopus. The use of indexed databases granted access to peer reviewed journals. The query made use of a keyword equation (i.e., query = terms topic \(a\) + terms topic \(b\) + terms topic \(c\)), where \(a\) contained scale descriptors (territorial, local and/or regional), \(b\) included challenge descriptors (e.g., sustainable development, governance, challenges, environmental conflict, social conflict, social inclusion, and so on), and \(c\) added globalization descriptors (for example, Latin America, [Latin-American country], globalization, foreign investment, MNC, _glocal_, and/or NGOs). This set of keywords was used by all authors in their data search. The search included more than three keywords and was made in both Spanish and English languages. Since the search in some databases resulted in a number of articles not directly related to the main topic of this article, keywords were adjusted following an iterative process in order to find the fittest descriptors. In general, we rejected articles where the main discussion did not focus on the challenges of governance for sustainable regional development, or where the empirical data exceeded the boundaries of Latin-America [75]. Thus, the selected articles totaled 71 items, adding together an illustrative data sample that captured a variety of governance challenges in different Latin American countries and sub-regions. The next research stage was to read the selected articles and incorporate the analysis results into a shared database. To do so, the articles were organized according to the authors and coded under six main aspects:  
1. Abstract: allowing a shared view of the discussed topics. 2. Publication year: identifying any trends describing the topics' relative importance. 3. Geographical location of the discussion: locating the empirical discussions of the article in a country, some countries, the Latin-American region, or the world (including of course, Latin America). 4. The scale of the unit of analysis: identifying whether the selected articles work on regional (two or more countries at the same time), national (one country treated as a whole), or subnational cases (one or more territories inside a specific country) in Latin America. 5. Dimensions of the typology: assigning each paper to one or more dimensions of the typology provided in the analytical framework, according to its approach. By implication, each single article was included in at least one dimension and a maximum of four. 6. Dimension's quadrants: labelling the articles to quadrants of each of the dimensions identified in the previous step. Despite some articles addressing different aspects of one or another dimension, we chose the quadrant that captured the best main governance challenges under discussion.