Territorial Governance: what progress has been made with the Metropolis Statute?

The emergence of new territorial arrangements, such as the metropolitan regions, gives rise to certain challenges in achieving adequate urban management for cities development. The Metropolis Statute, Law No. 13,089/2015, has been identified as a relevant regulatory advance in order to induce the governance of territories not recognised as federated entities. Resulting of the institutional research group "Urban Territorial Governance and Interfederative Relations" created by the UERJ Postgraduate Law Programme, the article analyses some developments of the Metropolis Statute's entry into force for the governance of metropolitan territories. Through bibliographic research and data collection and analysis, institutional changes were investigated in metropolitan regions that have state capitals as their nuclei, in an attempt to review the progress towards rules that were established by the Metropolis Statute, being also investigated the dissemination of the theme related to urban-territorial governance among specialists. In spite of the increasing dissemination of this theme, it was verified that the regional concentration of its academic-scientific production can compromise its understanding in national terms. There was also little institutional progress from the Metropolis Statute in the metropolitan regions analyzed, in view of the Integrated Urban Development Plans and metropolitan agency for territorial management.