The rise of public policy study has its apogee in the United States in 1960 but regained importance in Latin America in 1980 and for the Colombian case in the 1990s as stated Salazar Vargas (1995). From this reference, research, advocacy of public policy for overcoming extreme poverty in the context of local economic development in the municipality of Garzon - Huila during the period 1994-2014, aims for describing national public policy for overcoming extreme poverty for the period 1994 - 2014 and understand how this has been implemented through the institutional architecture in the context of local economic dynamics. The investigative exercise is performed from a descriptive and interpretative approach it agreed qualitative and quantitative techniques and allowed through empirical and critical processes, to answer the research question ?How interacts public policy to overcome extreme poverty, formulated in the past 20 years in Colombia, with the determinants of local economic development in the municipality of Garzon - Huila? So then, from the qualitative approach, it was possible to compare information from primary and secondary sources; between secondary qualitative information are plans national, departmental and municipal systemized and analyzed using specialized analytical records -RAE's- development and quantitative information type was represented in statistics and official reports of entities national, departmental and municipal levels. The primary qualitetive information corresponded to the information generated from a semi implemented structural interview with a group of relevant actors in the territory. As a result of the investigation a municipality with low performance in the dynamics of its indicators not only on poverty and extreme poverty, critical situation considering it was the second municipality in importance of the department, and currently occupies it identifies the fourth or fifth place with an unpromising scenario given the loss of jobs resulting from the commissioning of the dam the Quimbo, meriting in terms of public policy for local development design strategies in the short and medium term to generate permanent jobs to absorb one significant percentage of unskilled could easily enter the statistics of poor and extremely poor work.