| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Henry Veltmeyer and Anthony O'Malley, eds., Transcending Neoliberalism; Community-Based Development in Latin America (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press 2001).

FOR SOME TWENTY YEARS, diverse voices have pronounced development studies to be at a theoretical impasse, if not completely superceded. Post-structuralists and those infused with post-modern and post-colonial critiques of social science generalizations insist that diversity, identity, and multiple-subject status of Third World peoples had been ignored or suppressed. The epithets "Euro-centric" and "modernizationist" frequently characterize these perspectives on the discourses and policy projects of the development era. Critical and Marxist political economy traditions charged that development had been driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation in the dominant capitalist economies, amounting to "the pillage of the Third World," even to a new imperialism, a neo-colonial global order. At best, development was dependent and cynically oriented to the political perogatives of global anti-communism, and it tended to reproduce the abuses and social disruptions of the early industrial revolution and commercialization of agriculture. The prescriptions from these traditions ranged from socialist central planning to combinations of statist, corporatist, and welfare-state models.

Differentiation among developing economies brought many observers to reject both the modernization and the political economy perspectives. The stagnation and collapse of socialist and central planning versions of development, the exhaustion of revolutionary energies in much of the global South, and the processes of democratization appeared definitively to displace the latter. Abject failures, stagnation, and de-industrialization eroded the former. Economic globalization, with its predominantly neoliberal foundational and policy principles, occluded statist and Keynesian versions of national development projects. But at the moment of neoliberalism's doctrinal triumph, it could not rest easy. In Latin America, in particular, the 1980s, the first decade of full hegemony for structural adjustment and economic liberalization, was a "lost decade." And when growth occurred, it was neither stable nor continuous, neither regional nor shared, neither equitable nor ecologically sustainable.

Long a laboratory for diverse official and societal development projects, Latin America has manifested an array of popular and community-based "alternative" development experiences in the interstices of that neoliberal hegemony. Born as much from local struggles to survive as from the creativity and imagination expended in Latin Americans' search for social justice and popular democracy, these experiences constitute the practices Henry Veltmeyer's and Anthony O'Malley's edited book terms "another development." Transcending Neoliberalism offers closely informed, sympathetic but critical coverage of specific community-based experiences (in Costa Rica, Chile, El Salvador, and Bolivia) in four of the nine chapters. In the other five chapters (three by Veltmeyer, one by David Barkin, and a concluding one from O'Malley), the book provides rich contextual and theoretical discussion of the concepts, principles, and performance associated with those experiences. The resulting counterpoint is effective in conveying what is shared among (and beyond) the very diverse cases and the caution needed in advancing any generalizations about them.

Readers with the broad premise that neoliberal economic models do not serve the majority of Latin Americans at regional, national, and local levels will find easy and immediate confirmation in Transcending Neoliberalism. But those wanting to "just say no to neoliberalism" and to have a democratic, local, empowering, and ecologically-sustainable alternative clearly and programmatically laid out will be disappointed. But they should persevere. The authors are well aware that development historically has been contested terrain, discursively constructed and deconstructed, often a project embedded in another, for example, development as Cold War anti-communist strategy or privatizing the public sector in order to provide new arenas for private capital's expansion in a sustained crisis of accumulation. Henry Veltmeyer, in particular, has been for decades a trenchant critic of all forms of development subjected to the primacy of capitalist accumulation, and his several chapters are no less critical of neoliberalism. All the contributors articulate the need for "alternative" development and express solidarity with those subjects, especially the local community, trying to advance it. At the same time, they have all absorbed the post-modern obvious: avoid simple dualisms and polarities in the social sciences; acknowledge plural and shifting identities of actors; expect diversity of intention, practice, and outcomes; embrace complexity and contradiction.

In such a spirit, the editors and authors in Transcending Neoliberalism show themselves historically and conceptually informed. In chapters worthy of close attention from students of development thought and practice, Veltmeyer, O'Malley, and Barkin provide the contexts for both the emergence of neoliberalism's supremacy and its inchoate contestations in community-based development. The case study chapters-from Laura Macdonald on NGOs and participatory development discourse in Costa Rica, from Veltmeyer and Tellez on state-promoted participatory development in Bolivia, from Eduardo Aquevedo Soto on state-fostered local development ostensibly focused on poverty in Chile, and from Aquiles Montoya on community economic development- bring complementary contributions. Varied in style and case-specificity, they convey the breadth of community development in Latin America in conception, social composition of actors, and performance. Each brings into focus a slice of relatively unknown but relevant "alternative development" literature. Macdonald considers the activity of international and national NGOs involved in participatory development, particularly through the lens of discourse analysis. Veltmeyer and Tellez examine Bolivia's state-propelled popular participation infrastructures through their familiarity with 30 years of generally market-serving reforms and with specifically Latin American social movement literature. Aquevedo Soto highlights the heterogeneity of poverty in the Bío-Bío region of Chile as "a product of quite diverse socioeconomic and cultural processes," (118) placing that poverty and the government strategies for local development in the region within the narrative of Chile's last thirty years. State decentralization and devolution to municipalities by dictatorship decree provide the backdrop for considering poverty, community development, and the economics of the region within a liberalized and transnationalized Chilean economy. Montoya summarizes the findings of a survey of community economic development, also called the 'new popular economy,' in 100 Salvadorean communities of "repatriated, demobilized or relocated persons." (179) He concludes that varied social, political, and economic factors make the "new popular economy" both necessary and viable, though often conflicted and fragile. Together the case studies lend social concreteness to the broad conceptual matters of critical concern to the editors and the other contributors.

Politically and paradigmatically, Transcending Neoliberalism is committed to alternative, democratic, socially equitable, and ecologically sustainable community development; all the contributors would certainly want neoliberalism and strictly market-driven economic activity at the community level to be transcended. Their collective experience and knowledge exercise the same critical scrutiny of the discourses and inter-conceptual linkages to which they subject modernizationist, political economy, and neoliberal thought and practice. They place squarely before the reader, and before the literatures they engage, the alternative development glossary. Notions of how varied actors define and use development, community, decision-making, decentralization, sustainability, civil society, the "subject," even "the social" are subjected to informed intellectual historical contextualization, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Community-based economies and their development are considered in their articulation with globalizing capital accumulation; along the way readers may find themselves groping towards a renewed "social market" vision, one with significantly more local, ecological, gender, and popular content. And Transcending Neoliberalism keeps in the foreground the old and deceptively simple question: what is an economy for, after all?


Fred Judson University of Alberta

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