DRAFT – Not for quotation without the author’s permission
Neoliberalism and local governance: Global
contrasts and the backwardness of Britain
Paper for
Critical Governance Conference
University of Warwick
13 and 14 December 2010
Mike Geddes, University of Warwick, UK
Mike.Geddes@associate.wbs.ac.uk
Introduction
In England, if we put to one side those who are sceptical about the whole concept of
neoliberalism (Barnett 2005), there has been a fair consensus in the critical literature
that the neoliberalisation of governance at the local level implies a process of
destructive creation in which old institutions are tendentially replaced by new ones in
the so-called shift from government to governance. Thus we see the emergence of
networked forms of local governance; the ‘modernisation’ of pre-existing institutions
along new public management lines; and service privatisation, all within a policy
paradigm which assumes the primacy of ‘the market’.
This ‘networked’ local
governance incorporates both local business elites and leaders of voluntary and
community organisations into new forms of partnership and managed participation,
but local governance remains dominated by the state. While challenges to
neoliberalised local governance do exist, they seldom offer a serious threat to the
hegemonic status of the new orthodoxy. Moreover there is sometimes a tendency to
assume that this is a global model of local governance, not just one found in contexts
like England.
Of course, this is not the case. In contrast, in parts of Latin America modes of local
governance have emerged with very different characteristics. They are part of policy
paradigms which to a greater or lesser degree reject neoliberalism, and seek to
radically ‘refound the state’, rejecting neo-colonialist and neoliberal state forms. In
some places, new local governance institutions have been set up in parallel with,
and as a challenge to, existing municipal structures. Some new forms of local
governance are being derived from the institutions and practices of indigenous
peoples, and are rooted in traditional patterns of economic and social organisation,
in ways which challenge any easy assumptions that when we talk about local
governance we are talking about the state.
The paper suggests that the contrast between these two modes of local governance
points (in most if not all ways) to the backwardness of Britain in a global perspective.
2
Neoliberalised local governance in the UK
Local governance is everywhere contested. In the UK, this contestation primarily
takes the form of a tension between what Helen Sullivan and I have called the
expansive and consolidatory moments of neoliberalisation processes (Geddes and
Sullivan 2010).
An expansive’ form of neoliberal local governance is one which is closely aligned
with core neoliberal tenets, with an elite leadership drawn from or close to business
and/or imbued by principles such as those of the New Public Management.
Leadership is often ‘transformational’, with high profile individuals enunciating the
core values of neoliberalism and employing directive and ‘visionary’ leadership styles
designed to inculcate these values amongst ‘followers’ and to shape their activities in
support of them. Forms of authoritarian populism may well be the tactic employed to
secure political legitimacy. This form of local governance will prioritise goals of
competitiveness and efficiency, behind which lie dominant concerns with private
profitability. Policies will be pro-rich and pro-capital, including but not restricted to
privatization. Local state structures and processes will tend to prioritise privatepublic forms of partnership, such as underpinned the Enterprise Zones of the 1980s,
paralleled by a pruned-back, low tax/small remit model of local government
epitomized (parodied?) by Nicholas Ridley’s vision of local councils which met once
a year to agree the contracts for privatized services.
In contrast, consolidatory neoliberal local governance is likely to take the form of
more centrist elite coalitions, going beyond the private-public model, and mixing
managerialism with limited forms of public ‘engagement’ and ‘community leadership’.
Policies attempt to combine economic growth and forms of social inclusion
consistent with ‘growth’. Consolidatory neoliberals will seek to modernize local state
institutions in order to achieve ‘more for less’ in delivering public services, implying a
significant remit for the local public sector but one which is not easily delivered with
available resources. Consolidatory neoliberalism is often associated temporally with
a ‘second phase’ of neoliberalism when the contradictions of the expansive phase
force dominant interests to give greater priority to social cohesion and the hegemony
of the neoliberal project. The transition from Thatcherite expansive neoliberalism to
New Labour’s consolidatory neoliberalism is a case in point.
3
Partnership is often a key institution as it purports to offer all interests in the local
‘community’ a say in local governance and commits leaders to collaboration in the
common interest. Local leadership is more ‘distributed’ and ‘collaborative’ with an
emphasis on behaviours that: help build and and sustain relationships amongst elite
figures on key local priorities, encourage front-line officials to abandon old ways of
working and embrace the ‘new’, including building their own ‘leadership’ capacity,
and communicate to citizens a desire to get involved in governing themselves
Crucially however such local leadership does not seriously challenge dominant
features of neoliberal policy, rather it defines the task of leadership in terms of
‘change agents’ facilitating, rather than challenging, the waves of ‘change’ unleashed
by neoliberalism (Geddes 2006).
New participatory processes to bridge the accountability gap between managerialist
local leadership elites and populations or ‘local communities’ are also characteristic
of consolidatory neoliberalism, and are often seen as a substitute for, rather than a
supplement to (often discredited) local representative democratic processes.
However, the power which participatory mechanisms offer to citizens in the
consolidatory neoliberal model of local governance is heavily circumscribed.
Consolidatory neoliberalism thus contains dominant elements which directly
contribute to the neoliberal class project, and subaltern elements which contribute to
managing the problems – especially the threats to cohesion and to the hegemony of
the neoliberal project – which expansive neoliberalism produces. The latter do not,
therefore, necessarily directly promote ‘the market’, but they are positioned within a
broader market-friendly policy environment which often constrains the space in
which they can operate, influences the institutional forms which they take, and
promotes a culture in which ‘there is no alternative’ to market-friendly policies. Some
local leaders may recognise themselves as the ‘acceptable face’ of the neoliberal
project, but others may not picture themselves working within a neoliberal policy
framework - indeed they would often be less effective in implementing policies
directed to maintaining the hegemony of the wider neoliberal agenda if they did. In
either case the legal and fiscal capacity of local government and local state plays an
important role in the agency of local leaders.
4
At the current time, faced with the massive cuts in state expenditure being imposed
by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government, with which the Labour
opposition differs only in degree, we are witnessing a swing towards a new
expansive moment of neoliberalisation. This is evident in several ways. There is a
growing tendency for local authorities to provide all services jointly in order to make
economies of scale beyond those available to individual local councils, with little
concern for the implications for democratic accountability of even the residual nature
which now mostly exists. Broadly-based partnerships such as LSPs are being
downgraded. A rhetoric of localism is providing cover for devolving responsibility for
cuts to the local level.
In other words, contestation in the UK is primarily between versions of neoliberalised
local governance. This is not to say that more radical attempts at contestation do not
exist - see for example the discussion of trade union opposition to privatisation in
Newcastle, and of oppositional currents within the New Deal for Communities
programme (Wainwright 2010). But they are marginal to the mainstream and tend to
be isolated and limited in their impact.
Local governance in Latin America
In contrast, in parts of Latin America modes of local governance have emerged with
very different characteristics. This is not to say that some of the tensions which
dominate local governance in the UK are not also present in parts of Latin America.
For example, Leiva (2008) cites examples from Latin American countries such as
Chile and Brazil where local participative mechanisms have been introduced in
contexts where traditional forms of local political representation are perceived have
exhausted themselves, while expansive neoliberalism’s over-reliance on the
economic citizenship of the market has failed to secure social cohesion. Echoing
studies in many other countries, he argues that in Chile, the participation of social
groups and NGOs is carefully controlled to ensure that only those groups unlikely to
make excessive demands are included in participatory programmes and, especially,
that groups which question fundamental neoliberal principles are excluded from
participation.
5
But, in many parts of Latin America there are fundamental challenges to
neoliberalised models of local governance, and modes of local governance have
emerged or may be emerging which seek to roll back the processes of
neoliberalisation and construct ‘post-neoliberal’ local institutions and practices of
governance. They are part of political and policy paradigms which to a greater or
lesser degree reject neoliberalism, and seek to radically ‘refound the state’, rejecting
neo-colonialist and neoliberal state forms. In some places, new local governance
institutions have been set up in parallel with, and as a challenge to, existing
municipal structures. Some new forms of local governance are being derived from
the institutions and practices of indigenous peoples, and are rooted in traditional
patterns of economic and social organisation, in ways which challenge any easy
assumptions that when we talk about local governance we are talking about the
state.
A key factor in understanding the differences between the UK and Latin America is
the differential temporalities of crisis. Whereas in the UK the major crisis within/of
neoliberalism has occurred in the past couple of years, in much of Latin America
crisis impacted much earlier – in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is an indication
of the parochial nature of much debate in the UK that the banking/financial sector
crisis and subsequent recession is commonly referred to as the crisis, with the
implication a) that it is an undifferentiated global phenomenon and b) that the
foregoing crisis in Latin America and elsewhere is of no importance. In theory we
recognise that today everything is globalised, but in practice we still cling to national
or other limited (eg European) frames of analysis. Politically, this means we may fail
to learn from the experiences of those who have already experienced a crisis of
neoliberalism for many years.
In considering those radical practices of local governance in Latin America, I will
focus on three themes:

The subversion of neoliberal local governance institutions

‘Refounding’ the (local) state

Non-statist and/or anti-state modes of local governance
6
The subversion of neoliberal local governance institutions
The neoliberal governments which came to power in Bolivia initially in the early
1980s, with a popular mandate rooted in the ossification of the previous regime and
the perceived failure of import substitution industrialization and an economically
interventionist state, embarked on a set of policies which are now extremely familiar,
especially the privatization or closure of major parts of the extractive industries,
floating the currency, encouraging foreign direct investment and the restructuring of
the national state along neoliberal lines (Hylton and Thomson 2007; Kohl and
Farthing 2006). These ‘expansive’ neoliberal policies were however complemented
in the 1990s by a set of further ‘consolidatory’ policy measures impacting at the local
level and signifying recognition by the regime of the need to buttress the hegemony
of the neoliberal project as its negative effects (unemployment, rises in living costs)
became much more apparent and popular discontent grew.
The primary policy initiative of this type was the 1994 Law of Popular Participation
(LPP), which for the first time introduced a more comprehensive system of
democratic local government in a country where previously municipal elections had
taken place only in the larger cities. As Kohl and Farthing (2006, Ch 6; see also
Hylton and Thomson 99-100) point out, previous local elections had been dominated
by traditional political parties and urban political elites, but under the LPP more than
250 new local governments elected councillors, including many from rural areas and
from the indigenous population which is in the majority in Bolivia, especially in rural
areas. Furthermore, local government was allocated 20% of the national budget to
spend (double the previous proportion), especially on infrastructural development
and social investment in education and health. Localities were also required to set
up municipal ‘oversight committees’ to monitor spending, leading to over 15,000
local grassroots organizations becoming involved in participatory institutions at the
local level.
At the same time, national electoral changes improved the potential for
the representation of indigenous and peasant communities in the national congress.
7
However, as Kohl and Farthing argue, the problem for the neoliberal regime was that
the new local governance system substantially increased participatory opportunities
but was not capable of changing fundamentally the material conditions of the
majority of Bolivians – the resources available were very limited, and the new law did
not address fundamental issues of land tenure and economic development. The
redistributive impact of increased local infrastructural and social expenditure did
relatively little to counteract the broader ways in which neoliberal policies favoured
capital, especially foreign capital and the local ruling class aligned with foreign
capital. At the same time, oppositional forces, which initially had tended to dismiss
the new institutions, quickly came to recognize, and then colonize, the new
participatory and governance spaces. As neoliberal hegemony fragmented in the
late 1990s and the early years of this century, these new local spaces played a
crucial role in the coming together of an opposition movement ‘proposing a counterhegemonic agenda that united ….anti-neoliberal discourses (in) a heterogeneous
coalition of indigenous people, labour movements, impoverished urban residents and
coca producers’ (Kohl and Farthing 146-7). As Perrault (2005, 267) suggests,
countries such as Bolivia experience contradictory and unstable processes of
neoliberal state restructuring, as the tensions between the attempts to open up the
economy to the global market clash with local identities newly empowered by
decentralizing programmes.
‘Refounding’ the (local) state
In the UK the neoliberalising project has been to modernize the (local) state and
local governance. The rhetoric of modernization stresses the inefficiency of previous
– by implication old-fashioned - state forms and practices, the need to change and
the central role of ‘change agents’ and the association of the ‘modern’ with neoliberal
forms and practices. In contrast, radical Latin American practice has sought to
reshape the state in at least 3 ways:

By deepening democratic and especially participatory processes as a bulwark
against the threat of neoliberalisation

By creating new/alternative/parallel local governance structures and practices

By radically refounding the state, including the local state.
8
These categories overlap with each other in practice but it is useful to identify
different strands. The most well-known example of attempts to deepen democratic
and participatory processes is the experiment in participatory budgeting in Porto
Alegre, Brazil. As this is so well known (Wainwright 2010 Ch 5) I will not describe it
here but merely make one or two points. The experiment in Porto Alegre must be
distanced from some of the pale shadows which have sprung up elsewhere. Crucial
in Porto Alegre, but seldom replicated elsewhere, were the close links between the
local PT party in power in Porto Alegre and well-organised social movements and
civil society organisations; the substantial extent of the financial resources to which
the PB process applied; and the thorough and inclusive preparation and organisation
of the process. Perhaps most importantly, PB in Porto Alegre was an attempt to
strengthen popular support for local state expenditure on social programmes against
the depredations of neoliberal ideas, not to provide a populist veil for cuts (cf the ‘big
society’ in England).
Rather different, though also attempting to deepen participatory practices, are
various attempts to set up new local governance institutions in parallel with/ in
opposition to/or in the absence of existing municipal institutions.
In Venzuela, the establishment of around 20,000 community councils consejos
communales) at neighbourhood level can be seen both as a buttressing and a
challenge to the existing local state, and a process of local institution building helping
to create a new geometry of power (Massey 2010) which can both empower local
activists and enable new local leaders to emerge and promote the ‘Bolivarian
Revolution’ (Marcano 2009; Motta 2009). These councils are described by the
Chavez regime as the embodiment of participatory democracy, handing over power
locally to organised popular movements. A law of 2006 allowed local citizen groups
in small areas (average 400 households) to form councils, to initiate policy for their
local areas and oversee community development projects. Funding from central and
local government as well as from locally-raised resources amounted to US$5bn in
2007, shortly after their formation (Gott 2008). However many commentators
emphasise the tension between top-down and bottom up influences, with strong
pressures from the state to set up councils and the establishment of a national
ministry to oversee their funding and operation, while the existing local government
system complains about being undermined. Those councils which have been able
9
to consolidate their position have been more successful, but some have not, and the
tensions between the existing municipalities and the new councils can contribute to
what Ellner describes as the problems of organisational solidification and
institutionalisation which have faced the Chavez administrations (Ellner 2010).
Fernandes puts this in different terms, describing the Bolivarian state as ‘postneoliberal’ in the sense that neoliberalism is no longer the dominant guiding policy
but continues to surface in a range of conflicting rationalities and policies that are
brought into uneasy co-existence’, with ‘a collision between the urban social
movements and the instrumental rationality of bureaucrats’ (2010, 19 and 27).
The consejos comunales represent the introduction of a specific set of institutions
into the existing state apparatus. More far-reaching, at least potentially, are attempts
to thoroughly reshape the state in its entirety. In Bolivia the ‘refounding of the state’
has taken the initial form of a new constitution drafted by a specially-convened
constituent assembly and ratified by a national referendum. The new constitution –
in principle at any rate – entrenches a range of rights and guarantees, especially but
not only for the indigenous majority, and starts to disembed the 500 year old colonial
(neo)liberal state. Thus, for the Bolivian Vice-President (and Marxist intellectual)
Alvaro Garcia Linera, the success of the Constituent Assembly was essential in
order to ‘build the new state, to anchor in enduring state institutions and relations of
command the new correlation of forces reached by the indigenous popular
movement in the 2000-2005 cycle of (popular) mobilisations (and to) solidify a series
of irreversible points of support, conquests and controls historically achieved through
a society’s power struggles.’ Without the successful installation of the new
constitution, it would not have been possible to reach the ‘point of bifurcation’, or the
moment when ‘the crisis of the state, which began eight years earlier, would be
resolved either through a restoration of the old state power or through the
consolidation of the new bloc of popular power’ , in which there is an alignment
between the indigenous-popular social movements and other social sectors
including middle classes and small and medium sized business interests (Garcia
Linera 2009). The strength of this bloc was reflected in a presidential recall
referendum in which Morales increased his vote from 54 to 67%, providing the
democratic legitimacy for the reconstruction of the state and other elements of the
MAS programme.
10
The new constitution redefines the concept of the state ‘from a plurinational,
multicultural and communitarian perspective1. The development of liberal rights,
obligations and guarantees is combined with grassroots indigenous claims, which
are thereby included in the new legal and institutional framework. Hence the notion
of an interventionist, welfare state that protects natural resources takes shape, which
incorporates the ways and principles of first peoples and nations into its institutional
life’. The new constitution ‘opens up multiple types of direct, universal and
communitarian representation’ and represents ‘the deconstruction of the republican,
colonial and liberal state’. Gender and gender rights cut across the whole
constitution, as well as those of the indigenous majority (Alcoreza 2009).
Particularly relevant here is what the constitution says about the territorial structure
and organisation of the state. Here, four types of autonomy are recognised in a
decentralised model: departmental, regional, municipal and indigenous. These are
not dependent on each other and have equal constitutional rank. While the first
three ‘types of autonomy are familiar, the particular feature of the Bolivian
constitution in the recognition alongside departments, regions and municipalities of
‘the right to self-government, understood as the exercise of the self-determination of
originary indigenous nations and peoples and peasant communities whose
population shares territory, culture, history, language and its own legal, political,
social and economic organisation or institutions’ (Alcoreza).
Following the ratification of the constitution, the process of putting it into practice is
now beginning. As with the community councils in Venezuela, this is inevitably
raising issues about overlapping institutional jurisdictions, as well as about
institutional capacity and tensions between grassroots and indigenous organisations
and the old state bureaucracy surviving from the liberal colonial state. It will be some
time before the outcome is at all clear.
Non-statist and/or anti-state modes of local governance
A distinction can now be made between the three examples discussed so far – PB in
Porto Alegre, the Venezuelan community councils, and the refounding of the Bolivian
state - where the main thrust has been to work ‘in and against’ the existing local
1
Note that the term communitarian does not have the associations in Bolivia which it does in the US and UK.
11
state, or to radically reform it, and other experiences in which non-statist and antistatist currents and principles are dominant. In a moment we will look at examples of
this trend in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, but first it is interesting to note that in
Bolivia the current represented by the constitutionalism of the MAS, reflecting a
decision to occupy the state apparatus, albeit with the intention of transforming it, is
opposed by significant social forces within the social movements. Thus, for Zibechi,
the inclusion in the new constitution of the autonomous indigenous communities
represents a statist incorporation of the indigenous tradition. ‘The non-state
(decentralised and dispersed) powers of the Aymara (the largest indigenous group)
were born in territories in which the community machine operates: social
mechanisms that are de-territorialised and “de-communalized” in order to be used by
society in movement as non-state forms of mobilisation and to create spaces where
– far beyond mere rhetoric – the dictum “to lead by obeying functions. These are the
mechanisms that have enabled Aymara society and other social sectors in Bolivia to
unleash powerful mobilisations which have toppled two presidents and defeated the
neoliberal project without creating state structures’ (2010, 7). For Zibechi, a crucial
factor in this non-state indigenous organisation is that social control is not structured
territorially.
It is also relevant that the Bolivian President, Evo Morales, emerged from the
cocaleros movement, the autonomous organisation of coca-growers. Under the
neoliberal regime, in the absence of functioning official local government in the areas
where they were concentrated, the cocaleros - a mixture of trade union and social
movement - constituted the only effective local organisation, building roads,
providing education and other local services, and organising resistance to the
national state. In the absence of local government, the cocalero areas were
organised by a social movement, a situation not uncommon in other parts of Latin
America where the writ of the state has been oppressive, weak or non-existent.
Perhaps the best known example of anti-statist local governance are the Zapatistas.
The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, which erupted in 1994 and still
continues, had its roots in the exploitation and oppression of the peasantry in an
area dominated by large cattle ranches and coffee plantations which confine peasant
cultivation to the margins, and in the policies of the national and provincial Mexican
state as the chief agent of the dominant classes. A characteristic of the Zapatista
12
struggle has been its combination of local rootedness with global appeals for support
and for parallel activism elsewhere. The attempts by the Zapatistas to secure
concessions from the Mexican government largely failed, resulting in a long period of
stalemate in which the state pressurised and coerced the Zapatista-controlled
localities in a range of ways but stopped short of a serious attempt to eradicate the
rebellion by means of major military action. In the areas of Chiapas controlled by the
Zapatistas, however, they have established their own autonomous institutions
alongside those of the Mexican state. The exercise of indigenous autonomy is thus a
reality in the Zapatista lands, if a precarious one. The current autonomous
structures of ‘caracoles’ (physical administrative areas) and ‘good government
juntas’ each combining a number of autonomous municipalities, ‘extend the
autonomous infrastructure of schools, clinics, production workshops and shops
which the Zapatistas have been building’ since the early years of the rebellion. They
are not only a response to the failure to get indigenous rights secured in the state
constitution, but an attempt to put into practice alternative forms of organisation,
such as the famous principle of ‘leading by obeying’, and rotation of leadership roles
(Chatterton, 2009).
The existence side by side of the local institutions of the
Mexican state and those of the Zapatistas can be seen as a form of dual power. It is
clear that the extent of change from traditional forms of social and political
organisation which the Zapatistas have been able to achieve is ‘ a tendency, subject
to ‘ups and downs, contradictions and errors, but it is a dominant tendency’ (Marcos,
2003; Mentinis), and, regardless of its fragility and eventual outcome, the rebellion
has had a major impact across the globe.
In Argentina, the economy went into freefall at the end of 2001, leading to a collapse
of the political establishment, and large numbers of citizens were thrown onto their
own resources. The Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD) emerged as a major
force in response to these crisis conditions, in a struggle ‘framed within the
emergence of loosely networked autonomous neighbourhoods. These (were) the
basis for making an autonomous politics of place using direct action as a survival
strategy in the face of widespread unemployment’, providing services, making food
and shelter, selling locally made products, providing education via ‘a militant, mass
and barrio-based movement against the state and capital’, especially in poorer
industrial urban neighbourhoods (Chatterton 2005). To a great extent these
13
autonomous neighbourhoods proved quite short-lived, but left behind experiences of
self-organisation, direct democratic participation and ‘horizontalism’ – nonhierarchical and anti-authoritarian practices – which have been influential across
Latin America and beyond (Sitrin 2006).
One such movement influenced by such principles is La Via Campesina, a
transnational peasant network of grassroots organisations and movements of smallscale producers from various places around the world, mostly from the South.
Massicotte, analysing the Via Campesina in Brazil, argues that movements such as
this reflect the failure of the neoliberal order to ensure sustainable agriculture,
access to nutritious food and adequate living and working conditions for peasant
communities, while the market-driven neoliberal restructuring of the state leaves less
and less space for democratic practices. Social forces which participate in such
institutions find themselves contributing to the reproduction of the neoliberal order.
In contrast, organisations such as Via Campesina ‘are repoliticising a public sphere
of their own....contesting and redefining the politics of place and scale, that is, the
socio-political construction of the local, the national or the global, which usually
serves to confine rural movements into a bounded local space concerned with
traditional – read pre-modern or backward – ways of life, identities and cultures (69,
71, 74). Such place-based grassroots rural movements represent a ‘new critical
politics of rural citizenship’ (Woods, 2006, quoted by Massicotte 81), a radical nonstate form of local governance.
A few provisional conclusions
The contrast between Latin America and Britain could hardly be greater. In Britain,
contestation of neoliberalisation is only at the margins and indeed usage of the term
neoliberalism is restricted to a few leftist academics and commentators. It is absent
from debate about local governance among policy makers. In Latin America,
contestation of neoliberalisation is at the core of politics, and the term neoliberalism
is central to political and policy debate and has extremely wide popular currency.
This is not without its drawbacks – the extent of opposition to neoliberalism tends to
occlude the question of more thoroughgoing opposition to capitalism. But the
backwardness of both academic debate and political and policy practice in Britain (in
14
relation to local governance as well as wider issues of political economy) is striking in
comparison to Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and other Latin American countries.
On the other hand, there are some interesting parallels. In both Britain and Latin
America, a key issue in ‘modernising’ or ‘refounding’ the state and local governance
is that of capacity. In both cases, the resistance of the state apparatus to reform,
and the limits to its capacity to implement change, are an important reason why
reforming governments have found it difficult to push through their programmes.
This is as true of the MAS government in Bolivia as it was of New Labour in Britain.
In the paper I have merely described, rather than attempted to assess, the radical
approaches to local governance in Latin America. All the experiences described
here are of course actively contested. But whereas in England, a dominant theme in
the contestation of (local) governance concerns the respective roles of the state and
the ‘market’, in Latin America the more crucial theme concerns the respective roles
of the state and the social movements. Both the supporters of the ‘market’ (and
critics from the left who note the continuities with neoliberalism in their policies)
actively contest programmes such as those of Chavez in Venezuela or Morales in
Bolivia. However in Latin America to a much greater extent than in Britain the right
is on the defensive. Thus in Bolivia the MAS’s refounding of the state is contested
from the right, but by a right which is politically marginalised. In contrast, the ‘statist’
programme of the MAS is strongly contested by many in the social movements
(Zibechi, Webber 2010). For such critics, contestation of neoliberalism should
remain centred in the social movements and remain anti-state - and the models of
local governance to which we should look are those such as the Zapatistas, Via
Campesina and the ‘ciudad rebelde’ of El Alto in Bolivia (Lazar 2006), not the
participatory budget in Porto Alegre or the Venezuelan community councils. This
raises many difficult questions: to what extent are the social and indigenous
movements ‘progressive’, in relation not only to neoliberalism but to gender for
example (Buechler 2009, Lucero 2009; Pape 2009); can social movements ‘govern’
as well as they can oppose (Shultz 2008); can such movements survive long term
without themselves becoming institutionalised; how effectively can the principles of
direct democracy on which they are founded work at larger than the local scale? It is
though perhaps the central political question in Latin America today. In Britain,
15
unfortunately, debate about the relationship between state and civil society remains
stuck in facile concepts such as the ‘big society’.
16
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