Pia Riggirozzi

Governance after neoliberalism in Latin America

PART I Governance after Neoliberalism J.Grugel & P.Riggirozzi Social Dimensions of Crisis and Post-Crisis Governance R.Cortes Democracy and Political Inclusion after Neoliberalism J.Grugel PART II Argentina P.Riggirozzi Brazil S.Burges Bolivia P.Domingo Chile T.Rindefjall Venezuela J.Buxton Conclusion

The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism in Latin America

The current crisis of neoliberalism and its most recent international financial downturn represents a test of resilience for Latin America and at the same time an opportunity for ideological contestation and accommodation of political and economic projects – at domestic and regional governance levels. A growing politicization of the regional space and regional relations is part and parcel of a redefinition of what Latin Americanness should mean and how integration projects should respond to current challenges of global political economy. How are we to understand regional agreements that are grounded in different systems of rules that contest open regionalism and that are part of a complex set of alternative ideas and motivations affecting polities and policies across the region? Can we genuinely discern new regional governance beyond rhetorical rebellion against the Washington Consensus? In answering these questions we speculate on what current regional developments in Latin America mean for how we theorize regionalism beyond Europe and beyond dichotomized understandings of old and new regionalism.

Regionalism through social policy: collective action and health diplomacy in South America

Abstract This paper is concerned with the place of social policy as a driver of region building in South America. The contention is that while much has been written about economic integration, institutions and security communities in regionalism, a discussion of the significance of other regional projects has lagged behind. Social policy, particularly in the Americas, has been neglected as a policy domain in the account of regionalism. Changes in the political economy of Latin America in the last decade suggest that we need to engage afresh with regional governance and social policy formation in the Americas. By looking at the institutions, resources and policy action in the area of health within the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) this paper reconnects regionalism and social policy and explores two interrelated, yet largely unexplored, issues: the linkages between regional integration and social development beyond the historical hub of trade and finance; and the capacity of UNASUR to enable new policies for collective action in support of social development goals in the region, and to act as a broker of rights-based demands in global health governance. In so doing, the paper contributes towards a more nuanced understanding of regionalism and regionalization as alternative forms of regional governance.

Regional governance and legitimacy in South America: the meaning of UNASUR

Over the last decade, rapid changes to development models and market rules have led—yet again—to a revision of the meaning of regionalism, bringing to the fore the role of regional organizations in anchoring democracy and supporting progressive social policies. This is particularly the case in South America, where the presence of regional organizations in public policy-making is a subject of increasing scrutiny. This article examines new forms of politically sensitive regional governance in South America, focusing in particular on the case of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). It shows how contemporary South American regionalism bypasses the questions of trade and investment that dominated earlier schemes of regionalism in order to focus on shoring up democracy and managing the regional social deficit. The article explores UNASURs actions in two policy areas: supporting the regional democratic norm and health policy. UNASUR, this article argues, is developing a hybrid form of output-focused legitimacy that rests on a combination of credible commitments to welfare promotion, especially for the poor, and the pursuit of collective public goods, alongside a robust defence of quite minimal but uncontroversial standards of procedural democracy across the region. The analysis challenges the view that regionalism has failed in South America and identifies instead the emergence of a new sort of highly political regionalism. We call for UNASUR to be taken more seriously in the literature on comparative regionalism and, indeed, for a revision of how regionalism more widely is understood in Latin America

Reconstructing Regionalism: What does Development have to do with It?

Is Latin America facing a “Polanyian” moment of compensation for market excess or is it part of a “revolution in the making?” This question is at the core of this chapter. The route to answer it, we propose, is to make a distinction between moderate regionalism based on resilient models conceived by the “open regionalism” that prevailed during the 1990s and more radical models of socialist integration. By looking at the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) we argue that UNASUR and ALBA must not simply be seen as ad hoc subregional responses to the many crises of neoliberalism and the collapse of US-led hemispheric leadership but rather as visible manifestation of a repoliticization of the region giving birth to new polities in which citizens, social movements, political parties, and leaders interact and construct new understandings of social development and autonomy. Theoretically, we hope to challenge New Regionalist approaches that have usefully embraced issues beyond mainstream European Union (EU) studies (in particular the links between the regional, the international, and the local), yet had assumed regionalism as taking place within and modelled by neoliberal economics. Although there is undisputable agreement that regionalism is driven by economic calculations, we claim that UNASUR and ALBA relink the political and social dimensions to define post-neoliberal integration objectives.

The End of the Embrace? Neoliberalism and Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Latin America

This book sets out to explore how Latin America is responding to what Dani Rodrik (2002) aptly described as the most pressing question currently facing the global political economy: “After neoliberalism, what?” We take as our starting point the fact that contemporary Latin American political economy is marked by the crisis of neoliberalism. Two decades of Washington Consensus policies have left legacies of uneven growth, inequity, social conflicts, and lackluster democracy. But the crises that erupted in much of the region with the onset of the twenty-first century were due to more than Latin America’s embrace of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s and 1990s; in a very real way, they were the latest episodes in a drama that has been played out since the 1930s over the state and the direction of the region’s political economy. The challenges of governance and development now, in other words, are rooted in “the disarticulation of the relations between state and society that have characterized the region since the 1930s” (Garreton 2006: 1). Latin America has, in effect, been in search of a stable model of growth and development since the collapse of the oligarchy-dominated model of liberal economics and export agriculture in the 1930s. At the center of the development debate in Latin America is the question of the role and the weight of the state versus the market. For this reason, rethinking regional political economy in Latin America can look like something of a journey back to the future.

New directions in welfare: rights-based social policies in post-neoliberal Latin America

Abstract What happens to the politics of welfare in the Global South when neoliberal values are questioned? How is welfare re-imagined and re-enacted when governments seek to introduce progressive change? Latin America provides an illustration and a valuable entry point to debates about ‘interruptions’ of neoliberalism and the changing nature of social policy. Drawing on examples of disability policies in Ecuador and care provision in Uruguay, we argue that there is a ‘rights turn’ in welfare provision under the left that reflects a recognition that previous welfare models left too many people out, ethically and politically, as well as efforts to embed welfare more centrally in new patterns of respect for socio-economic and identity-based human rights. Given Latin America’s recent contestation of neoliberal development as well as its history of sometimes dramatic welfare shifts, the emergence of rights-based social provision is significant not just for the region but also in relation to global struggles for more equitable governance.

Locating regional health policy: Institutions, politics, and practices:

Poverty reduction and health became central in the agendas of Southern regional organisations in the last two decades. Yet, little is known about how these organisations address poverty, inclusion and social inequality, and how Southern regional formations are engaging in power constellations, institutions, processes, interests and ideological positions within different spheres of governance. This article reviews academic literatures spanning global social policy, regional studies and diplomacy studies, and the state of knowledge and understanding of the ‘place’ of regional actors in health governance as a global political practice therein. It identifies theoretical and thematic points of connection between disparate literatures and how these can be bridged through research focusing on the social policies of regional organisations and regional integration processes. This framework hence locates the contributions of each of the research articles of this Special Issue of Global Social Policy on the regional dimension of health policy and diplomacy in relation to Southern Africa and South America. It also highlights the ways in which the articles bring new evidence about how social relations of welfare are being (re)made over larger scales and how regional actors may initiate new norms to improve health rights in international arenas engaging in new forms of ‘regional’ diplomacy.

Conclusion: Governance after Neoliberalism

This book has explored, over the course of the previous nine chapters, the difficult birth of alternative political economies to neoliberalism in Latin America. We have reflected on the costs of neoliberalism in the region in terms of citizenship, democracy, inclusion, and social policies, as well as the difficulties of sustaining growth over the long term via Washington Consensus-type policies; and we have identified he crises of various sorts—developmental, representational, social and political—inside Latin America that meant that market democracies were questioned and have sometimes faltered. Here, we wish to pull together some of the interpretative threads and key insights of the chapters with the aim of conceptualizing more precisely what governance after neoliberalism means in the region. In order to do so, we need to identify the common terrain between the various emergent and sometimes contradictory national strategies of democracy and development. At the same time, we must avoid nailing too firmly a single, fixed interpretation onto what are evolving policy paradigms, characterized as much by national specificities, pragmatism, ad hoc policymaking and responses to changing global and regional politics as ideology and principle. Our task, then, is to balance the need for a broad regional synthesis of change, alongside sensitivity to national specificities.

Regional integration and welfare: framing and advocating pro-poor norms through Southern regionalisms

ABSTRACT Regional organisations are moving away from traditional market-based goals to embrace issues of welfare, yet the role they play in social policy formation, and their contribution to the embedding of alternative approaches to development, is poorly understood. This article explores whether and how the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) advance pro-poor norms and policies in national and global governance. Whilst not coherent citizenship-centred projects of regionalism, SADC and UNASUR have developed institutional competences to address the health–poverty nexus, though their policy development practices and methods take quite different forms. Theoretically, the paper develops a framework addressing three key claims: (i) poverty and welfare need to be brought in to the study of regional governance; (ii) the agency of Southern regional organisations in the generation and diffusion of norms needs to be taken more seriously in the literature and in practice; and (iii) context matters for whether and how regional organisations provide normative leadership; act as brokers in a (re)distributive way; or as advocacy actors in a political way, enabling claims at different levels of governance.