Neoliberalism’s Uneven Reach: Agency and Diversity among Guatemalan NGOs

• In Event: The Return of the State: Reassembling Neoliberal Development

Abstract

Economic crises and structural adjustment plans reduced public expenditures across Latin America as the market replaced the state as the locus of Development. As policymakers looked to private actors to promote development in the context of neoliberalism, they assigned non-governmental organizations (NGOs) central roles in development. Subsequent scholars contrasted these NGOs with grassroots social movements, arguing that rather than resisting inequality as social movements had, NGO facilitated a “hidden” agenda of promoting neoliberalism and reproducing Western hegemony. While the destructive effects of neoliberal development for Latin America have been detailed, less clear is how international discourses interacted with particular national and local histories, contexts, and organizations to affect “developers” and “developees’” actual practices and experiences on the ground. How “deep” did neoliberalism go and how widespread was its influence among organizations and communities? How much room for maneuver did allow? How did NGOs and people accept, leverage, or sidetrack it in their day-to-day lives?

In order to explore these understudied questions, this study draws on archival research, key informant interviews and longitudinal comparative organizational ethnographies of Guatemalan NGOs, taking place over the course of seven years. It focuses on the antecedents, contexts, and trajectories of two NGOs that in many ways reflect contrasting NGO “types” in the region as windows into the interactions between international discourses, local histories and contexts, and real people acting creatively. The analysis demonstrates that international trends influenced, but did not determine, actual practices and experiences on the ground, and that their effects varied across organizations. Neoliberal prescriptions did not enter a vacuum, but interacted with local histories and were reinterpreted by actors in diverse and sometimes surprising ways. This reality opens up possibilities for thinking about ways that neoliberal entrenchment may vary even within the same country, and thus highlights potential points of leverage for resistance and change.

Author

• Erin E Beck, University of Oregon