Midcentury Development and the Early Lives of Neoliberal Practices

• In Event: Local Histories of Development

Abstract

When capitalist economies came to crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, Latin Americans did not merely reach for new ideas: they reordered their political-economic systems using tools already at hand. Many of the practices we regard today as hallmarks of neoliberalism—state decentralization, austere forms of social welfare provision, and private delegation—in fact had earlier lives as developmentalist phenomena. At midcentury, they were essential tools that developmental states used to extend their responsibilities and meet rising expectations under severe fiscal constraints and the ideological constraints of the Cold War. These strategies of midcentury state building were redeployed after the 1970s, appropriated by new champions and reconceived as instruments of structural adjustment. This paper uses research in Colombia to explore that process of redeployment. It examines Colombia's first regional development corporation, the Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca, as a model of midcentury decentralization. It explores the largest housing project built under the Alliance for Progress—Ciudad Kennedy in Bogotá—as a model of austere social welfare provision. It looks at practices of private delegation in both projects. Finally, it shows how the principles of decentralization, private delegation, and austerity contained within these developmentalist icons became redeployed in the 1970s and 1980s, how they became politically resignified and how their midcentury pasts became obscured.

Author

• Amy C Offner, University of Pennsylvania