Activities > Conferences > 2023 Research Conference
Post-Neoliberal Transformations: Politics, Practices and Governance in a Changing International Political Economy
Society for the Advancement of Socio-Ecoomics (SASE) Annual Meeting
Mini-Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20-22 July 2023
For many observers, the activist government responses to the spread of Covid-19 represented a radical break from the dominant paradigms of economic management and the role of the state: neoliberal orthodoxies on ever-expanding markets, limited state intervention and individual self- reliance were jettisoned as policymakers used the power of the state to oversee large social assistance and economic support packages. Academics have pointed to how the failures of neoliberalism—hollowed-out state capacity and widening socio-economic inequalities— exacerbated the impact of the pandemic and thoroughly discredited this policy paradigm, while Financial Times editorials quickly heralded the emergence of a ‘post-neoliberal order’.
This is not the first time that neoliberalism has been pronounced dead or dying. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, there was no shortage of commentary on the imminent collapse of the neoliberal order (e.g., Stiglitz, 2008; Wallerstein, 2008). But over the subsequent decade, social scientists comprehensively documented that this was not the case. For example, the crisis had long-lasting adverse effects on employment, and sparked a renewed assault on state intervention through austerity and privatization. Will this time be different?
This mini-conference seeks to interrogate the shifting ground of ongoing post-neoliberal transformations. In doing so, we do not treat post-neoliberalism as a rigid temporal demarcation signifying the end of the neoliberal era. Instead, we use the term to refer to the ongoing (re)orderings of political economies across the world: this is not necessarily done in opposition to the neoliberal paradigm, but in interaction with it. Given the neoliberal dominance of the past decades, ongoing transformations occur in necessary dialogue with the ideological, political and policy infrastructures of this ‘always mutating’ paradigm (Peck and Theodore, 2019). In the Global North, attempts to enact post-neoliberal policy programs are most advanced, but they have often taken reactionary forms (Davies, 2021) or been co-opted by corporate and financial interests (Braun, 2021). In the Global South, there is diversity of policy responses to the crises of neoliberalism, and ongoing efforts to change the mode of integration into global value chains are eliciting resistance from guardians of economic orthodoxy like the World Bank (Bair et al., 2021). And China does not fit neatly in the neoliberalism/post-neoliberalism spectrum (Slobodian, 2022).
This mini-conference hopes to encourage empirical attempts to capture the broad contours of post-neoliberal transformations, including attention to their intellectual, bureaucratic and political aspects, as well as place them in their broader historical context. How have countries or regions sought to move beyond the neoliberal paradigm, how have they succeeded or failed, and why? How have global processes shaped the possibilities for post-neoliberal alternatives? How do social movements and political forces across the ideological spectrum relate to the neoliberal order and its potential overhaul? What are the intellectual underpinnings of ongoing political-economic transformations? What parallels can be drawn from past attempts at fundamental paradigm change?
Panels:
Thursday, July 20, 2023
MC01-01 Neoliberalism still? Varieties, Hybridities and Mutations in Latin-America
Stephan Gruber, Institute Max Planck for the Study of Societies, “Gradualist, Anti-Technocratic and National? Ideas and practices of Peru’s neoliberalism during the developmental era (1945-1962)”
Maria Teresa Ruas Coelho, University of Sergipe, Brazil: “Bureaucrats or revolutionaries? Governing public debt, reshaping the Brazilian State”
Ricardo Lopez Pedreros, Western Washington University: “The Fetishes of a Neoliberal Democracy in Colombia, 1970-1982”
Jose Carlos Orihuela Paredes, University of Peru: “Organization Over Rules: Institutions for Lithium-Based Development in Andean Countries”
MC01-02 Central Banks in the Post/Neoliberal Order
Bianca Orsi, University of Leeds; Sophia Kuehnlenz, Manchester Metropolitan University; Annina Kaltenbrunner, University of Leeds: “Central bank digital currencies and the international payment system: The demise of the US dollar?”
Arie Krampf, Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo, Israel:“Re-politicizing Central Banking: A Post-Keynesian Framework of Central Bank Power”
Rune M Stahl, Copenhagen Business School; Jack Foster, Victoria University of Wellington: “Accidental hegemons: the rise and transformation of the independent central banker”
MC01-03 Author Meets Critics: A Thousand Cuts: Social Protection in the Age of Austerity, by Alexander Kentikelenis and Thomas Stubbs
Benjamin Bradlow, Princeton University
Alexander Kentikelenis, Bocconi University
Thomas Stubbs, Royal Holloway, University of London
Susan Park, University of Sydney
Christy Thornton, Johns Hopkins University
MC01-04 Climate Regulation and Neoliberal Transitions
Joel Michaels, Yale Law School: “Capital Rules are Credit Policy: The Case for Climate Risk-Weighting”
Adriana Nilsson, University of Liverpool; Claes Belfrage, University of Liverpool; Klaus Dalgaard, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianopolis: “Governing Sustainability in a Context of Decelerating Globalisation: the Case of Biofuels”
Rosie Collington, University College London, “Between a Net Zero Goal and a Green Transition: Green State Capacity as a Strategic-Relational and Evolutionary Process”
Juan José Tapia León, Emilio Galdeano Gómez, Manuel Naranjo Garrido, Universidad de Almería: “The intellectual structure of degrowth as an emerging research field”
Friday, July 21 2023
MC01-05 Contesting and Defending Neoliberalism
Odysseas Konstantinakos, European University Institute: “Revisiting paradigmatic change in European macroeconomic policy: the missing link between social learning and authority contestation.”
Marcos González Hernando, Universidad Diego Portales: “Defending the model? Right-wing think tanks in Chile (2011-2022)”
Jorge Atria, Universidad Diego Portales; Dante Contreras, Universidad de Chile; María Luisa Méndez, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile: “Increasing Wealth Taxation in a Context of Social Upheaval: Social Movements and the Property Tax in Chile”
Byron Villacis, University of California Berkeley, “On The Privatization of Symbolic Power: How the Appropriation of Public Statistics Helped to Navigate Neoliberal Transformations”
MC01-06 Implementing Neoliberalism in Comparative Perspective
Anush Kapadia, IIT Bombay: “Indian neoliberalism: engineering the state to plan markets”
Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia; Nik Theodore, University of Illinois at Chicago: “New terrains of late-neoliberal policymaking: the scale politics of (un)conditional cash in Brazil and the United States”
Leandro Bona, FLACSO/CONICET/UNLP; Marcos Oslé, UNLP; Sergio Páez, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro: “China and the reshaping of the Argentinian and Brazilian economies during the 21st century. Developmental and environmental consequences of bilateral trade”
Ibrahim Murat Kara, Lingnan University: “Great Power Competition Over Infrastructure: The Status Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative”
MC01-07 Workers, Industry, and Development
Timur Ergen, Center for European Studies; Erez Maggor, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Fabio Bulfone, Leiden University: “The new industrial policy and the political economy of conditionality”
Ana Laura Fernandez, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento; Mariana Laura González, FLACSO/ CONICET: “External constraint and wages: Argentina during the XXIst Century”
Ludwig Hehl, University of Kassel: “(Missing) Developmental Coalitions in Mexico – A Political Settlement Approach”
Seth Pipkin, University of California, Irvine: “Discipline to Flourish: On The Meaning and Uses of Discipline in Industrial Policy”
MC01-08 After the neoliberal policy dismantling: State capacities recovery and development policies
Ana Celia Castro, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, “Dismantling and Reconstruction of State Capacities in Brazil: A Future Agenda”
Alexandre Gomide,Institute of Applied Economic Research; Michelle Morais, University of Oklahoma: “The policy process in democratic backsliding: findings from a comparative study”
Flavio Gaitan, Federal University of Latin American Integration: “Elites, coalitions and patterns of socio-economic development. Social development policies in Argentina and Brazil”
Maria Estela Neves, INCT-PPED: “Water policies, dismantling and reconstruction – Brazil, 2016-2023”
MC01-09 Progressive Industrial Policies for a Just Transition
Ludwig Hehl, University of Kassel: “Industrial policy between dependent financialization and domestic distributive conflict in the process of structural change of Mexico and Turkey“
Christoph Scherrer, University of Kassel: “The political economy of implementing progressive industrial policies”
Keno Haverkamp, University College London: “Maintaining position as an incumbent leader: Green windows of opportunity and industrial policy alignment in wind energy technologies in Germany”
Leonardo Burlamaqui, Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro: “Creative Destruction Management: A neglected key policy tool”