Towards a Neo-Polanyian Political Economy of Development

The Global South has entered an era of ideological flux. The inadequacies of neoliberalism have spawned a widespread questioning of this dominant worldview. Intellectuals and political movements search for an alternative development ideology that explains what has gone wrong, provides a vision of a more desirable future and suggests a process for achieving this goal. Responding to these challenges, the World Bank and other purveyors of the dominant model have undertaken a gradual shift from an unpopular and inefficacious “Washington Consensus” to a more complex and politically progressive “Post-Washington Consensus”. This shift, though blunting the attack on neoliberalism, has moved the debate on legitimate development strategies to the left and towards more statist approaches. Socialism, the developmental state, social democracy, and emancipatory community-based development have moved back into development discourse. In an earlier era of ideological flux, Karl Polanyi probed the origins of the implosion of economic liberalism in the Great Depression and two world wars, as well as the alternatives that might, by re-embedding the economy in society, allow people to live freer and more secure lives. These reflections came together in The Great Transformation, his masterwork that appeared in 1944. Although Polanyi studied a different era (1830-1940) and focused on Europe, his ideas have inspired an outpouring of studies on contemporary problems and prospects in the neoliberal era (since 1980). The bulk of these studies pertain to industrial countries or global economic issues. However, the human, environmental and financial impact of market deregulation is arguably more devastating in the ‘developing’ countries than in the core. A question thus arises: do Polanyi’s reflections on progressive alternatives to liberalism clarify contemporary debates on progressive alternatives to neoliberalism in the Global South?