Disciplining Regions: Subnational Contention in Neoliberal Peru

Abstract

This article examines tensions between two governance trends that have impacted subnational regions across the global south in recent decades: liberalization and decentralization. Although both trends diminish the prerogatives of the central state, a shift in focus from national to subnational scales reveals important contradictions between the two trends. Through an in-depth examination of the Peruvian case, the article explores the scope for resistance to neoliberalism in subnational regions that have become politically empowered via decentralization. Pushed by their constituents, subnational elected officials have sought to contest and disrupt the neoliberal mining policies that were adopted by Alberto Fujimori's authoritarian government over two decades ago and that his successors have maintained in the years since re-democratization. The national government has responded to this opposition by defending neoliberalism from substantive challenges and by adopting new strategies to discipline subnational regions. These include not just attempts to weaken regional efforts at territorial regulation and to encourage corporate social responsibility by mining companies, but new tax programmes that invite the private sector to displace the state at the subnational level by playing direct roles in infrastructure and service provision.