From Developmental States to Developmental Regimes: Lessons from Asia for Contemporary Latin America

Abstract

The previous chapter demonstrated that mainstream meta-theories of political economy are inadequate when attempting to characterise and analyse the pink tide in Latin America. While elements of some or all of them may exist in different regimes across the continent, no one by itself can consistently and coherently capture the nature of these regimes. The chapter concluded by suggesting that the continent could represent fertile ground for articulation of alternative models of development, as well as alternative models of post-crisis development given the recent historical context of many countries in Latin America. It is the purpose of this chapter to outline an alternative model of political economy which, it will be argued, offers the necessary analytical leverage to interpret the contemporary political economy of Latin America’s pink tide. This alternative is the ‘Developmental Regime’ (Pempel, 1998, 1999), itself a reformulation of traditional Developmental State theory. The Developmental State ‘became by about 1990 the major ideological rallying point for those who wish to contest the appropriateness of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus as a framework for effective governance and economic development in the global South’ (Radice, 2008: 1153). Therefore, this chapter will seek to trace the contours of this theory and how it has developed.