Planned city, shrinking state: Ciudad Guayana's state-led industrialization and its transition to the neoliberal model
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Description
The 'Washington Consensus' over Neoliberal reform has fallen significantly short of a consensus, at least among some Latin American nations maintaining vestiges of state-led development strategies. Instead, this study shows how Venezuela is fashioning a 'hybrid' strategy, incorporating elements of statist theories of regional development with free market principles of economic reform such as privatization and decentralization. It examines the extent neoliberal principles have been adopted, assesses the social impacts of different approaches to development, and uncovers social and political forces complicating a shift from state to market-led development Three dimensions of the impacts of retreating states and a strengthening market are analyzed: regional planning, firm performance, and political participation. I conducted in-depth interviews, archival research, and content analysis where the Corporacion Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) built a planned city and Latin America's largest state-owned industrial complex. Legacies of state intervention in Ciudad Guayana were a context for examining how the State, firms, and civil society are negotiating industrial restructuring, increased global competition and political decentralization. My own face-to-face household survey, focus groups, participant observation, and annual survey data reveal impacts of these processes and provide evidence of and reasons for resistance to change My results challenge key assumptions about both statist and market-based development models, and in doing so indicate that neoliberalism's hegemony is subject to reexamination. First, despite origins in competing ideologies, both approaches advocate exploiting comparative advantages in natural resources. Second, contrary to empirical evidence from other resource-based development projects, residents' standard of living was very adequate, indicating long-term returns on public investment associated with state-led capitalism. Third, regardless of global universality and uniformity of neoliberalism, locally implemented policies stopped short of structural reform. Fourth, global economic restructuring has wrought enormous local change independent of neoliberal reform. Industries struggle with global oversupply of commodities, debt, and technological shortcomings; unemployment is increasing; wages are stagnant; and the service sector is growing. Finally, while local actors agree that they must look beyond public enterprise for a development strategy, the centralization associated with state-led development makes it difficult for local government, led by 'La Causa R', to foster participatory democracy