The Uses of Neoliberalism

Abstract

The term "neoliberalism" has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal "arts of government" and the class-based ideological "project" of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti-poverty politics in southern Africa.

Silencing Agency in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) by Essentializing a Neoliberal ‘Monster’ Into Being: A Response to Fletcher & Büscher's ‘PES Conceit’

“…First, they highlight the fallacy of F & B's implication of an unquestionable hegemonic, central command that is pushing PES "as a global program to spread neoliberalization as a particular rationality and mode of capital accumulation" (p.224). Second, they illustrate our claim that it is by exploring the actions of implicated 'PES actors', not as passive recipients or predictably rational homo economicus, but as complex and intersectional individuals exerting both individual and collective agency to resist, readapt, but also propose divergent PES ontologies, that we offer a way forward for escaping the material effects of neoliberal logics (Larner, 2003;Ferguson, 2009;Gibson-Graham, 2008;Van Hecken et al, 2015a). Third, these cases show how broader neoliberal rationalities of transforming liabilities to assets, rational selfinterest and incentives, or the notion of undervalued goods and services produced from the land failed to perform as theorized.…”

“…We argue, instead, for the adoption of 'weak theory' 4 to understand the co-production of PES. Such a perspective views PES as multi-scalar, plural and necessarily mutually constituted amongst macro and micro scales, discourses and practices (Larner, 2003;Gibson-Graham, 2008;Ferguson, 2009). It explores the intersectoral and intersubjective dialectic between human-nature entanglements "as being multiple and determined simultaneously and interactively" (Stasiulis, 1999:345).…”

Book Review Symposium

“…Her analysis is animated as much by the multiplicities, contestations and struggles of millennial development, as it is by the hegemonic centralities. In this sense Poverty Capital aligns with an expanding body of work in critical development and urban studies that emphasizes the contingency of actually existing neoliberalism (Ferguson 2010;Larner 2009;Leitner, Peck and Sheppard 2007;Li 2006;McCann and Ward 2010;Ward and England 2007;Wilson 2004;. Much of this scholarship engages poststructuralist epistemologies to probe neoliberal governmentalities as practices of assemblage-aiming to achieve coherent political rationalities, on the one hand, but also straining and fragmenting as enlisted actors, knowledges and norms come to serve other, coevolving strategies of rule on the other hand.…”

“…However, this doesn't mean that different ways of linking microfinance with the state or social movements are not also possible. As James Ferguson (2010) has recently suggested, in order to avoid a politics centered on "the antis" we need to think about the polyvalent forms that a neoliberal "arts of government" can take and the progressive possibilities that might open up when schemes that are in some senses "neoliberal" can also be made to co-exist with other more welfare-state-like interventions. I think Roy's reflections on the Bangladeshi institutions prompt the reader to consider other ways in which microfinance programs are, or could be, "multiplied" and made to work within different "arts of government"?…”

The Neo-liberal City as Idea and Reality

“…The 'responsibilized' citizen comes to operate as a miniature firm, responding to incentives, rationally assessing risks, and prudently choosing from among different courses of action. (Ferguson, 2010: 172).…”