Polarising Development – Introducing Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis

Neoliberal economic policies, with their emphasis on market-led development and individual rationality, have been exposed as bankrupt not only by the global economic crisis but also by increasing social opposition and resistance. Social movements and critical scholars in Latin America, East Asia, Europe and the United States, alongside the Arab uprisings, have triggered renewed debate on possible different futures.

While for some years any discussion of substantive alternatives has been marginalised, the global crisis since 2008 has opened up new spaces to debate, and indeed to radically rethink, the meaning of development. Debates on developmental change are no longer tethered to the pole of ‘reform and reproduce’: a new pole of ‘critique and strategy beyond’ neoliberal capitalism has emerged.