ABSTRACT
Austerity prevailed over other potential responses in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008, yet this return to neoliberal economic policies was far from inevitable. Economic crises are particularly volatile junctures in the prevailing ‘sensemaking,’ 1 thus crises may provide an opportunity to expand debates about what is economically necessary, possible, and desirable. Economic crises do not inevitably generate new economic imaginaries; whether an economic crisis will provoke a rethinking of existing economic arrangements will depend on the interplay of a panoply of factors that shape struggles for social change and the defensive reactions to such struggles. But economic crises do present an auspicious occasion to promote critical scrutiny of the hegemonic economic paradigm amidst widespread perceptions of an unsustainable, difficult and/or dangerous situation that demands urgent action. Ideas may be entertained that might have seemed unthinkable amidst the inhibiting momentum of “governance as usual” (Boin, t’Hart, & McConnell, 2009, p. 82). As an advisor to the Obama administration famously instructed, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before” (Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2008).
