ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how civil society is being strategized, disciplined, and governed in the service of neoliberalism. Strategizing means the deployment of the tools and enacting the conduct of civil society members' everyday behaviour towards the production and reproduction of global capital, which is the 'business of development' for some international non-governmental organizations. The chapter also explores the process through which civil society organizations are transformed into strategic entities, attributing to them certain neoliberal functionalities that ensure the provision of infrastructural elements of capital accumulation. It provides a biopolitical framework to analyse the transformations taking place in civil society. It explains how the neoliberal agenda of global development operates in the rural landscapes of peripheral countries, and how this strategizing is taking place based on four interrelated elements: corporatizing; incorporating ideologies and discourses; constructing individual selves; and adopting multiple evaluative criteria.
