ABSTRACT
Introduction If the 1980s were widely considered a “lost decade” for some parts of the developing world, a retrospective look at the 1990s finds much less consensus in the literature. Scholars looking to the global South find contradictory patterns of economic globalization, the deregulation and liberalization of national economies, the decentralization of national states, and tentative steps toward democratic consolidation. Particularly contested is the understanding of decentralization that nearly universally occurred in the developing world. For some it is proof of the positive impacts of globalization, as bloated and corrupt national-level bureaucracies were dismantled in favor of presumably more responsive local units. For others, the weakening of national states meant the erosion of their regulatory capacity to assure the minimum conditions for democracy. Some scholars have greeted with “alarm” the potential impacts of globalization on democracy, when only recently many had greeted the most recent “wave of democratizations” with a great deal of optimism (Markoff, 1999). A third position is held by those who focus on the way that globalization has altered the “socio-spatial scales” of the functioning of states (Keil, 1998; Brenner, 2004a; Swyngedouw, 2004; Jessop, 2000; Weiss, 1997). As the state “hollows out,” it does not just “wither away” but its functions are displaced into newer or altered lower-or upper-level state institutions, where new dynamics of political contestation emerge. In many settings the local urban state has emerged as an especially important site, because it is more porous than national states and is situated “in the confluence of globalization dynamics and increased local political action based in civil society” (Keil, 1998, 632).
