ABSTRACT
Introduction In the 1990s neo-liberal agendas for global economic change and development shifted from a simple plan to roll out markets through policy reform to a new concern for containing the political and social risks that seem invariably to accompany their rise. Programmes of institutional reform were intended to provide new incentives to shift the choices of individuals in favour of collective action to support markets. A new emphasis on ‘good governance’ was designed as a means of ensuring these reforms were enforced and providing the capacity to regulate markets effectively. Yet, attempts to establish specifically neo-liberal forms of governance have encountered critical difficulties. Within the World Bank and other mainline development agencies these are explained primarily as technical problems of design or sequencing of institutional reforms or lack of capacity that could be remedied by training or new attitudes (see Rosser, this volume, p. 171 ff.; World Bank 2004a: 16-60). In contrast, it is proposed here that such problems are integral to the conflicts over power that accompany the rise of new market states and market societies. These cannot be understood simply in terms of the politics of resistance versus transformation. In critical instances, it is proposed, the advance of markets has generated new forms of political and social oligarchy the ascendancy of which is consolidated in systems of authoritarian or discretionary governance. This chapter examines how these forms of power and governance are constructed and preserved, not least in the context of highly ambiguous relationships with forces within the neo-liberal camp itself.
