Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom

BERNDT, CHRISTIAN; WERNER, MARION; FERNÁNDEZ, VÍCTOR RAMIRO

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

SAGE Publications Ltd

Año: 2019 p. 1 - 21

0308-518X

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effectsof marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutionalanalysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms.Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin Americanstructuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentiniansoy boom of the 2000s, identifying forms of market extension, redistribution, reciprocity andhouseholding that facilitated this process. We argue for a multi-scalar approach that balancesattention to national and extra-local dynamics shaping the combination of these forms, identifiedthrough the lens of the ?fictitious commodities? of the soy boom: money (credit, currency andcross-border capital flows), land (in the agricultural heartland and frontier regions), labor (transformedand excluded in a ?farming without farmers? model) and, we add, knowledge (biotech).Our analysis identifies internal tensions as well as overt resistance and ?overflow? that ultimatelyled to the collapse of postneoliberal regulation of the soy complex, ushering in a wider, marketradicalcounter-movement. Refracting double-movement-type dynamics through the prism ofheterodox institutional forms, we argue, allows for a better grasp of processes that underlieinstitutional recalibrations of progressive and regressive kinds.