In thematic terms, this book seeks to promote vital debate on the interactions between economic, political, and social processes. Latin American Political Economy publishes new, relevant, and empirically grounded scholarship that deepens our understanding of contemporary Latin American political economy and contributes to the formulation and evaluation of new theories that are both context-sensitive and subject to broader comparisons. Inspired by the need to provide new analytical perspectives for understanding the massive social, political, and economic transformations underway in Latin America, the series is directed at researchers and practitioners interested in resurrecting political economy as a primary research area in the developing world. It is especially concerned with how findings may further our understanding of development models, the socio-political institutions that sustain them, and the practical problems they confront.

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’. Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption. The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.

When the Iron Curtain lifted in 1989, it was seen by some as proof of the final demise of the ideas and aspirations of the radical left. Not many years passed, however, before the critique of social inequalities and capitalism was once again a main protest theme of social movements. This book provides an account of radical left movements in today’s Europe and how they are trying to accomplish social and political change. The book’s international group of leading experts provide detailed analysis on social movement organizations, activist groups, and networks that are rooted in the left-wing ideologies of anarchism, Marxism, socialism, and communism in both newly democratized post-communist and longstanding liberal-democratic polities. Through a range of case studies, the authors explore how radical left movements are influenced by their situated political and social contexts, and how contemporary radical left activism differs from both new and old social movements on one hand, and the activities of radical left parliamentary parties on the other. Ultimately, this volume investigates what it means to be ‘radical left’ in current day liberal-democratic and capitalist societies after the fall of European state socialism. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in European politics, contemporary social movements and political sociology.

A study of workers struggles against management regimes in Britain's car industry from the Second World War to the late 1980s.

In Social Movements and Radical Populism in the Andes: Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, Jennifer N. Collins examines why the new left took the form of radical populism in Ecuador and Bolivia and how social movements were impacted by this development. Using a Laclauian approach, Collins argues that anti-neoliberal social movements provided the groundwork for populist identity formation. This book also offers a nuanced and insightful explanation for the decline of Ecuador's indigenous movement, examining the role of state resurgence in the fragmentation of social movements. Collins’s analysis provides key insights into the life cycles of social movements in the Andes from development to decline.

In this book, Enrico Padoan proposes an original middle-range theory to explain the emergence and the internal organisation of anti-neoliberal populist parties in Latin America and Southern Europe, and the relationships between these parties and the organised working class. Padoan begins by tracing the diverging evolution of the electoral Lefts in Latin America and Southern Europe in the aftermath of economic crises, and during the implementation of austerity measures within many of these nations. A causal typology for interpreting the possible outcomes of the realignments within the electoral Lefts is proposed. Hereafter, the volume features five empirical chapters, four of which focus on the rise of anti-neoliberal populist parties in Bolivia, Argentina, Spain and Italy, while a fifth offers an analysis on four ‘shadow cases’ in Venezuela, Uruguay, Portugal and Greece. Scholars of Latin America and Comparative Politics will find Anti-Neoliberal Populisms in Comparative Perspective a highly valuable resource, offering a distinctive perspective on the impact of different populisms on party systems and on the challenges that such populisms posed to syndicalism and to traditional left-of-centre parties.

Neoliberalism is fast becoming the dominant ideology of our age, yet politicians, businessmen and academics rarely identify themselves with it and even political forces critical of it continue to carry out neoliberal policies around the globe. How can we make sense of this paradox? Who actually are "the neoliberals"? This is the first explanation of neoliberal hegemony, which systematically considers and analyzes the networks and organizations of around 1.000 self conscious neoliberal intellectuals organized in the Mont Pèlerin Society. This book challenges simplistic understandings of neoliberalism. It underlines the variety of neoliberal schools of thought, the various approaches of its proponents in the fight for hegemony in research and policy development, political and communication efforts, and the well funded, well coordinated, and highly effective new types of knowledge organizations generated by the neoliberal movement: partisan think tanks. It also closes an important gap in the growing literature on "private authority’’, presenting new perspectives on transnational civil society formation processes. This fascinating new book will be of great interest to students of international relations, political economy, globalization and politics.

In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the “twenty-first-century socialist” government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In Resource Radicals, Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration's resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government's disregard for nature and indigenous communities. In this archival and ethnographic study, Riofrancos expands the study of resource politics by decentering state resource policy and locating it in a field of political struggle populated by actors with conflicting visions of resource extraction. She demonstrates how Ecuador's commodity-dependent economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism.

The contributions cover a wide range of territories - Argentina, Russia, the Ukraine, Indonesia and Taiwan The book will be the first to call into question the idea of 'good governance' and exactly what that implies The editors have a good track record and have been widely published in the area Book should be of great appeal to all international and development economists