The “Re-Branding” of Neoliberalism: Competing Hegemonies and Systemic Dilemmas Impacting Educational Development in Heavily Indebted Latin American States

Abstract

Using an overview of Latin American experience and drawing on evidence from some of its most heavily indebted states as cases, this chapter considers the example of education policy as a means of exploring the question of whether the poverty reduction strategies of the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), hereafter referred to as BWIs) merely “re-brand” damaging structural conditionality principles inherent in neoliberal development paradigms. My argument draws both on a conception of hegemony adapted from Gramsci (1991) and an understanding of the dynamic of neoliberalism as an imperialistic and “colonizing” set of policy discourses and practices, or a “material-discursive dialectic” between the hegemony of neoliberal policy discourses and their attendant impacts that play out in various educational policy practices (Davidson-Harden 2005). Neoliberalism consists of a series of trends and preferences toward privatization, deregulation, and commodification as modes of social policy wielded by a “restructured” state whose principal aim is to continuously “re-order” all aspects of the social according to the image of the market, both to facilitate capital accumulation, on the one hand, and to promote a neoliberal vision for the state, society, and citizen, on the other.