英文摘要 |
In the post-Washington Consensus era, the pending social inequality and poverty have pushed South American New Left governments to seek “alternative developments” in the dawn of the 21st century, which is the so-called “Pink tide.” These governments’ motive is to seek an alternative development plan to address the social injustice and poverty left by market economy under the neoliberal model. In fact, the common feature of this alternative development trend is characterized by a strong “normative orientation.” However, due to some political leaders usually having strong charismatic personalities, coupled with a weak state capacity and their constantly adapting strategies in response to political conflicts, results in a huge gap between development ideas and their policy praxis. Therefore, these leaders’ alternatives have been criticized as “political rhetoric”. However, this paper argues that Latin American alternative developments could still be constructive in shaping new development perspectives and new social contracts by proposing alternative political and economic institutions to correct the ideal type of neoliberal governance, i.e. “liberal democracy” and “market economy.” This paper examines the development discourses, political and economic agenda, as well as their corresponding governance institutions among Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador. This research concludes that these three cases show their alternative projects as conveying diverse development perspectives; however, their common ground is to promote “participatory democracy” and “economic democratization” as citizen’s empowerment strategy to meet human development, despite the fact they are also different in degree and forms of praxis. |