Politics, state power, & policies: Exploring the contemporary nature of economic governance through the case of Brazil

Uneven development continues apace, yet it is constantly challenged by groups, cities, states, and countries around the world. Latin America has been a particularly fertile region of experimentation in this regard since the early 2000s, when the region witnessed the election of a wave of leftist leaders. Discussions about the emergence of a post-neoliberalism have been central to political debate in the region for decades now, and new, sometimes radical, models for development and government are being implemented across the region. In Brazil these experimentations have taken a more traditional form, invoking the past successes of a powerful state in directing economic development, but also updating these old authoritarian models to reflect the new context of a vibrant democracy. Differently from earlier eras, when nationalist or developmentalist models were tolerated, or even encouraged, the present is marked by the dominance of singular, though not homogeneous, model of neoliberal capitalism which deters and obstructs alternate forms of development across multiple scales and geographies.;This dissertation centers on the question of the politics and practice of economic governance in the contemporary era and the possibility for alternate models. This question is grounded through an analysis of the case of Brazil. During nine months of field research in Brazil between 2012--2013, key actors from the public and private sector involved in industrial policy formulation, implementation, and monitoring were interviewed. Data was also collected at the first National Conference on Regional Development (2013) in Brasilia, the Forum for Development in the Northeast (2013) and the Regional Economics Conference (2013), both in Fortaleza, and informally during the Free Fare Movement protests of June and July 2013 in Sao Paulo, and the 'Day of Labor Struggles' march jointly organized by the major national labor unions in Sao Paulo on July 11, 2013. The data from these in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and less formal street-level interviews, was then triangulated through extensive research among secondary materials, government policy documents, and media coverage to provide adequate depth and breadth to accurately debate this admittedly wide-ranging and very complex topic.;By examining these processes at the three distinct levels of policies, state power, and politics, an integrative and comprehensive analysis is provided to explain the possibilities and challenges of pursuing alternative development models in the present era. This dissertation, organized as a collection of three articles, begins with an analysis of the policy outcomes of Brazil's new developmentalist orientation and highlights the strategic role that states can and do play in shaping the formation and evolution of global production networks. The second article works to expand and operationalize the variegated capitalism approach, and interrogates the constitutive social forms of economic institutionalization and their relation to international regimes in order to discern key forces and limitations to capitalist variegation---in the case of Brazil, variegation was possible up to the point that the government began to restructure the profits and operation of the financial sector. The third article moves to the level of politics in order to explore how political identities are constructed and mobilized in support of particular place-based projects through the use of populist logics in pursuit of hegemony, and reveals how a leader's understanding of politics can have drastic impacts on his or her success---in the case of Brazil, President Lula was enormously successful in this regard, while his successor President Dilma was far less successful.;Through this dissertation, I demonstrate that understanding the contemporary production of uneven development and economic governance requires an approach that links the concrete policies back to their origins in state projects and visions, and then link these visions and projects back to the underlying political-economic imaginaries that serve to orient them. As a result, societal buy-in to the guiding political economic imaginaries becomes key if the state projects and individual policies are to be successful. Constructing this buy-in is a political process of identity construction, and cannot be understood as a simple linking of defined class positions and interests, but requires a contemporary understanding of how political identities are constructed in order to be successful.