Post-neoliberalism in Latin America: a conceptual review

The concept of post-neoliberalism has emerged in response to the electoral victories of new left governments across Latin America starting in the late 1990s. Since then, it has been widely employed to understand the policy response of new left governments to the neoliberal Washington Consensus. However, there is no clear consensus on the utility of the concept and little effort has been made to systematically analyse policy and institutional trends amongst countries pursuing post-neoliberal strategies, including attention to variation in approaches to policy and underlying tensions and contradictions of post-neoliberal policy development. We performed a critical literature review of post-neoliberalism and, based on this review, argue that the concept remains useful, but only if we understand it as a tendency to break with neoliberal policy prescriptions leading to a variety of distinct post-neoliberalisms.