Making Popular and Solidarity Economies in Dollarized Ecuador: Money, Law, and the Social After Neoliberalism

In Ecuador, state and non-state actors have turned to forms of everyday economic practice and organization for inspiration in conceptualizing and institutionalizing a “post-neoliberal” economic system oriented to “social and solidary” ends: a so-called “popular and solidarity economy” [economía popular y solidaria]. Such efforts to reimagine “the social” itself as an alternative to neoliberal capitalism provoke questions that dovetail with those introduced more than a decade before by Ecuador’s official adoption of the U.S. dollar. This dissertation examines the intersection of these two projects of state and social transformation with the activities of bureaucrats and experts, market vendors, and members of family and neighborhood savings and credit associations. At stake are not only debates about alternative economic and political imaginaries, state and civil society, or the pasts and futures of liberalism and neoliberalism, but also questions about trust, durability, and form—of value, institutions, and collective life itself: What happens when regimes of value are transformed? How do the uses and meanings of money change along with its legal status and material form? How are “economy” and “society” reformatted as local lives and livelihoods are harnessed to state-led efforts to reconstitute state and society? And how can the infrastructures and institutions of associational life that subtend trust—in the value of a new currency, in governmental or financial institutions, in one’s neighbors and fellow citizens—be made durable and lasting? From policy to practice, market stalls and middle-class living rooms to government offices and neighborhood meeting houses, this dissertation explores efforts to imagine and institutionalize this popular and solidarity economy alongside the everyday politics and pragmatics of money and law. The dissertation tracks how the mundane techniques and technologies of money and law—cash and coin, account books and Excel files, the rules and regulations of bureaucratic administration and vernacular institution-building—are folded into people’s everyday efforts to navigate the relational complexities of associational life in the context of dollarization and post-neoliberal state transformation