How Domestic Politics Shapes Globalized State-led Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 July 2026
Chapter 5 shows that development banks provide policy-makers with the ability to address policy contestation. I document the varying policy contestation from labor unions, civil society organizations, and legislators to each type of internationalization support: acquisitions and greenfield investments, project finance, and mergers among domestic firms. I then show that this variation obeyed differences in the salience of associated domestic effects and in BNDES’ funding strategy for each intervention. The chapter shows that BNDES relied increasingly on providing equity financed through market sources to finance politically sensitive overseas investments. These dynamics reveal the “fragile autonomy” of states under democracy: their capacity to support national firms in global markets depends on their ability to strategically mobilize or obfuscate their interventions and pushes them toward more market-conforming instruments of industrial policy.
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