In the last decade Kent Eaton has published several outstanding articles on subnational politics in the Andean countries. Built from different theoretical perspectives (social movements, political regime, political parties, centralisation, political economy), his articles have given us an enlightened understanding of the recent dynamics of subnational politics in the Andean countries. His new book synthesises all that previous work under an original framework shedding light not only on subnational politics – understood as what occurs in subnational units – but as the relation between those subnational units and the national governments.
The book masterfully harmonises different literatures in the field of comparative politics – especially, the literature on multilevel governance, economic development, subnational phenomena and the Latin American ‘left turn’. All these subfields, usually unrelated, are tied together, underscoring the new policy and political tensions between national governments and subnational units in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. The main tension Eaton seeks to analyse is the one built around ‘policy regimes’. A policy regime is ‘a package of public policies and institutional practices that together reflect a common set of ideas and beliefs about the appropriate role for market forces and the appropriate levels and types of state intervention in economic life’ (p. 7). Based on their content, these policy regimes can be either neoliberal or statist. A key premise of the book is that such regimes can be found and erected both at the national and subnational levels. Such options give two possible outcomes: either a policy regime juxtaposition (the same policy regime in both national and subnational levels of governments), or a divergent policy regime, where the national and a subnational unit have divergent regimes (neoliberal and statist or vice versa).
Having established that juxtaposition and divergence of regimes are possible, what Eaton seeks to answer is why and when subnational units are more likely to deviate from the national policy regime. Deviation can adopt two different paths: (i) the subnational unit builds a divergent regime vis-à-vis the national one; (ii) the subnational unit succeeds in derailing the policy regime at the national level. Once we apply this typology to the three central Andean countries we find the following:
Peru: (i) Subnational units failed to erect a policy regime different from the neoliberal one prevalent at the national level; (ii) they also failed to derail the national neoliberal regime.
Ecuador: (i) Subnational unit Guayaquil succeeded in building and defending its own neoliberal regime divergent from the national statist Rafael Correa regime; (ii) Guayaquil failed to derail the statist national regime.
Bolivia: (i) Subnational unit Santa Cruz succeeded in building and defending a neoliberal regime divergent from the statist national Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) project; (ii) they also succeeded in derailing/moderating the statist national MAS policy regime. (This interpretation with Santa Cruz as a winner is very interesting, contrasting with most of the recent assessments of Bolivia in which the city and department are usually perceived to have been crushed by centralist/statist Evo Morales.)
What, then, explains this variety of outcomes? Eaton provides a comprehensive and sophisticated answer that eschews ‘silver bullet’ explanations. Three main factors are presented. First, a structural dimension: subnational units with an undeniable economic relevance will be more likely to derail national regimes. That is what happened in Bolivia but not in Peru and Ecuador. The economic relevance of Santa Cruz – able to export its huge natural resources without passing through La Paz – placed it in an auspicious position to challenge the statist policy regime pushed by the MAS government. In Ecuador and Peru, on the contrary, the subnational units lacked such structural position (Guayaquil, Eaton explains, has lost much of its structural clout because of the recent pre-eminence of oil – located in the Amazon – in the national economy).
Second, institutional capacities. Functional, capable subnational governments are key to producing a divergent domestic subnational regime, but not to challenging the national one. This is the case with Santa Cruz and Guayaquil, where local elites long established in government have gradually built a set of capacities that make them able to protect and strengthen their own neoliberal subnational policy regimes. In contrast, Peru's regional governments never developed institutional capacities and, hence, have been unable to produce something as complicated as a domestic policy regime.
The ability to form political coalitions is the third key variable in Eaton's explanation. Contrary to the previous ones, coalitions are key for both forms of divergence. Either for building a domestic subnational regime or for challenging the national one, enlarging the group of political actors that support either of the two agendas is a core element of success. In Guayaquil, for instance, an array of social and political alliances has helped to keep the neoliberal regime in place. In Santa Cruz, in addition to intra-province alliances, cross-regional alliances emerged with Bolivian departments across the eastern part of the country, creating a powerful coalition against the MAS government. Finally, in Peru no coalitions of any type have emerged within or between the subnational units.
As we see, this is a powerful book. The prism of national and subnational relations allows the author to grasp several key dimensions of current processes in Andean countries. By the end of the book the scope of the reader's knowledge of these countries will have been increased in all directions. Yet, one can still raise a few critiques related more to the way the argument is framed than to the book itself, which remains outstanding. The author might have pushed further in showing that unitary countries can produce subnational units building alternative ‘regimes’ to the ones prevailing at the national level. In other words, is it possible in a unitary country for there to be coexistence between statist and neoliberal regimes? If that possibility exists, would Guayaquil's citizens be living under a policy regime closer to the one we find in neoliberal Peru than the statist one prevailing in Quito? The concept of ‘policy regime’ might be stretched a bit here. To clarify this issue, it would have been useful to have a more precise definition about what exactly distinguishes a statist from a neoliberal policy regime. At least in the country I know best, Peru, I suspect it is unlikely that the national constitutional framework would permit the emergence of a subnational policy regime diverging from the rest of the country's neoliberal regime. For sure, a few and small policy initiatives can be put in place, but nothing like a separate regime.
Nonetheless, even if we find that the contrast between ‘regimes’ may be overemphasised, politics and policies at the national and subnational level have diverged enough in these countries to permit Eaton to write a book that will for a long time be a must-read for Latin American scholars interested in subnational dynamics, and mandatory for any working on the Andean countries.
