Negotiating Local Development within Processes of Neoliberalisation: Empirical Evidence from a Campesinos Cooperative

This article highlights the role of organised rural communities in negotiating local development within processes of neoliberalisation. Based on the empirical evidence of a cooperative organisation from rural Chile, it is argued that local actors claim ownership of regional economic processes and local development agendas, while negotiating between mainstream economic growth worldviews and alternative solutions to market distribution failures. This negotiation results in local economies that manoeuvre between adapting and rejecting neoliberal economic policies offering a locally embedded solution to inequality and segregation, in this case to the benefit of a historically marginalised rural population.