Co-optation, Cooperation or Competition? Microfinance and the new left in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua

Florent Bédécarrats, Johan Bastiaensen and François Doligez

Third World Quarterly, 2012, vol. 33, issue 1, 143-160

Abstract: The past decade has been marked by the resurgence of leftist political movements across Latin America. The rise of the ‘new left’ masks the ambivalent relationships these movements have with broader society, and their struggle to find an alternative to the prevailing development model. Filling the void left by failed public banks, the microfinance sector has grown significantly across the continent in an increasingly commercial form. Analysis of Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia reveals that their new governments share a common distrust of microfinance. Yet, in the absence of viable alternatives for financial service provision, governments and microfinance stakeholders are forced to coexist. The environment in which they do so varies greatly, depending on local political and institutional factors. Some common trends can nevertheless be discerned. Paradoxically, the sector seems to be polarised into two competing approaches which reinforce the most commercially oriented institutions on the one hand, and the most subsidised on the other, gradually eliminating the economically viable microfinance institutions which have tried to strike a balance between social objectives and the market.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2012.627245 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Co-optation, Cooperation or Competition? Microfinance and the new left in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua (2012)
Working Paper: Co-optation, Cooperation or Competition? Microfinance and the New Left in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:33:y:2012:i:1:p:143-160

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.627245

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().