The insufficiency of the 1990s (?) liberalisation agenda promoted by the ‘Washington Consensus’, the emergence of regulatory governance, and the reconfiguration of global value chains driven by the rise of China as the world’s manufacturing centre have propelled Latin American polities/countries/institutions towards new experiments in economic governance. These efforts have nonetheless been insufficient to solve the region’s structural inequality, its languishing economic growth prospects, and they have also been inadequate to tackle new environmental challenges. This chapter revisits the developmental policy debates vis-à-vis the state vs laissez-faire. From the vantage point of both renewed dependency theory scholarship and a constructivists account of economic institutions, in this chapter I show how socio-economic systems in Latin America (and their study) have transformed over the past X years. In doing so, I invite future researchers to see economic institutions as dynamic political projects rather than congealed norms of modern economic systems.

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