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Democratizing the Developmental State

Pedro Alarcón

Contact: pedroalarcon76(at)gmail.com

Visiting professor Latin American Studies / International Relations, University of Vienna

Pedro Alarcón is a research fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town.
Dr. Alarcón has held visiting professorships at the University of Vienna and at several institutions in Ecuador. He has also undertaken postdoctoral research at universities in Germany, Peru and Colombia.
His research lies at the crossroads of climate change, energy, and society. From a Political Economy perspective he explores the entanglements between nature, rent, and national states.
Dr. Alarcón studied energy sciences and environmental humanities at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences, the University of Oslo, and the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. He holds a PhD in Development Economics from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.
Regions/countries of interest: Southern Africa, Andean countries, the Philippines

Research project

Trajectories of Developmental States: Natural Resource Nationalism and the Challenges during the Energy Transition

In my current research I delve into the juncture triggered by the climate and energy crises from the viewpoint of the peripheral developmental state. Herein, I identify specific constraints to a sustainable structural transformation and other contradictions that stem from the Global South’s position in the international division of nature or its traditional (economic, social, and political) dependence on natural resource rent. In identifying these constraints, I inquire into how to catalyze them within democratic polities. My comparative research on the emergence of the Global Southern developmental state locates in Latin America in the 1970s; herein, I highlight natural resource nationalism policies leading to domestic industrialization policies carried out in Ecuador (1972-1976) and Peru (1968-1975). In identifying the conditions under which peripheral developmental states emerge, I also draw attention to Brazil’s ‘forgotten’ energy transition through the Proalcool program (1975-1982), which sought not only to transform the country’s energy system but also the economy through the emergence of governed interdependence between local firms and political elites. Through a diachronic comparative perspective, I examine developmental states’ transitions and trajectories from authoritarianism to democracy. Besides these Latin American countries, I also focus on Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa in times of the present energy transition in order to further understand the juncture triggered by the climate and energy crises and the peripheral states possibilities to democratically intervene (or not) the economy.