ABSTRACT
This final chapter shifts attention away from both wider international contexts and national political struggles for state power, to consider the possibilities that more effective alternatives to neo-liberal adjustment may grow from the local strategies of resistance of a range of social and political groups in particular localities. Such perspectives are often, as suggested by Hyden above, linked to positions which share the neo-liberal distrust of the state and a conviction that it is only in the initiatives of local communities and the wider organisations of civil society that real advances in democratisation, empowerment and political participation will be achieved. This championing of the local over the national, civil society (however defined) over the state and the informal over the formal (in terms of political participation) has won many adherents amongst the left who, disillusioned with the top-down political styles of socialist regimes in the past, have interpreted the impressive range of so-called new social movements as a form of wider popular resistance to neo-liberalism and possible ‘building blocks’ for the construction of wider political alternatives.
