Precarious Alternative: Sustaining the Popular Solidarity Economy in Ecuador

Abstract

Written into the Ecuadorian Constitution in 2008, the Popular Solidarity Economy (PSE) was intended to be an alternative economy that "put people before the market" and was a centrepiece of left-wing President Correa's "21st Century Socialism". Ten years later, staff at the National Institute of Popular Solidarity Economy (IEPS) were uncertain about the future of the PSE and the institute itself. As politics shifted to the right, the place of the PSE and the IEPS appeared to be precarious to everyone involved--government functionaries, academics, NGO staff, and actors in the alternative economy itself.

Conducting research with the IEPS, I sought to understand how staff attempted to keep the PSE alive as an economic alternative during a period of waning political interest. While there, I came to see how the many different actors surrounding the PSE experienced precarity in mutually reinforcing ways, whether it was government staff constantly being replaced, NGOs seeking program funding, or PSE actors who were mostly trying to string together livelihoods from multiple unstable income sources.

Beyond the precarity experienced by individuals, I use the term 'precarious alternative' to highlight the position of the PSE as a whole. Firstly, with waning interest from both the public and the rest of government, the PSE was in danger of collapsing as a policy framework. Secondly, as the lack of political and economic support pushed the IEPS into encouraging more entrepreneurial strategies among program beneficiaries, the PSE itself risked becoming little different from the rest of the economy--its status as an alternative was also under threat. At the same time, I argue that the very alterity of the PSE created resonances with entrepreneurial logics of disruption.

In my analysis, I focus on the labour of IEPS staff. In doing so, I am able to show how experiences of precarity in both their work and careers pushed them to follow economic logics that reinforced the precarity of others. In a context in which having a 'side hustle' appeared sensible, the PSE became a vehicle for promoting micro-entrepreneurialism. What was originally a response to the neoliberalism of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s in Ecuador became another precarious thread in a patchwork of livelihood strategies. In this thesis, I am making an intervention into the anthropological literature on precarity and bureaucracy. I do this by examining how precarity is ported into and then reinforced by the state, not just through high-level policy decisions, but by the lived experiences of bureaucrats. Economic uncertainty encouraged many staff to have their own 'side hustles'. Entrepreneurial endeavours, however, were not only economic strategies but projects of self-making, with IEPS staff and other PSE proponents using entrepreneurial strategies to remake themselves as affectively engaged bureaucrats. As IEPS staff attempted to sustain both their careers and the PSE under precarious circumstances, they also made the PSE's status as an alternative itself precarious. Show more