Neoliberalism and the Contradictions of Centralized State Planning in Colombia: Development, Democracy, Peace, and Rural Transformations

Abstract

This article examines the academic literature and reports on Colombia's National Development Plans over the past 50 years. It aims to identify the central debates regarding Colombia's development model, addressing a series of contradictions, path-dependent outcomes, salient variations, and issue framing. This work is based on a comprehensive web search of internet repositories of academic journals (mainly LatIndex and Google Scholar) to retrieve materials discussing Colombia's National Development Plans. The 60 articles and reports analyzed date from 1975 until 2023 and include the most relevant materials regarding the proposed topic. As in all interpretative research processes, the main arguments of this article emerged gradually, first by reading the articles as separate pieces of data and then by trying to identify connecting dots in the most recurrent arguments and themes. This study identifies four salient and interrelated debates that emerge continuously regarding Colombia's National Development Plans—the historical prevalence of the neoliberal development model, the continuation of a democratic deficit in the conception of development, the abandonment of the rural areas in development strategies, and the relationship between the development model and armed conflict. This research shows how these debates are interwoven and have as a common denominator the historical circumstances underlying the incorporation of the neoliberal model in Colombia's National Development Plans. It creates connections between different materials and corrects existing fallacies and false beliefs concerning the planning processes and development.