This chapter talks about decentralization, which was in fact an enduring and characteristic form of government in the Americas by the time of the Great Depression. It was reimagined and redeployed twice during the subsequent years, first as a developmentalist prescription to expand the responsibilities of weak states, and later as an instrument to break down established state functions. During the 1980s, Colombian economist Eduardo Wiesner had served as the Western Hemisphere director for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pushing through structural adjustment programs throughout the region. By the 1990s, he was an advisor to the World Bank and an international authority on state decentralization. The power and example of decentralized corporations have reordered the political economy of the region and the very terms in which political economy was discussed.
