Pobreza, Desarrollo y Alianzas Multiactorales: Balances y Perspectivas

The FORTAL programme (Strengthening of Alliances against Urban Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean) was a two-year international multi-sectoral experience led by institutions from Argentina, Peru and Costa Rica. Its main goal was to support local processes of social empowerment through the development of alliances between public sector and civil society. The programme sponsored 22 alliances in 15 countries, mostly with a focus on employment, income improvement, local development and housing for low-income groups.

In the early 1990s, strong neo-liberal political–economic models were imposed in the Latin American region. This meant a split between economic growth and social development, weakening the state–civil society relationship and generating a number of social crises during the late 1990s and early 2000s in many countries. Adriana Clemente argues that “…the persistence of poverty and the need to make progress toward new developmental paradigms reinforces the necessity of studying in-depth multi-participant alliances as instruments of agreement and action, for the sake of social demands that otherwise can be easily ignored by governments’ short-term agendas or media-oriented actions. In this context, multi-participant alliances acquire more political value and deserve to be explored as repositioning strategies for organized low-income sectors who pursue real social and economic development.”

The book is based on a collection of 17 papers presented at the Regional Meeting of Local Development Alliances in 2004, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The book has three parts. The first contextualizes and analyzes the programme and its results, and comprises four papers that:
· critically analyze the neoliberal reforms imposed in the region during the 1990s, comparing their effects among nations;
· provide descriptive data about implementation of the programme;
· generate a critical analysis of the “incidence” of the programme in the participant countries; and
· draw some lessons from the implementation of FORTAL.

Perhaps the most important lesson learnt is the evidence that a local strategy of alliance is not a solution to poverty and development if it does not resolve problems of distribution. The second part of the book presents some external overviews and general considerations of the political and economic dimensions implied in multi-participant social policies, as part of the broader current political and economic context in Latin America. The six papers pass dialectically from the evidence provided by the experiences (successes and failures) to the construction of a general theory of local alliance-based development. The last part of the book describes particular experiences in Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, which demonstrate how and why the content and aims established by FORTAL can be implemented and practiced in real contexts, with relatively high levels of success.