Institutional adaptation and innovation in rural Mexico

Abstract

This volume explores the complex processes of institutional transformation that were unleashed in rural Mexico by the government's massive program of market-oriented economic reforms in the 1990s, creating new pressures for campesinos to make their production choices individually. Instead of paving the way for the triumph of free market forces, neoliberal reforms in rural Mexico tiggered a creative episode of institutional reconstruction and innovation. As a result, instead of focusing on how the old institutions of statism were dismantled, students of rural Mexico should shift their attention to understanding the new institutions that have replaced those destroyed or displaced by the neoliberal reforms.