The New Political Economy Initiative
The New Political Economy Initiative (NPEI) is a research programme based at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
The Initiative aims rethink the study of the economy by catalyzing a set of research collectives. We draw together economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, geographers, legal scholars, urbanists, technical experts, journalists and research practitioners to build a structural and institutional vision of South Asia’s economies, past, present, and future.
A network to shift the economic common sense
The neoliberal paradigm, the notion that “free markets” are the best means of achieving human flourishing, is broken, having failed to deliver even on its own terms. Adherents will argue that these are failures of execution rather than conception, but this no longer carries legitimacy in an era of sharp inequalities, jobless growth, corrosive populism, and a boiling planet. Yet no new economic paradigm has emerged to replace neoliberalism as our economic common sense. The New Political Economy Initiative at IIT Bombay aims to help build an ecosystem out of which an alternative paradigm can emerge to inform a new economic common sense in India, South Asia and the Global South. Central to this new common sense is a structural vision of the economy, namely seeing economies as composed of varied institutions and power relations that form particular configurations with particular dynamics. Critically, if the economy and indeed society at large is a collective artefact, it can be reconstructed on alternative, more inclusive terms.
The Initiative seeks to reset the conversation, picking up abandoned but fertile lines of inquiry and forging new ones across the social sciences and law to push towards a democratic political economy. Our efforts and activites at the moment are streamlined through three research clusters:
Social Structures of the Economy
Regional Political Economy
Industrial Policy and Structural Transformation
Being situated at the intersection of popular and scholarly discourses, these areas provide focal points in our effort to shift the economic common sense as well as add up to an overall theme of economic transformation.
New Political Economy Initiative is part of the Emerging Political Economies Global South (EPE-GS) Network, involving five other centers, namely
- Pathways Beyond Neoliberalism: Voices from MENA at the American University Cairo, Egypt
- Centre for Critical Imagination: Political Economy and Citizenship at Cebrap – Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning
- Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
- Program for the Economic Analysis of Mexico at El Colegio de México
- Teaching and Researching Equitable Economics from the South at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
The programme at IIT Bombay focuses on India and South Asia. These six centers are further part of a larger network of 16 university political economy centers across the world, called the Emergent Political Economies Network.
How do we do it?
Behind NPEI is a small core team of people who drive the Initiative programmatically, carrying forward its vision and mandate. This core team works alongside an advisory board that provides strategic oversight to the Initiative. Further, the three Research Clusters are the nucleus of all activities within the Initiative and are staffed by people who together drive the research agenda in each research cluster. Finally, we host small working groups and also larger communities of scholars coming from different disciplinary persuasions with an attempt to provide an institutional space to new thinking on the economy.