1) Bibliographic data
McDonald, James H. (1999) “The Neoliberal Project and Governmentality in Rural Mexico: Emergent Farmer Organization in the Michoacan highlands.” Human Organization, V. 58-3, Fall:274-84.

2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
i) Explore the neoliberal project in the context of Mexico’s new agrarian reform and the disjuncture between neoliberal ideals and on-the-ground reality. This is examined through the case of small-scale dairy farmers in northwestern Michoacán as they struggle to understand their relationship with a medium-scale dairy processor who is urging them to organize in the name of quality.

ii) Contextualize and evaluate neoliberalism in the Mexican context through the analysis of agricultural change as an illustration of the consequences of attempting to weld neoliberalism with the Mexican political economy. Specifically, analysis focus on small-scale dairy farmers on the Mexican margins of northwestern Michoacán as they attempt to engage and understand the new global language of the market ushered in with the North American Free Trade Agreement.

iii) Explore in detail the confrontation of a global discourse and associated set of practices with local realities and knowledge.

iv) Show how the art of governance works itself out at the local level in a process characterized by the marked contradiction between the options assumed to be “available” to farmers by the El Paraiso dairy and the actual constraints that exist on farmers’ ability to modify their practices. Farmers are being put into what is effectively an impossible situation when asked to produces a “quality” product in a more “efficient”, “rational”, and “competitive” manner, all of which are expressed goals of the dairy.
Beginning in the 1980s, Mexico embarked on a path of radical economic reform whose avowed goal was to reorient the economy from a state-centered to a free-market system. Under the administration of Salinas (1988-1994), Mexican political discourse embraced Western neoliberalism. To understand the relationship between globalization, the state, and local producers and processors, the author employs Foucault’s concept of governmentality.
When examining contemporary neoliberal economic reforms Foucault would not focus on the more common objects of analyisis: reduction of tariff barriers, privatization, rationalization, or the down-sizing of the government. Rather than succumbing to the temptation of seeing these moves as the state and its agents abandoning civil society to the capriciousness of the market, Foucault implies that the turn to free-market practices produces and transforms markets, people, and everyday relationships at the local level in both intended and unintended ways. Often this relationship is couched in a dualist opposition of civil vs. state-centered domains. An important goal of this article, then, is to trace these linkages between the local level and the state, and explore how governmentality is shaping and reconstituting farmers and processors on Mexico’s rural margins.

3) Conceptual references to transnational – transnationalism

4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
The socioeconomic conditions in Mexico make it virtually impossible for neoliberal reform to take place. What is occurring in the countryside may be sold to the Mexican people as neoliberalism, but it is some other thing whose consequences for rural Mexicans are not clear. The project was originally planned in two phases, a diagnostic analysis followed by applied intervention. The second phase never materialized.
The governmentality approach is useful in that it helps to be clearer about the contradictions of the research, while revealing the hidden aspects of policy making.