Embedding post-capitalist alternatives? The global network of alternative knowledge production and mobilization

Since the 1970s, transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) have emerged as a component of global civil society, generating visions and strategies for a ‘globalization from below’ that points toward post-capitalist alternatives. This study proceeds from a neo-Gramscian understanding that hegemonic think tanks and TAPGs are embedded in opposing historical blocs, as they develop and deploy knowledge with the intent to make their respective blocs more coherent and effective. Here, we map the global network of TAPGs and kindred international groups – alternative media, social movement organizations, and international NGOs – in order to discern more specifically how TAPGs are embedded in a larger formation. In this era of capitalist globalization, are TAPGs, like their hegemonic counterparts, positioned as ‘brokers’, bridging across geographic spaces (e.g. North-South) and movement domains to foster the convergence across difference that is taken as a criterial attribute of a counter-hegemonic historical bloc? Our network analysis suggests that transnational alternative policy groups are well placed to participate in the transformation of the democratic globalization network from a gelatinous and unselfconscious state, into an historical bloc capable of collective action toward an alternative global order. However, this general finding must be qualified in two respects. On the one hand, there are gaps in the bloc, having to do with the representation and integration of regions and movement domains, and with the salience of post-capitalism as a unifying social vision. On the other hand, our architectonic network analysis does not reveal what the various relations and mediations in which TAPGs are active agents actually mean in concrete practice. There is a need both for closer analysis of the specific kinds of relations that link transnational alternative policy groups to other international actors, including intergovernmental organizations and funding foundations, and for field work that explores the actual practices of these groups, in situ.