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Paper short abstract

Analyzing the failure of development policy in Central Appalachia, I ask, what comes ‘after development’ (Li 2017)? Drawing on critical agrarian studies and feminist political economy (Ossome 2025), I argue that development approaches must contend with an emerging post-neoliberal political economy.

Paper long abstract

Based on our recent book, Power and Just Transitions (Gaventa and Schwartzman 2026), I detail the failure of development policy in Central Appalachia, a coal mining region of the United States plagued with endemic poverty, and I ask, what comes ‘after development’ (Li 2017) in similar underdeveloped regions across the globe? In Appalachia, regional development initiatives explicitly used development state theory to guide decades of industrial policy aimed at rapid economic growth and diversification (Pollard et al. 2022). Yet, the region remains one of the poorest in the country. Dependency theorists of the region, calling it a ‘Global South in the North,’ contend that Appalachia’s underdevelopment stems from its position as an ‘internal colony’ (Lewis et al. 1978; Salstrom 1994), trapped in capitalist relations of resource extraction (Whisnant 1994; Stump 2021). Neither approach, however, has grappled with economic forms that generate widespread conditions of surplus labor, what I contend is a crisis of post-neoliberal political economy (Slobodian 2025). Across the globe, new economic formations increasingly fail to secure stable employment or social reproduction, following the neoliberal dismantling of both family wages and social welfare (Cooper 2019; 2025; Slobodian 2025). Bringing together critical agrarian studies and feminist political economy, and drawing on the work of Lyn Ossome (2025), I argue that if development is still possible in places like Appalachia, it is only in a form that responds to a post-neoliberal political conjuncture, and the end of the promise that capitalism can deliver economic benefit through industrialization, urbanization, and economic growth.