The Popular Economy and Its Critics: Cooperation and Contradiction in the Sandinista Welfare‐Developmentalist State

ABSTRACT The popular economy is a subjective economic community in Nicaragua. It is sustained by the imaginative and material labors of worker‐producers organized in households, cooperatives, and other self‐managing associations. This article demonstrates the popular economy's importance to the format of work, wealth, and welfare in contemporary Nicaragua. It situates the popular economy within the larger state and partisan project of 21st century Sandinista welfare developmentalism. It examines the contradictions within and between the cooperative movement and MEFCCA, a state agency established to foster the growth of popular economy associations. It argues that subjective economic communities like Nicaragua's “popular economy” are indeterminate: they have no political essence that can be disentangled from the wider social contexts in which they are inevitably imagined and enacted.