Getting to Grips with ALBA’s Brand Governance

Abstract

This chapter first explores the emergence of ALBA and its varied initiatives before analysing issues around its limits and governance. Official and observable versions of ALBA governance are compared, with much of the former proving deficient or non-existent. ALBA governance functions as a “brand”, presenting pre-existing, improvised, and better planned projects as a coherent entity and thus obscuring Venezuela’s defining control and influence. The effects of this are clear in faltering grandnational companies and the façade of an ALBA Bank, with Venezuelan inconstancy, improvisation, and impropriety often crucial. ALBA’s real governance revolves around the Venezuelan presidency and oil-backed development funds whereas its idealised form is a regional extension of Venezuela’s “dissimulative state”, which vaunts formal institutions and procedures but proceeds informally and unsystematically. Though governance arrangements vary across initiatives, generally negative impacts have rendered ALBA a toxic brand for internal and external stakeholders, hamstringing initiatives new and old.