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This article provides a critical overview of neoliberalism scholarship from a queer sociological perspective. Despite mainstream neoliberalism scholarship neglecting sexuality as a system of intersecting power relations, sociologists of sexualities have explored how neoliberalism reshapes the state, market, society, and subjectivity concerning sex, intimacy, and sexual politics. Highlighting the intersection of the sociology of sexualities with transnational feminist and queer studies, as well as critical race studies, I advocate for a refined understanding of sexuality as integral to neoliberalism's operations with empire, colonialism, and racial capitalism. I suggest areas for future research to further develop this understanding, including the emphasis on the variegated nature of neoliberalism, its ambivalence and contradictions, and its promiscuous convergence with other political, social, and cultural formations. This article ultimately calls for a queer political economic analysis in the continued engagement with neoliberalism and its interactions with sexuality politics to understand new global challenges and social transformations, including shifting geopolitics, digital and platform economies, and climate and reproductive crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canadian universities are increasingly relying on private-sector participation in the provision of student housing through new means and strategies, such as financialization and public–private partnerships (P3s). Such participation is furthering the transformation of students as consumers and universities as neoliberal subjects embracing business propositions and entrepreneurial initiatives. We discuss the precedents, current motivations for university administrations, and effects of private-sector participation in shaping contemporary student housing landscapes in Canada, with a view to the international situation. Ultimately, the overreliance on market-based and P3 solutions for new student housing is not resolving the immediate housing availability and affordability needs of Canadian university students; it is, rather, entrenching enclaves of exclusive student housing for some while doing little to reduce the barriers to adequate housing for a far larger number of students. For further exploration and debate, we conclude with a reflection on alternative, participatory, and inclusive student housing solutions beyond P3s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of responsibility for future‐making often arise in localities where the withdrawal of capital and state seem to leave tangible voids and a sense of loss. Over the past decade, academic discourse has furthered discussions on the role of civic engagement, local initiatives and their agency under conditions of urban shrinkage. However, scholars (including ourselves) are confronted with their own normative assumptions and aspirations when conceptualizing local initiatives in shrinking cities. Through reviewing the literature on this phenomenon, we identified three main epistemological pitfalls that emerge from the legacies of planning discipline, current neoliberal developments and scholars’ own biases. By drawing from our fieldwork experiences, we conclude that local initiatives should be viewed in the plurality of their essences as extremely variegated in form and motivation. We therefore assert the need to disentangle research on local initiatives in shrinking cities from normative aspirations to avoid neoliberal responsibilization, and instead pay attention to the nuances of their aims and practices, achievements and constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In case of migration of Iranian nationals, while Mediterranean countries are hesitant to accept Iranian undergraduate students and do not admit applications from Iranian citizens due to sanctions, Turkey has increasingly been preferred by Iranian students and individuals who purchase real estate in Turkey in return of residency permit in the last decade. By revealing the South-South migration in context of capital intensified migration in Turkey, the article argues that the introduction of citizenship-by-investment category in 2016 regulating the exceptional acquisition of Turkish citizenship and increasing quotas for international students have motivated more Iranian students to apply undergraduate programs in Turkey and Iranian nationals to buy real estate in Turkey. This transformation in Turkish migration domain isin line with the neoliberal logic and demands of market by commodifying both citizenship and education. In unfolding motivations of Iranians, the research utilizes qualitative data collection technique in which I conduct twenty-five semi-structured interviews with Iranian undergraduate students and real estate purchasers. Interviews suggest that the mobility of Iranian students and investors offers a unique example in the Mediterranean region as Turkey has become a plausible option for Iranian nationals who can obtain an alternative way to exit from Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the criticisms made of business schools and higher education institutions regarding their teaching practices and their responsibility in economic crises. Neoliberal ideology and a consumerist approach to education have created a utilitarian relationship with knowledge, in which education is seen as an investment that must be profitable. While alternative forms of learning exist, which emphasize the teacher's role in supporting students' capacities for change, and integrate solidarity, ethics, and empathy into the learning process, reflection on participatory classrooms raises questions about their utilitarian scope. Participative pedagogies may be relevant for developing behavioural competencies that aid employability. However, participatory classrooms often reproduce certain dynamics of domination in terms of gender and sociocultural background. Students sometimes find it difficult to adopt alternative models of organization and individual practice. They are reluctant to explore unconventional ideas or contemplative practices because they feel obliged to conform to the behaviour expressed by their group. The power of imagination is vital to free oneself from conformity and cynicism, and mindfulness practices may be beneficial in this regard. It is also essential that students recognize the difference between an opinion and a well-argued knowledge base, and that embodied knowledge is deconstructed with them to collectively rebuild new knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events that have happened since 2002, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power, contain rich research topics that need to be examined for many years by social scientists who work on Turkey. However, AKP’s cultural policies have not yet received sufficient attention in academic studies. The dissolution of the moderate atmosphere created by the EU accession negotiations and liberal policies in the early 2000s had a direct impact on AKP’s cultural policies in the 2010s. This article argues that the cultural policies implemented in the last decade, which I will define as yerli ve milli (homegrown and national) cultural policy, emerged intending to fill the cultural hegemony gap that manifested after the conservative art debates (2012), Gezi Park Protests (2013) and the termination of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process (2015). By analysing the formation and implementation levels of the yerli ve milli culture, the article shows that this unofficially implemented yerli ve milli cultural policy seeks to construct a neoliberal cultural space in which the Islamic elements are integrated into the traditional national cultural policies centred on Turkishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that neoliberal rationality implies the economic opening of state spaces in a borderless global market, this article proposes a critical reassessment of the origins of actually existing neoliberalism, with the twofold aim of addressing the empirical shortcomings of the conventional narrative and specifying the conditions of the emergence of neoliberalization. The present authors demonstrate how the US Department of State implemented a foreign economic policy between 1933 and 1947 which constituted one of the first neoliberal experiments of the twentieth century, engendering the hotbed of transatlantic neoliberalization which unfolded, albeit incompletely, in the following decades. This revisitation of the origins of neoliberalization has, in turn, enabled a theoretical reframing of the neoliberal spatiality, intersecting multiple stream framework analysis and the neo-institutionalist approach, in order to highlight the complexity of the factors responsible for the emergence of political neoliberalism in the context of the global crisis of the 1930s and 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) extended its mandate beyond Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to the Middle East. Since then, it has supported financial institutions, private sector involvement, energy production and, most recently, infrastructure and public service reforms. While the EBRD presents itself as supporting the region's economies in light of the refugee 'crisis', I question the power relations driving its recent public investments there. I situate them within the context of global capitalism's crises since the Great Recession and MDBs' development agendas in the Middle East, specifically increased aid since 2011. I argue that, jointly advanced by the EBRD and Jordanian state, the EBRD's public loans in Jordan offer fixes for capitalism's crises to the benefit of donors, the state as well as private investors. More specifically, the EBRD's projects and emphasis on the refugee "crisis" entrench and justify market-based neoliberal reforms in Jordan's infrastructure and public services, opening them up to investment and expanding accumulation at the expense of public interest. The Jordanian state is an active partner and beneficiary of these projects, not only establishing the necessary regulatory frameworks for them, but also aligning them with its own development agendas and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s Estonia has been characterized by the acceptance of neoliberal values, as an antidote to the Soviet past. Neoliberal practices, like quantification and market- orientation, have permeated most spheres of society, including academia. There has been very little critical reflection on the epistemic inequalities created by this academic model for Estonia as a semi-peripheral country. In this article, the authors aim to place the neoliberalization of academia within a broader framework of colonial practices within global knowledge production, continuing their previous work on the blind spots of transnational feminism and intersections of feminisms and neoliberalism. Building on insights developed within transnational and decolonial feminism, the authors propose three interventions into neoliberal academic culture: telling better stories, practicing slow scholarship to tease apart complex colonial entanglements and using creative writing practices.

Both Chile and Argentina have a history of neoliberalization, but while neoliberal reforms brought social unrest to Argentina in 2001 after Menem's "economic miracle", in recent years Chile has decided to end a neoliberal era through a plebiscite for a new constitution. One single element is not enough to explain this difference. For this reason, in this article we will explain what neoliberalism has meant for the history of both countries in terms of "state capacity". The cost paid by society for neoliberalization is not only social or economic inequality, but also the damage to the state's capacity for further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Lefebvrian triad, we explore spatial organizing of classed‐gendered work and working bodies in a cafe space that emerges from urbanized claims of empowering "rural poor women" to become entrepreneurs by employing them in a cafe. Our critical‐interpretive ethnography analyses the process of installing a neoliberal‐managerial path along which foodwork and working bodies are hierarchized and disciplined, creating spatialized hegemonic gendered positionalities interlaced with elite urban‐working class rural binaries. The womanized workers came to embody the binaries and the dialectical contradictions they created, yet performing alternative femininities in the free spaces and times in the cafe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electoral geographic world system method can explain the role and significance of electoral diversification in different regions of the world economy. This paper focuses on the 2017 Japanese General Election and combines the world system analysis method with electoral politics to explore the political tussle between different interest groups in international free trade and domestic agricultural policy reform. This reveals the relationship between global geopolitical economic changes and local elections. The results show that: (1) Due to the "incumbency effect" caused by low-information and low-participation elections, the one-party dominance pat‐ tern of the liberal Democratic Party is stable, but the intensity of the election in urban and rural areas varies greatly, and the representativeness is increasingly unbalanced; (2) The global neoliberalism promotes the reconstruction of Japan's economic space and the change of its electoral power, forming the political geography of power based on free trade economic geography and the political geography of support based on traditional agricultural culture geography; (3) By adjusting the power relationship between the agricultural interest groups and the prime minister, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) regime reformed the agricultural policy and closed the separation between the supporting geography and the power geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on what people working in edu-business want to achieve. The aim is to explore (1) how the edu-business sector is discursively constructed as a work-place and part of the education system, and (2) how this discourse is organized within an affective economy – that is how the valuation of emotions distinguish what are considered as 'good' or 'bad' subjectivities, practices, and institutions. The analysis draws on interviews with 22 people working in Sweden's edu-business sector. The results illuminate three discourses: a bureaucratic, an entrepreneurial, and a profit discourse. Emotions attached to the bureaucratic discourse are anxiety, guilt, and boredom. Connected to the entrepreneurial discourse are joy, creativity, and well-being. Shame and pride are attached to the profit discourse. The affective economy constructs the business sector as desirable and the public sector as its opposite. Studying 'the bright side' of neoliberalism helps us to understand its power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, which is based on an empirical analysis of neoliberal restructuring in Leipzig, East Germany, I describe how the study of affective atmospheres adds to our understanding of urban restructuring, showing how collective moods affect (de)mobilization, contestation and the regulation of urban political economy to shed light on the relation between institutional, political and social processes. I demonstrate the relevance of affect for power relations, political interactions beyond rationality, and the rhythms and temporalities of urban restructuring, as exemplified by two prominent atmospheres that characterize Leipzig—post shrinkage depression (PSD) and anticipatory hope (AH). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper challenges mainstream economists' ideas that economic growth and productivity in the neoliberal framework can reduce inequality and alleviate poverty. Using the lens of historical sociology, it demonstrates that at the present conjuncture, belonging to a dominant caste of a region may not necessarily yield economic benefits. In fact, economic chasm and differentiation within a caste group appear to have widened. Only those groups within the dominant caste have achieved upward class mobility whose land happened to crisscross neoliberal agendas of urban zoning and spacing. To build an interdisciplinary dialogue, this paper invites economists to observe a complicated and contradictory picture full of unresolved caste and class predicaments as economic liberalization unfolds in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research addresses the construction of scale politics that unfolds at the intersection between the demands for employment and credit of subaltern subjects and state-local management at the beginning of the 21st century. From a multi-scalar approach, a qualitative methodology is used from which case studies are presented in Argentina (Fondo de Financiamiento Solidario) and Brazil (Banco Comunitario Popular). This article concludes that local state initiatives meeting such demands should consider the macro-policies that promote the neoliberalization of social relationships as well as their reproduction among subalternate subjects.

This study analyzes transformations in institutions of affordable housing production connected to neoliberalization, which have impacted affordability rates and income gaps in Copenhagen and Istanbul. Also, different types of affordable housing began to develop, such as modular housing of Almenbolig+ in Copenhagen and housing for very low-income people in Istanbul. Increased affordability rates are the results of the transformations of welfare state-based practices to market-based approaches. The aim of this paper is to analyze and compare how affordable housing institutions have transformed from being financed through public funds to private funding sources since the periods of financial crisis in 2001 and 2008 in a Western and non-Western country. Using the concept of neoliberal localization, this comparative case study employs variation finding tool to analyze the transformations under three causal mechanisms. The first mechanism is state withdrawal of providing finance to affordable housing production; second, collaboration with private sector for financing affordable housing while increasing authority of municipalities. The third mechanism is restructuring institutions to open a base for public-private partnerships. Primary data was provided from interviews, while secondary data was gathered from planning policies, legislations, OECD and country statistics. The outcome of this study reveals information about changes in affordable housing institutions and neoliberal effects on affordable housing production due to contributions of local governments contingent on requirements of private funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability standards have been one of the hopefuls for decades when it comes to ensuring the sustainability of biomass for the bioeconomy, especially in the wake of their evolvement from voluntary, non-governmental to hybrid, public–private governance instruments in recent years. In addition to doubts regarding their legitimacy and effectiveness, however, they have also been associated with a neoliberalization of nature that integrates natural resources into a free market logic. Drawing on a conceptual framework that builds on political ecology and the political sociology of policy instruments, this paper challenges this notion. To this end, it examines sustainability standards in three countries/regions particularly prominent for the bioeconomy—the EU, Brazil, and Indonesia—to illustrate how these can be differentiated in terms of their neoliberal orientation, and what can be inferred from this for the orientation and state of the respective bioeconomies. The results show that the introduction of sustainability standards is not necessarily accompanied by a neoliberalization of nature. Rather, it is shown that the standards and their specific designs—and thus also their intrinsic understanding of sustainability as integration—are primarily intended to serve the material interests of the state and the respective industrial factions, for which neoliberal configurations are sometimes seen as rather obstructive, sometimes as rather useful. The sustainability standards, and thus the bioeconomies for which they stand, therefore, rather serve as instruments to stay on the path of modernization and industrial development already taken or envisaged, or, put differently, as strategies to avoid social–ecological transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s Estonia has been characterized by the acceptance of neoliberal values, as an antidote to the Soviet past. Neoliberal practices, like quantification and market-orientation, have permeated most spheres of society, including academia. There has been very little critical reflection on the epistemic inequalities created by this academic model for Estonia as a semi-peripheral country. In this article, the authors aim to place the neo liberalization of academia within a broader framework of colonial practices within global knowledge production, continuing their previous work on the blind spots of transnational feminism and intersections of feminisms and neoliberalism. Building on insights developed within transnational and decolonial feminism, the authors propose three interventions into neoliberal academic culture: telling better stories, practicing slow scholarship to tease apart complex colonial entanglements and using creative writing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws attention to the extent to which third sector organizations have acted as policy catalysts and entrepreneurs for a social investment state, and the extent to which third sector organizations and interests are now dominated by external private and corporate interests. Though the United Kingdom and Ireland are the primary focus, because of the global influence of the British Irish Council and British Council, these developments are now permeating other economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution to the debate that followed the publication of Hilde Refstie's timely and cogent Reconfiguring research relevance, I propose to take a closer look at the funding structures that bind academia and other institutional and private sector actors into networks of collaboration and research co-production often experienced as dysfunctional. In particular, I focus on competitive funding bids that distribute financial and labour resources by awarding short-term 'projects', with particular reference to European Union (EU) projects. Drawing on my current research work on the 'project economy', co-led with Nadine Hassouneh and funded by the KONE Foundation at Tampere University, I make two initial suggestions that expand on some of the points raised so far in the discussion hosted by Fennia. First, project-based research funding is a more politicized and coercive tool than we tend to think. Second, project management and project-based work, and the associated patterns of (gendered and racialized) precarization and even abuse, have a longer and more ingrained history than what we commonly identify as the 'neoliberalization' of academia. By way of conclusion, I highlight how scrutinizing the funding architectures that enable and constrain our work help us to explore the relation between research and policy, beyond the limits of critical categories such as 'neoliberalism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review: Oskar Szwabowski, Nekrofilna produkcja akademicka i pieśni partyzantów. Autoetnografia pracy akademickiej i dydaktycznej w czasach zombie-kapitalizmu (Necrophilic Academic Production and the Songs of Partisans: Authoethnography of Academic Research and Teaching in Times of Zombie Capitalism), Instytut Pedagogiki Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław 2019. The review critically reflects on the potential and limitations of the autoethnographic method seen as an analytical tool supporting a better understanding of academic work in the context of the academia’s neoliberal reform in Poland. The review focuses on Oskar Szwabowski’s book Nekrofilna produkcja akademicka i pieśni partyzantów (Necrophilic Academic Production and the Songs of Partisans), which explores alternative forms of academic writing and more democratic model of didactics. The text then addresses the therapeutic-compensatory function of autoethnography, linking it to Szwabowski’s affirmation of the art of parrhesia and the community-forming aspect of collaborative writing. Moreover, the review draws attention to the shortcomings of the book, arguing for a more nuanced, diverse vision of neoliberalism, along with a more in-depth use of the possibilities offered by Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Conference Journal of Social Policy / Sosyal Siyaset Konferanslar Dergisi is the property of Journal of Social Policy Conferences/Sosyal Siyaset Konferanslar Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article questions the role of universities in the power/knowledge relation by examining the case of Turkey's 'Academics for Peace.' It is based on six in-depth interviews conducted with dismissed peace petitioners. Facing both the market pressures and the state oppression, the intellectual institutions in many countries are in a precarious position. Even though it is true that knowledge can be oppressive, it is also true that it can help constructing resistance. However, this requires new, and relatively autonomous, spaces of intellectual activity. Deriving from the example of Turkey's 'solidarity academies,' this paper shows that the attempts to construct alternative institutions face numerous hardships, many of them deriving from lack of funding. It calls for contemplation on ways of dealing with the neoliberalization of intellectual institutions and the authoritarian political wave that numerous countries face while scrutinizing the relationship between scientific knowledge and power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public demand for companies to assume responsibility for social and environmental impacts of their operations has led to an increase in the number of industries adopting corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies. The water industry, defined in this article as public and private suppliers of water, holds the unique responsibility to manage a critical natural resource. As such, a review of scholarship on CSR in the water industry provides an entry point to assess the specific role the water industry plays in addressing societal and environmental concerns. This review identifies three prominent themes that appear in the existing literature. The first theme investigates the motivations for the water industry to utilize CSR strategies; the second describes the limitations of current CSR frameworks; and the last is an assessment of whether CSR policies and practices differ between public and private water companies. Through a critical review of each theme, this article evaluates the level of CSR engagement in the water industry, and if CSR activity supports further privatization. Taken together, this review article provides a summary of the current state of research on CSR within the water industry, analyses limitations on current evaluation methods and frameworks, and connects the literature to broader themes on the privatization of water and market environmentalism. We conclude with a discussion of future research topics such as CSR barriers to implementation, water‐related CSR indicators, and the relationship of CSR policies to remunicipalization of water providers. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water Governance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our contribution aims at providing a return on experience by describing and theorizing the tactics we developed to poach time, space, and resources in order to write. A series of neoliberal measures in French higher education during the last 20 years shape the context, and have consequences for the political and material economies of scholarly writing. We use de Certeau's concept of poaching, because the strategies that our institutions deploy exert immense pressure on our ordinary scholarly life. Consequently, writing economies have to resort to poaching tactics. We present some of the devices and fixes we have developed in this regard in terms of our teaching, supervision, and research activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the neoliberal transformation of Valparaíso from a deindustrialised, declining city to a site of tourist appeal that commodifies, in an ambivalent but striking way, its own decay. We describe the city’s economic, social and cultural trajectory from a period of global importance as a key port city to deindustrialisation and the acceleration of the city’s decline and the imposition of violent economic policies between 1970s and 90s. Drawing on the notion of slow violence and critical literature around heritage, postcolonial, deindustrial and ‘poverty’ tourism, we trace the impact and materiality of economic abandonment into the present moment, together with the city’s contemporary reliance on tourism for economic survival through a form of dereliction tourism. In a port city like Valparaíso, which has suffered economic decline, widening inequality and precariousness, of which neoliberalism is one cause, the full plasticity and ambivalence of neoliberalization processes is revealed.

Copyright of Economía, Sociedad y Territorio is the property of El Colegio Mexiquense and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

At the turn of the millennium, Turkish television series became a global phenomenon, requiring comprehension of the broader social and historical context of their production, distribution and reception. The paper considers questions regarding their genre and points to the socioeconomic and political circumstances of their development and transformation into a cultural product with worldwide popularity and an industry with great market value. Particular attention has been given to the question of how these processes have affected the depiction of the family and family values in these series. The second part of the paper presents a case study of the series The Fall of Leaves, in which the concept of the family and family life that is offered through the plot of "the family in crisis" in the present age of changes is examined. The reception of family relationships in the series has been studied through the analysis of an internet forum in which forum members, viewers of this series in Croatia and the region, commented in 2287 posts from 2011 to 2012 on the first TV broadcast of this Turkish series.

This paper asks what critical urban theory can add to the sociology of disasters. If the fundamental insight of disaster studies is that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster, the starting point for critical urban studies is that capitalist urbanization is a disaster waiting to happen. Disasters are promoted and inflected by the specific forms of crisis and vulnerability created by neoliberal urbanization. Disasters are also ways in which urban space is produced and remade, in a process that can be called disaster urbanization. A critical account of the relationship between contemporary urbanization and disaster can help us better understand the disaster-prone, unevenly urbanizing future.

Copyright of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology is the property of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, I discuss the urban rescaling theory by questioning the forms of public action of Yaoundé and Douala’s urban governments, the political and the economic capital of Cameroon. Indeed, to respond to the challenges related to the housing crisis, the Cameroonian State has carried out reforms giving a larger place to private actors in the real estate development sector and transferred part of its competences to the urban scale. These dynamics seem to be part of qualitative transformation and scalar reorganization of public intervention known as neoliberalization. The legislative process of decentralization of competences related to housing production can be understood as a rescaling of public action. Thus, analysis of the real estate programs conducted by the two urban government attest that Yaoundé and Douala are indeed scales of diffusion of neoliberal practices forged in the local governance arenas. We thus underline the variegated form of neoliberalization of real estate in Cameroon. In this paper, I discuss the urban rescaling theory by questioning the forms of public action of the urban governments of Yaoundé and Douala, respectively the political and economic capitals of Cameroon. Indeed, to respond to the challenges related to the housing crisis, the Cameroonian State has carried out reforms giving a larger place to private actors in the real estate development sector and has transferred part of its competences to the urban scale. These dynamics seem to be part of the qualitative transformation and scalar reorganization of public intervention known as neoliberalization. The legislative process of the decentralization of competences related to housing production can be understood as a rescaling of public action. Thus, analysis of the real estate programmes conducted by the two urban governments attest that Yaoundé and Douala are indeed scales of diffusion of neoliberal practices forged in the local governance arenas. However, because Cameroonian cities and housing remain key issues both for the construction of the Cameroonian State and for the legitimacy of Paul Biya's regime, the rescaling of public action appears unfulfilled. We thus underline the variegated form of the neoliberalization of real estate in Cameroon.