According to most dictionaries, substitution refers to the replacement of a person or object with another—a clear-cut shift from one order of things to a different one. But what happens when substitution rather refers to a situation in which everything seems to change for it to remain the same?

In the 1950s Central America began a process known as Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI). Based on the idea that the economic underdevelopment of the Global South stemmed from its dependency on cheap raw-material exports and the need to import everything else, the solution was to ascend the value chain and substitute domestic goods for industrial imports.

Agriculture was central for ISI, enabling both cheap food and strong domestic markets. While ISI ultimately failed in terms of industrialization, it proved successful agriculturally. The agrarian frontier expanded and by the 1970s, most domestic demand for staple crops was met by local producers. The traditional land-owning elite captured the lion’s share of the resources directed by the state towards agriculture, in what Cristobal Kay (1998) has dubbed “modernization from above.” At the same time, many landless peasants gained access to marginal lands as part of colonization projects in which forest was substituted with farmland.

By the 1980s ISI was in crisis and calls for change intensified. According to the predominant interpretation, the market needed to substitute for the state as the main engine of development. Through a set of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) large amounts of resources were reoriented towards opening the economy, letting cheap imported goods flow in (including food) and promoting “non-traditional exports” (NTEs) to substitute for domestic-oriented agriculture. Resources were taken away from the domestic market and made available for those willing and able to export.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1971) used the notion of “passive revolution” to explore the tension between change and restoration in the context of capitalist modernization. One way such “revolution from above” can take place is when the transformation of a society follows the initiative of the dominant classes but is instrumentalized through the state and thus presented as neutral. As such, passive revolution can be seen as both a tactic to secure a conservative modernization with limited mass participation, as well as the historical project of a particular constellation of classes to remain dominant amid constant change and turmoil. Let’s use these ideas to think about substitution in Costa Rica.

The Costa Rican northern region, a set of lowlands bordering Nicaragua, had remained beyond national concern until the 1970s when escalating agrarian conflicts and the intensification of the war against the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua fueled increasing interest in the border. Killing the proverbial two birds with one stone, the Costa Rican government, with U.S. support, poured resources into the region to create a “living frontier”: a region populated by Costa Ricans producing food for the domestic market, creating a buffer zone with the Sandinista regime. As new infrastructure was built and economic and technical support became available, forests were turned into cattle ranches or fields of beans and other crops. The traditional land-owning elite, closely entwined with the political elite, hoarded most of these resources even as migrating landless peasants from different parts of the country settled in the region.

In the 1990s, after the Sandinistas were electorally defeated in Nicaragua, a new wave of substitution discourse became prevalent. Costa Rica embraced “sustainable development,” which meant two things. First, the market needed to substitute for the inefficient state as the engine of development, and thus state resources, again with U.S. financial support, were diverted away from domestic production and towards NTEs. Second, the country needed to embrace “industries without chimneys,” mainly tourism, services, and agro-exports, as alternatives to traditional industries.

In the northern plains, the large landowners who had benefited from ISI exploited their connections and shifted towards monocultures such as citrus trees and, later, pineapples. Peasant families, without enough resources to partake in this “productive reconversion,” were forced in most cases to either sell their land or join the monocrop revolution as contract farmers. Together with the waves of impoverished Nicaraguans running away from their devastated country, they constituted the pool of cheap labor upon which Costa Rica’s spectacular rise was built.

Costa Rica became the largest exporter of fresh pineapple in the world, with almost 70 percent of production in the northern plains. Further, pineapples became deeply enmeshed in Costa Rica’s image as the “world’s greenest, happiest country in the world,” a top ecotourism destination, and one of the pioneers of payments for ecosystem services. Not included in this imagery is the fact that the country is among the top consumers of pesticides per capita in the world, a contradiction that only makes sense within the broader framework of substitution where one order of things, traditional development, was replaced by a different one: sustainable development.

The concept of substitution here is an important index of passive revolution. First, with ISI and then in the 1990s, something “old” was to be replaced with something “new.” However, in both cases change was caught in the swing of a pendulum between state and market as engines of development. These supposed winds of change were accompanied by unrelenting continuity. The same actors in power before these periods of alleged substitution remained so afterwards. Second, the notion that everything has become “greener” with sustainable development hides the significant environmental and labor costs of a crop like pineapples. Everything changed, for it only to remain the same.