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This paper provides an ethnographic exploration of the current socioeconomic and political crisis of Spain from the case study of a Rural Development Group in Asturias (Spain). This group channels EU funds into a region undergoing dramatic economic decline and depopulation, while at the same time attempts to create a fictitious territorial identity for commercialization purposes. To do so, a Cultural Park project was planned but never implemented in reality, being replaced by a series of large infrastructure investments. The paper argues that in order to understand the Spanish corporatist neoliberalism, we need to increase our knowledge from an ontological perspective. This implies addressing the realities enacted and constructed by social actors in practice, halfway between traditional clientelist dynamics and neoliberal free market logics. This hybrid phenomenon is publicly criticized but largely unknown. In it, communities of complicity distribute public resources without public accountability. In turn, citizens ignore, tolerate or participate –either actively or passively– in the process. In addition, the paper presents a case study of the failure of knowledge transfer processes in Spain, showing that shortcomings are not due to wrong epistemological practices but rather to the internal dynamics of communities of complicity, which can do without knowledge and academia to reproduce themselves. Finally, it is argued that “politics" should be retained as an ethnographic concept instead of a ubiquitous self-explanatory universal category if we want to retain its critical capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]