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Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2013, 9-13 April, Los Angeles
Session Title: Value Chains, Neoliberal Regulation, and Global Restructuring
Session Organizers: Jennifer Bair (University of Colorado at Boulder), Christian Berndt (University of Zurich), Victor Ramiro Fernández (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe), Marion Werner (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
For three decades, the value chain construct has served as a powerful heuristic device to conceptualize and critique links between economies of the global North and South. Over this period, the chain concept itself has undergone two major transformations: from “commodity” to “value chain,” signaling a reorientation from Marxist-inspired World Systems Theory to a more industry- and firm-centered mode of analysis; and from an academic framework to a development policy tool. Subsequently, value chains have had considerable impact on industrial and trade policy across a broad range of institutions including multilateral donors, bilateral funders, and UN agencies, as well as governments in “developing countries”.
Building on a workshop in November 2012 in Santa Fe, Argentina, this panel aims to foster critical conversations on the value chain concept, its circulation as a development policy tool, as well as its potential and limits in the context of contemporary global economic restructuring. In fostering this dialogue, we have two specific aims. First, we encourage analyses of value chain studies as policy tools in light of contemporary research on neoliberalism as a form of regulation. In short, do value chains constitute a neoliberal policy device, and if so, what are the geographies of policy at work and how are we to understand their effect(s)? What, for example, is the relationship between value chain analysis and the Markets for the Poor (M4P) approach? Second, what is the future of value chains as a primarily north-south framework in light of both intensifying hierarchies of unequal capitalist development, and particular dynamic spaces of accumulation emerging in the global South? How might shifts in global trade and capital accumulation, and attendant patterns of relative policy autonomy and dependence, disrupt value chain frameworks deployed so widely in the post-Washington Consensus period? We welcome a range of papers that address one or more aspects of the following themes:
• Value chains in relation to the institutional literature on regulation, neoliberalization and “fast policy transfer,” as well as more Foucauldian science studies approaches on calculating devices, tools and discourses that construct markets over uneven geographies;
• Contemporary geo-economic and geopolitical perspectives on value chains shaped by global economic restructuring and, in particular, emergent south-south geographies of investment and trade, and national and macro-regional dynamics of accumulation and development trajectories;
• Links between value chains, variegated geographies of subnational regions and labor. Beyond specific sectoral studies, the particular modes of “insertion” and disarticulation of subnational regions in and from value chains, shaped by geographies of social relations that condition outcomes for particular places.
Interested participants should send expressions of interest, questions and/or an abstract of 250 words (maximum) to Jennifer Bair ([log in to unmask]), Christian Berndt ([log in to unmask]), Victor Ramiro Fernández ([log in to unmask]) or Marion Werner ([log in to unmask]) by October 15th.
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