WORKSHOP: “Value Chains, Neoliberal Regulation and Global Restructuring: Considerations from the South”

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 firm-centered sociological analysis; and from an academic framework to a development policy tool. Subsequently, value chains have had considerable impact on industrial policy promoted by international organizations like the World Bank and the OECD, as well as governments in “developing countries”. 

The workshop 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)? 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. 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.
• Links between value chains and variegated geographies of subnational regions and labor. Beyond specific sectoral studies, the particular modes of “insertion” and disarticulation of regions in and from value chains, shaped by geographies of social relations that condition outcomes for particular places. 

We welcome submissions from all disciplines and geographic locations. Submissions can be in either Spanish or English.

Important Dates
Submission of abstracts: 1st of July
Documents (final or in progress): 1st week of October
PPT or slides for exposure: 2nd week of October
 
Submissions
E-mail: [log in to unmask] 

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Lucas Gabriel Cardozo
Instituto de Investigación Estado, Territorio y Economía
Facultad de Ciencias Económicas - Universidad Nacional del Litoral
Área de Investigación, 3er. piso. Oficina 3.03. Tel: +54 (342) 4585610 int.162
Moreno 2557 CP S3000CVE, Santa Fe, Argentina.
Website: www.iiete.unl.edu.ar