I hope you are all well. I am writing in my capacity as Convenor of the Development Politics Specialist Group in the PSA. I am circulating the Call for Papers for the Development Politics Group in the PSA again. Apologies for cross-posting. We now have three panels - regionalism, natural resource politics, and democratization. The deadline for abstract submission is the end of this week (October 14). Kindly send us your abstracts if you would like to present on-going research or more finished papers. I will be very grateful if you can circulate the CFPs to your students and colleagues.

(1) Regional social policy: cross-border social standards to reduce inequity and poverty

Like all forms of governance, regionalism is a form of coordination across and between different policy areas. Regionalism is organised in different forms of institutional architecture that open different kinds of political engagement; and thus different types of activism. Despite a wide array of political economic projects of varying compositions, capabilities and aspirations, expectations of what regional governance can deliver have been evaluated primarily in terms of management, trade liberalisation and trade integration. It is not surprising then that despite a wealth of literature offering normative references to the capacity of regional frameworks to provide social development, this has largely remained a rhetorical aspect in the way regionalism has unfolded and has been studied. However, recent developments in regional formations across the globe are seeking social and political integration to address issues of poverty and inequality and ways to mitigate trans-border social issues and harms. The facilitation of cross-border labour mobility has featured as a principal policy aim, but increasingly regional policy cooperation is emerging beyond strict regionalisation of commercial markets. Examples include regional cooperation on communicable diseases, the referral of patients between member states, access to medicines (UNASUR, SADC, CARICOM) and regional food security programmes (SAARC, ASEAN). This panel is seeks to discuss social policy in relation to regional governance exploring empirical linkages between regional integration, social policy and social development, and academic links between regionalism and development studies.

(2) How Resources Shape the Global Political Economy: Commodity Booms and Developmental Spaces in a Multipolar World Order

This panel explores the changing global political economy from the perspective of resource production. In some ways, scholars have begun to recognise the uniqueness of the current boom, in particular (a) the economic opportunities being given to resource-rich states due to the longevity of the boom as well as (b) the new political dynamics emerging from the globalization of political decision-making. This panel seeks to critically examine the implications of the changing political economy of resource extraction within the global-domestic nexus. We encourage papers that deal with issues on the shifting levels of political authority, state-market relations in the context of the current export bonanza, the growing importance of corporate actors in international governance initiatives, the new roles of multilateral institutions, the role of emerging powers and resource-rich states in response to the economic crisis in the core economies, and the rise of new types of states in the post-Washington Consensus context.

(3) Managing Democratic Transitions: Problems of State Capacity, Agency and Organisation

Democratising authoritarian societies dominates the political agenda in most LDCs, driven by donor demands and resistance to predatory despotism. However, these reforms fail when power is heavily contested, state and economic capacity is weak, and societies are dominated by patrimonial elites and divided by adversarial conflicts based on antagonistic sectarian, ethnic or class identities and inequalities. This raises complex issues of state capacity, sequencing, economic policy, and political processes and organisation that we will explore in this workshop. The need for democracy is clear since even weak elected regimes are more likely to respond to popular pressures than predatory autocracies, while popular movements find it much easier to resist abuses of power in even weak democracies than in oppressive dictatorships. However, electoral competition in societies without the necessary capacities can intensify class, sectarian or ethnic conflicts, encourage rulers to adopt populist policies, and allow regressive elites to capture power by using their social and economic power to build clientalistic parties and manipulate elections.

Indeed, many weak democracies have performed worse than strong autocracies like South Korea and China that have imposed the discipline needed for rapid industrialisation, and created good public services and safety nets. This does not negate the need for democracy since few autocracies live up to these standards, but it does offer most LDCs an unenviable choice between predatory autocracy and weak and contested democracy. We will address the problems raise by this gap between democratic aspirations and substantive capacities by examining the structural pre-requisites for effective democratic transitions, and the problems of sequencing, economic policy, and political agency involved in implementing them in order to identify the organisational structures and political processes needed to facilitate transitions from situations where democratisation intensifies corruption and destructive conflicts, to those where it enables all citizens to play an active role in political processes.

We will use recent work on state formation and democratic transitions that identifies the pre-conditions for viable democratic transitions, and shows that successful democratisation is directly related to the levels of state, economic and civic capacity achieved during earlier authoritarian regimes, and that weak, intermediate and strong pre-democratic states confront different opportunities and threats as they attempt to make these transitions. We attribute democratic transitions to the ability of different classes to resist oppression and fight for their rights, and the ability of weak states to turn procedural into substantive democratic to their ability to create strong and diverse representative organisations – political movements, parties, interest groups and formal and informal associations - that enable the poor as well as the rich to assert their rights, identify their needs, develop viable policy agendas and demands, and negotiate agreed compromises through legitimated political processes.

Research Associate

Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID)

ICOSS Building, 219 Portobello Road

Sheffield, S1 4DP

United Kingdom

'Who Owns the Minerals? Repoliticizing Neoliberal Governance in Brazil and Chile', Special Issue, The New Politics of Mineral Extraction in Latin America, Journal of Developing Societies, 28 (2): 229-256. http://jds.sagepub.com/content/28/2/229