Over the last decade, the global value chain (GVC) approach, with its associated notions of chain governance and firm upgrading, has proliferated as a mode of analysis and of intervention amongst development institutions. This article examines the adoption and adaptation of GVCs at four multilateral agencies in order to understand the purchase of value chain approaches within the development field. Mixing GVC perspectives with other theoretical influences and applied practices, these institutions deploy value chain frameworks to signal a new generation of policies that promise both to consolidate, and to advance beyond, the market fundamentalism of the Washington Consensus. To achieve this, value chain development frameworks craft interventions directed toward various constellations of firm and non-firm actors as a 'third way' between state-minimalist and state-coordinated approaches. The authors identify key adaptations of the GVC framework including an emphasis on value chain governance as an instrument to correct market failure in partnership with state and development agencies, and upgrading as a de facto tool for poverty reduction. They find that efforts are ongoing to construct a 'post' to the Washington Consensus and that the global value chain is enabling this process by providing a new language and new object of development intervention: 'the chain' and the local-global linkages that comprise it.

The global value chain (GVC) approach has become an increasingly relevant tool not only for the analysis of the current strategies of firms in global economic networks, but also for the economic development policies promoted by supranational institutions. The paper argues that this supranational institutionalization of such an approach has been contributing to legitimate a subordinated and exclusive pattern of integration to networks governed by the transnational fraction of capital rather than constituting a tool for enabling the strategies of developing countries and their actors. This is made possible through the transformation of the GVC into a neoliberal device for strategies implemented by global political networks as well as through the uncritical assimilation of a group of limitations in the GVC theoretical and methodological corpus, when those global political networks incorporate that theoretical approach. The paper concludes by suggesting the necessity of a new approach capable of overcoming the limitations of the GVC inspired policy prescriptions as a condition for forging global alternatives to neoliberal fast policies dominating the Global South.

Este artículo realiza una interpretación teórica crítica de las cadenas globales de valor, entendidas como una relevante herramienta para el análisis de los procesos de globalización, no sólo a nivel académico sino a nivel institucional, a partir de la formulación de estrategias de desarrollo promovidas por gobiernos y organismos internacionales en el Sur Global. Teniendo en cuenta la evolución del concepto a partir de una perspectiva comparada con la teoría del sistema-mundo que le diera origen, se destacan las debilidades fundadas tanto en aspectos ligados al distanciamiento respecto de dicha teoría, como en los limitantes que surgen producto de la plataforma teórica que ambas comparten. Las restricciones para comprender la inalterada recreación de la estructura jerárquica y desigualadora del capitalismo, y los divergentes escenarios al interior del Sur Global, emergen como los limitantes teórico-empíricos más importantes. En este sentido, el trabajo concluye subrayando algunos desafíos orientados a superarlos.

The article reconsiders how capitalist diversity is conceived of in the mainstream institutionalist “comparative capitalisms” literature. It highlights the division between centers and peripheries as a differentiation prior to national varieties, subsequently introducing the concepts of “nuclei of accumulation” and “nuclei of state implication.” It proposes to analyze (peripheral) varieties of capitalism as results of the conformation and change of these nuclei, their interrelations, and their insertion into global economic and political networks.

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentinian soy boom of the 2000s, identifying forms of market extension, redistribution, reciprocity and householding that facilitated this process. We argue for a multi-scalar approach that balances attention to national and extra-local dynamics shaping the combination of these forms, identified through the lens of the “fictitious commodities” of the soy boom: money (credit, currency and cross-border capital flows), land (in the agricultural heartland and frontier regions), labor (transformed and excluded in a “farming without farmers” model) and, we add, knowledge (biotech). Our analysis identifies internal tensions as well as overt resistance and “overflow” that ultimately led to the collapse of postneoliberal regulation of the soy complex, ushering in a wider, market-radical counter-movement. Refracting double-movement-type dynamics through the prism of heterodox institutional forms, we argue, allows for a better grasp of processes that underlie institutional recalibrations of progressive and regressive kinds.