Geographies of production II: Thinking through the state

Abstract

As corporate power strains the liberal hegemony that has stabilized the globalization project, it is no wonder that scholars of global production are increasingly turning their attention to the role of the state. While the long-held assumption that the state primarily acted to facilitate capital’s priorities remains accurate, it is nonetheless incomplete. I discuss studies that focus on other state roles (regulator, buyer and producer) and pay particular attention to the ways that restrictive trade regulations and state-owned enterprises shape production arrangements. Turning from state roles (i.e. what states do), I go on to examine critical scholarship that focuses on why states act in the ways that they do and how social forces and class dynamics shape these institutional arrangements. Recent studies of labor regimes, the political economy of smallholder value chains, and the dialectic of geoeconomic/geopolitical logics offer useful insights into the role states play to stabilize (or not) global production arrangements. Overall, examining the state-production network nexus can shed light on the possibilities to work with, through or against the state in order to transform the relations of power materialized in and through global production networks.

The trouble with global production networks

“…Not surprisingly, some critics of GPN 2.0 have lamented its (mostly) "missing" analysis of the state. While many GPN scholars have already recognized the state's differentiated roles in global production networks (Horner, 2017;Lim, 2018;Smith, 2015;Werner, 2020;Yeung, 2014), this GPN trouble needs further unpacking and clarification here.…”

State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime

“…SOEs also facilitated the concentration and monopolisation of capital in strategic sectors. This allows scaling up production and technological endowment, and enhancing participation in global production networks, including as lead firms, in sectors such as agro‐chemicals, minerals and hydrocarbons (Lim 2018 ; Werner 2021 ). China, in particular, has systematically relied upon SOEs and policy banks to establish Sino‐centric global production networks (Schindler and Kanai 2021 ).…”

“…It has also inspired low‐and middle‐income economies to build on their experience and push industrial development through greater participation in GVCs”, especially in a context shaped by this crisis of legitimacy of the Anglo‐Saxon liberal brand of capitalism in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the multiple failures of the post‐Washington Consensus to deliver significant development gains (Sheppard and Leitner 2010 ). States have designed a variety of plans and specific forms of government‐business cooperation in order to foster the “strategic coupling” of their domestic firms with GVCs, but also new forms of technology and innovation policies to compete at the technological frontier of the Fourth industrial revolution (Thurbon and Weiss 2019 ; Werner 2021 ; Yeung 2016 ). This has also been accompanied with the re‐emergence of spatial planning strategies, which had fallen out of fashion during the neoliberal period, “to constitute functional territories that can be ‘plugged in’ to GVCs in order to foster industrial upgrading and export‐oriented growth” (Schindler and Kanai 2021 :44).…”

Materiality in the Seam Space: Sketches for a Transitional Port City Dome District

“…Gereffi and Koreniewicz (1994) developed their foundational model of global commodity chain analysis, and later Gereffi et al (2001) researched global corporate value chains as the optimal corporate strategy for path efficiency and vertical integration (Bair, 2005;Cattaneo et al, 2010). Critical geography has focused more on issues of ecology and political economy (Bernstein & Campling, 2006a, 2006bHughes & Reimer, 2004;Sheppard, 2015;Werner, 2020), and the "multiple, simultaneous spatial strategies" (Zalik, 2015(Zalik, , pp. 2452(Zalik, -2453 that capital deploys to construct, balance, and maintain production, distribution, and consumption across supply chains (Simpson, 2019, p. 124;Smith, 1984;Storper & Walker, 1989).…”