- Convenors:
-
Pritish Behuria
(University of Manchester)
Md Imran Hossain Bhuiyan (University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Economics of development: Finance, trade and livelihoods
Short Abstract
For decades, dependency scholarship has been considered to be opposed to developmental state scholarship, resulting in the two schools often being caricatured by one another. This panel invites papers to examine whether development may still be possible under contemporary globalisation.
Description
Dependency and developmental state scholarship have often been treated as opposing paradigms within the study of political economy and development. Dependency theorists have traditionally emphasised structural constraints imposed by global capitalism, highlighting the limits of national autonomy and the reproduction of underdevelopment. Segments of the contemporary literature on dependency highlight how financialisation, the fragmentation of global production and the effects of decades of market-led reforms have all made structural transformation all but impossible. In contrast, developmental state scholars (or those working in these traditions) have pointed to the capacity of certain states to harness industrial policy to achieve rapid economic transformation. Optimistic scholarship highlights the East Asian miracle as evidence that structural transformation can be achieved and often highlights several examples elsewhere to suggest that there are reasons to have a bias for hope. Extreme ends of both scholarship tend to caricature both sides rather than highlighting the long-standing dialectic between development amid dependency in the Global South.
This DSA Politics and Political Economy study group panel invites papers - both theoretical and case studies - that analyse whether development is still possible under contemporary globalisation. It is open to members and non-members of the study group.
Ideally, papers would bridge or revisit these traditions, draw on cases from the Global South, or advance theoretical innovations that reimagine dependency and developmentalism. By reopening dialogue between these two traditions, the panel seeks to reassess the prospects for structural transformation in a world economy where global interdependence and structural asymmetries persist.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper compares Poland and South Africa’s development trajectories since the early 1990s. Drawing on structural change theory, it examines how liberalisation, institutional choices, and global interdependence shaped divergent patterns of structural transformation and development outcomes.
Paper long abstract
For many, the recent announcement by President Trump’s administration to exclude South Africa from the next G20 Leaders’ Summit in 2026 in Miami and to welcome Poland instead exemplifies the United States’ pressure on the ANC-led government and its Black Economic Empowerment agenda. Although President Trump’s decision appears largely politically motivated, his critique of South Africa’s economic stagnation, burdensome regulatory regime, and unsustainable redistributive policies is not without merit. Similarly, the US acknowledgement of Poland’s “rightful” place among the world’s twenty largest economies reflects Poland’s genuine development success.
Over the last 35 years, Poland’s GDP per capita increased from $1,700 in 1990 to $25,100 in 2024, while South Africa’s rose from $3,100 to $6,250 over the same period. This simple indicator, however, conceals far more complex structural transformations experienced by both countries. In the early 1990s, Poland and South Africa underwent profound economic, social, and political regime changes shaped by liberal free-market principles. Yet, due to differing exogenous and endogenous conditions, their development trajectories diverged sharply.
The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it compares the development track records of Poland and South Africa since the early 1990s. Second, by identifying key development underpinnings, it contributes to debates on whether development remains possible under conditions of contemporary global interdependence.
Drawing on structural change scholarship, the paper analyses country-specific transformation processes, demonstrating how patterns of development – such as resource reallocation across sectors, labour market shifts, and institutional and policy contexts – have shaped structural change and development outcomes.
Paper short abstract
Synthesising the dependency-developmental state debate and recent empirics, this paper shows universal "thick" industrialisation is impossible due to a fixed global manufacturing share. Rational national policies in a finite industrial space create overcapacity and "thin" industrialisation.
Paper long abstract
For decades, the dependency theory literature has emphasised the structural constraints that limit industrialisation possibilities for the global periphery. High development theory and the later developmental state literature, in contrast, took the possibility of universal industrialisation as given. Since William Cline's “manufacturing fallacy of composition,” parallel literatures have emerged which allude to structural constraints, including Brenner's analyses of global overcapacity in 2006, the middle-income trap from 2007, "premature deindustrialization" from 2015, "thin industrialization", and empirical evidence since 2016 that the global manufacturing share of output and employment has remained fixed at approximately 14% and 16-17% since 1970.
The paper synthesises the literature, taking both a historical and a light quantitative approach. The first insight is a historical contextualization, whereby the fundamental transformations in product and process innovation, combined with income growth, enabled the manufacturing share of global GDP to rise since the early modern period, and a small group of countries were able to undergo "thick industrialisation" while other countries neglected industrialisation or were forcefully compelled to avoid industrialisation. Decolonisation was the beginning of an era of universal efforts to industrialise (UEI) at the same time that the manufacturing share of global GDP might have plateaued. Thirdly, a simple allocation model demonstrates that, given this stable global share, the majority of countries cannot all simultaneously achieve “thick” industrialisation. Under UEI, the universal pursuit of industrial policy may be framed as a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma, where individually rational strategies generate a collectively suboptimal equilibrium of overcapacity and “thin” industrialisation.
Paper short abstract
This paper shows how poverty in Turkey is reproduced through neoliberal urban and health policies. Housing-led urban transformation and marketised healthcare expand inclusion while shifting risk to households, managing poverty instead of enabling structural change.
Paper long abstract
This paper asks whether development remains possible under contemporary global capitalism by examining how poverty is reproduced through neoliberal urban and health policies. Using Turkey as a critical case, it argues that post-2001 reforms did not reduce state involvement but reoriented state capacity toward market-making, risk-shifting, and crisis management, limiting prospects for structural transformation. The paper analyses two policy arenas where poverty reproduction becomes visible. First, housing-led urban transformation, particularly through state-led agencies, expanded access to formal housing while restructuring urban space, displacing subsistence practices, deepening spatial inequality, and embedding households in debt-mediated dependency. Urban policy thus functioned simultaneously as inclusionary social policy and a mechanism of accumulation and control. Second, welfare and health reforms expanded formal coverage but conditionalised access through means-testing, insurance premiums, and rising out-of-pocket expenditures. These arrangements shifted social risk from the state to households, producing chronic financial strain and new forms of vulnerability despite moments of crisis responsiveness. Health access became formally universal but substantively unequal. These cases show that poverty in Turkey is not the result of individual failure or policy absence but a structural and relational process reproduced through institutional design, spatial governance, and marketised social policy. Inclusionary reforms coexist with deepening inequality when state power is deployed to stabilise markets and secure legitimacy rather than enable redistribution and productive transformation. It concludes that under neoliberal globalisation, development increasingly operates as a technology for managing poverty rather than transforming its structural causes.
Paper short abstract
The challenge of financing structural transformation under contemporary capitalism is an ever present challenge for most developing countries. Pension funds, even in African countries, are increasingly influential financial actors. But do they represent a pathway to finance structural transfomraiton
Paper long abstract
Pension Fund Capitalism – the growing use of domestic pension funds in shaping investments in national economies – is an increasingly visible feature of the contemporary global economy. In North America, Europe and in East Asia, pension funds played a vital role in funding nationally strategic investments and structural transformation strategies. There is comparatively less analysis of the use of pension funds for strategic investments in African countries. This paper analyses the Rwandan government’s use of its pension fund (Rwanda Social Security Board - RSBB) to finance its development strategy while highlighting the vulnerabilities that have resulted. Rwanda has been among Africa’s fastest growing countries over the last two decades. Through analysing the case of the RSSB, the paper highlights how the Rwandan government has used its pension fund in innovative ways to fund strategic investments to support its services-first strategy. Employing pension funds under contemporary globalisation is accompanied by challenges associated with future demographic changes, the youth under-employment of contemporary low-wage services-based growth and precarious domestic elite politics and state-business relations. The paper is based on fieldwork in Rwanda since 2011, as well as an analysis of RSSB annual reports and investment data.
Paper short abstract
This paper challenges the notion that expanding informal economies are surplus to the needs of capital by tracing the alternative ways in which informal economies are being incorporated into global circuits of accumulation, turning perpetual precarity into a feature, not a bug.
Paper long abstract
In the context of globalization, technological change, and market reforms, the burgeoning informal economies of the Global South suggest that the prospects for absorption into the formal economy are increasingly dim. In the face of jobless growth and rising unemployment, many scholars view expanding informality as evidence of the ‘structural irrelevance’ of the informal masses to contemporary processes of development. This paper examines the blindspots of the conventional Transition narrative, promising informal workers a path out of proverty, as well as the limitations of its mirror image, the Stalled Transition narrative, which highlights the failure of the promised transition to materialize, highlighting instead an alternative labour transition taking place under the radar of prevailing Development thinking. The paper argues that, far from being surplus to the needs of capital, informal economies are being incorporated into global circuits of accumulation in new ways, operating at the level of production and social reproduction. It explores how the intertwining of precarious work and financialized social protection are creating new dynamics of accumulation and labour discipline which transform perpetual precarity into a feature, not a bug. Examining the interface between formal economic exclusion and financial inclusion, this paper shows how new labour transitions underway turn informal economic inclusion from a path out of informality into a development regime of profiting from perpetual precarity, raising new questions about the role of social protection in the transformation of informal economies.
Paper short abstract
Analyzing the failure of development policy in Central Appalachia, I ask, what comes ‘after development’ (Li 2017)? Drawing on critical agrarian studies and feminist political economy (Ossome 2025), I argue that development approaches must contend with an emerging post-neoliberal political economy.
Paper long abstract
Based on our recent book, Power and Just Transitions (Gaventa and Schwartzman 2026), I detail the failure of development policy in Central Appalachia, a coal mining region of the United States plagued with endemic poverty, and I ask, what comes ‘after development’ (Li 2017) in similar underdeveloped regions across the globe? In Appalachia, regional development initiatives explicitly used development state theory to guide decades of industrial policy aimed at rapid economic growth and diversification (Pollard et al. 2022). Yet, the region remains one of the poorest in the country. Dependency theorists of the region, calling it a ‘Global South in the North,’ contend that Appalachia’s underdevelopment stems from its position as an ‘internal colony’ (Lewis et al. 1978; Salstrom 1994), trapped in capitalist relations of resource extraction (Whisnant 1994; Stump 2021). Neither approach, however, has grappled with economic forms that generate widespread conditions of surplus labor, what I contend is a crisis of post-neoliberal political economy (Slobodian 2025). Across the globe, new economic formations increasingly fail to secure stable employment or social reproduction, following the neoliberal dismantling of both family wages and social welfare (Cooper 2019; 2025; Slobodian 2025). Bringing together critical agrarian studies and feminist political economy, and drawing on the work of Lyn Ossome (2025), I argue that if development is still possible in places like Appalachia, it is only in a form that responds to a post-neoliberal political conjuncture, and the end of the promise that capitalism can deliver economic benefit through industrialization, urbanization, and economic growth.
Paper short abstract
This paper takes the leather sector of Bangladesh as a case to explore the conditions under which states and firm owners in the global south address, prioritise, or avoid environmental and labour concerns through an in-depth and integrated analysis of the domestic and global political economy.
Paper long abstract
Firm owners and states have historically suppressed labour and ignored environmental concerns during the early stages of industrialisation and capital accumulation. Of late, both state and business actors in the global south have come under pressure to meet environmental and labour conditions to retain and expand access to markets in the global north. Buyers from the global north now increasingly set labour and environmental standards for the industries of the global south. Yet, poor environmental and labour conditions continue to exist in the manufacturing industries of the global south despite rising global awareness of these problems. Moreover, given the variations in the state’s capacity, developmental strategy, and position in the global economy, addressing environmental and labour concerns has varied from country to country and from industry to industry. Hence, exploring the conditions under which states and firm owners address or avoid environmental and labour concerns demands an in-depth and integrated analysis of the domestic and global political economy. Additionally, it is also important to understand why and when the state prioritises adopting and implementing one category (e.g., environmental) of regulations and standards over the other (e.g. labour). We take the leather sector of Bangladesh as a case to study the politics of the non-adoption, adoption, and prioritisation of certain regulations and standards in the manufacturing industries of the global south.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines agrarian transition in Vietnam through a labour-centred lens. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, it analyses labour processes, differentiated labour regimes, and concrete working conditions shaping rural livelihoods across agriculture, services, wage labour and petty production
Paper long abstract
While dependency and developmental state scholarships offer contrasting accounts of development under globalisation, relatively little attention has been paid to concrete labour processes. Much research has focused on how labour outcomes deviate from normative development trajectories, with informal employment often treated as a pathological social outcome. Over recent decades, Vietnam’s integration into globalisation has been accompanied by a rapid decline in agricultural employment; yet rural people exiting agriculture were not absorbed into formal industrial wage employment but into service-sector activities. Much development research interprets this transition through formal–informal employment dichotomies, often implicitly assuming that service-sector employment, whether formal white-collar work or informal labour, represents a deviation from a teleological model of development. This paper argues that such perspectives obscure the real and concrete labour processes through which rural people sustain themselves in practice. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Central Vietnam, the study examines how rural livelihoods are concretely (re)organised across agriculture, wage labour, petty production, and service-sector work. The analysis traces how households move between different labour processes, how work is governed and remunerated, and how these arrangements shape everyday working conditions and social reproduction practices without predefined teleological assumptions. The findings show that people move across rural-urban continuum and that their working lives are characterised by overlapping labour regimes, complex employment relations, and differentiated working conditions. By foregrounding labour processes rather than employment categories, the paper contributes to development debates and calls for policy and research approaches that engage with the realities of work beyond formal–informal binaries.
Paper short abstract
This paper explains variations in lithium industrial policies in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile (2019–2025). Drawing on the political settlements framework, it shows how historically rooted ideas shaped industrial development strategies beyond economic or geopolitical explanations.
Paper long abstract
The rise of lithium as a key mineral in the energy transition has sparked growing interest among countries with large reserves in capturing the associated economic development opportunities. Between 2019 and 2025, progressive governments in the "lithium triangle" — Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile — advanced industrial policies aimed at adding value to lithium extraction in an effort to move beyond their role as exporters of raw materials. Comparative literature has highlighted differences among the three countries, particularly in the role assigned to the state and the mechanisms adopted for public sector involvement. To explain these variations, this paper challenges explanations centred on economic incentives and geopolitical dynamics and instead draws on recent debates about the role of ideas within the political settlements framework. It shows how policymakers shaped lithium governance through distinct interpretive lenses rooted in each country’s historical experience and development trajectory. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with key government officials involved in policy formulation. The findings highlight how extractive legacies continue to shape policy choices: Bolivia’s colonial history of silver extraction, Chile’s neoliberal mining expansion under Pinochet's dictatorship, and Argentina’s developmentalist tradition of import substitution. By tracing how global development paradigms are translated, contested, and operationalised in specific national contexts, the paper contributes to debates on the local–global articulation of development and the geopolitics of knowledge production. It demonstrates how extractive legacies shape contemporary policy imaginaries, revealing both the potential and the constraints of development strategies in the context of the energy transition.
Paper short abstract
Some scholars assume that green developmental states are emerging but their work do not specify what is their state capacity and where are these states. To fill this gap, this contribution provides an index capturing the content and the scope of green developmentalism in Colombia, France and Uganda
Paper long abstract
Ban on the export of “critical minerals” for the energy transition in Malaysia and Indonesia, Green New Deal in South Korea, ban on second-hand clothes imports in Rwanda, green industrial policies in Brazil and South Africa, the last decade has been characterized by a series of policy actions that seem to signal a “return of the State”, especially regarding ecological transition and climate policies. Some scholars have depicted this eventual return of the state as the emergence of ‘green developmental states’ (Dent, 2018; Kim and Thurbon, 2015). The latter has so far been characterized as a state combining the dismantling of polluting economic sectors with the creation of new “green” market segments(Thurbon et al , 2023: 6). , 2023: 6). While this literature has been helpful to capture specific policies in specific geographical contexts, there are still research gaps when it comes to assess if there is a world-wide diffusion of green developmental state approaches and how specific are they compared to former developmental states and other state configurations. My contribution aims to address these shortcomings with an index that specifies and objectifies what is a green developmental state. To do so, I will highlight the operationalisation of this indicator with the cases of Colombia, France and Uganda, for which the coding of all variables and the aggregate scores of the indicator will be detailed. The latter will show the extent of the presence and absence of green developmentalism within the three cases.
Paper short abstract
This article develops an Arrighi-inspired perspective on production injustices during the current transition by examining how the global wind value chain perpetuates knowledge dependency through peripheralisation, drawing on a comparison of Brazil’s and India’s wind sectors.
Paper long abstract
This article develops an Arrighi-inspired perspective on the just transition by examining how the global wind value chain perpetuates production injustices through peripheralisation. Expanding on the JUST framework, we conceptualise justice as an outcome of historically constituted value-chain positioning within the emerging green division of labour. Drawing on a positive-outcome comparative design of Brazil’s and India’s wind sectors, based on secondary data, trade and patent statistics, and interviews with industry experts, we demonstrate how both countries’ integration into the wind value chain has led to subordinate, knowledge-dependent positions. In Brazil, local content policies have externalised adaptation tasks to foreign original equipment manufacturers (OEMs); in India, liberalised deployment policies have favoured foreign dominance after Suzlon’s speculative collapse. These dynamics reveal that, without challenging the governance of transnational value chains, green transitions risk deepening — rather than overcoming — core-periphery production injustices that underpin the capitalist world-system.
Paper short abstract
In this contribution I reassess the relentless quest for development. By revisiting the Peruvian military dictatorship between 1968 and 1975 through the lens of dependency theory, I argue that some developmental policies enforced are still valid to navigate the current stage of green capitalism .
Paper long abstract
One of the most salient contributions of Marxist dependency theory is to provide a theoretical and methodological toolbox to understand national (under)development as an outcome of global unequal exchange, independently of the ongoing stage of capitalism. Today’s pursuit of low-carbon societies led by the Global North increasingly translates into snowballing demand for natural resources and energy of the Global South to build up green technologies. As many traditional raw material exporting countries rethink their natural resource-driven development strategies and simultaneously attempt to achieve low-carbon societies themselves by buying green technologies in the global market, key tenets of dependency theory are more topical than ever.
In this contribution I aim to revalue the theoretical and empirical inputs of Latin American social thought to Marxist dependency theory and development studies. Therefore, I reassess Latin American countries’ relentless quest for natural resource-driven development. By revisiting the Peruvian military dictatorship between 1968 and 1975 through the lens of dependency theory, I argue that some developmental policies enforced during the so-called ‘peculiar revolution’ are still valid to navigate the current stage of green capitalism and globalized supply chains.
Paper short abstract
This study explores how Pakistani automotive suppliers integrate into global value chains, highlighting pathways for industrial upgrading. It finds that most enter GVCs through intermediaries, often as captive vendors, but some leverage international certifications for faster growth and innovation.
Paper long abstract
This study examines how automotive suppliers in Pakistan grow through participation in global value chains (GVCs), and it explores several pathways of industrial upgrading for these firms. Employing an econometric approach followed by qualitative interviews, the research focuses on the automotive sector in the Lahore region of Pakistan. Data were collected through a survey of 319 automotive-supplier firms, followed by semi-structured interviews with 42 firms, revealing that most local firms experienced business growth because of their enrollment in GVCs. However, these firms typically entered GVCs via contracting arrangements with intermediary firms, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which in many cases positioned them as captive vendors and thus constrained the opportunities for industrial upgrading. However, a subset of firms, categorized in this study as “emerging suppliers,” leveraged their prior experience with OEMs to obtain international certifications that enabled access to global markets. It demonstrated that proactive strategies could enable at least some local firms to escape the constraints of OEM-mediated-GVCs. By directly enrolling in GVCs, emerging suppliers not only achieved faster growth but also pursued innovation strategies that led to industrial upgrading. These findings suggest that a geographical imbalance in firms’ innovatory capacities is being orchestrated through OEM-mediated enrollment in GVCs. Some firms, however, are able to adapt and evolve amid the ongoing reconfiguration of GVCs due to technological change and public policy. The study offers a granular perspective on firm performance and industrial upgrading, with implications for how GVCs impact local economic development in the industrial regions of emerging economies.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines how the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank's investments in Indonesia are impacting the political economy of development in that country.
Paper long abstract
Over the past decade, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has become an increasingly important funder of infrastructure development in Asia. Much analysis of the AIIB’s growing role has focused on the weakness of its policies with regards to protection of human rights and environmental sustainability. This analysis has pointed out that the AIIB’s policies have contained many loopholes and disclaimers, confusing and contradictory language, and gaps with regards to human rights and environmental protections. Moreover, these policies have afforded discretion to governments in recipient countries to decide ‘which types of risks to consider (and which ones to ignore) and how precisely to manage those risks’ (Bugalski and Grimsditch 2021). By contrast, this paper examines the impact of the AIIB’s projects on the ground, focusing on the case of Indonesia. In Indonesia, we suggest, the AIIB’s investments have served to benefit the interests of politico-business and state elites in client countries in Asia at the expense of the rights of local communities and protection of the environment and, in so doing, reinforced the predatory, oligarchic, and extractive model of capitalism that has characterised the country’s development in recent decades. Co-financing with the World Bank or Asian Development Bank does not seem to have altered its impact in this respect, perhaps unsurprisingly given that these organisations’ infrastructure activities have also been criticised for their human rights and environmental impacts. To illustrate these points, we examine the AIIB’s engagement in Indonesia’s tourism sector.
Paper short abstract
Political alignment causally reshapes agricultural credit in India. Using a regression discontinuity design, I show large reallocations through state banks without expanding total credit—evidence of conditional development under structural constraints.
Paper long abstract
Is development still possible under contemporary globalization marked by financialization and persistent structural asymmetries? This paper revisits this question by examining how domestic political incentives shape state-led finance in a Global South context. Focusing on India, it estimates the causal effect of political alignment between elected representatives and ruling parties on the allocation of agricultural credit by state-owned banks.
The study exploits close electoral contests to implement a Regression Discontinuity Design, using narrow victory margins as a quasi-random source of political alignment. By linking constituency-level electoral outcomes to district-level banking data, the analysis identifies the local average treatment effect of political alignment on agricultural credit flows. The results reveal large but highly concentrated effects. Political alignment increases agricultural credit disbursed by Regional Rural Banks by roughly 400 percent, equivalent to an increase of about ₹1,220 crore relative to a baseline mean of ₹305 crore in aligned districts.
Importantly, this increase does not reflect an expansion of aggregate agricultural credit. Instead, credit is reallocated across banking institutions and spatial contexts, with gains concentrated in rural areas and specific public banking channels, while other segments of the banking system exhibit muted or offsetting responses. Political alignment therefore reshapes the composition of credit rather than relaxing overall financial constraints.
These findings contribute to debates between dependency and developmental state scholarship. They suggest that development under contemporary globalization is conditional and selective, operating through politically mediated reallocations within structurally constrained financial systems rather than broad-based transformation.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores how institutions, laws (written/unwritten) and general structures of governance in the colonial period in the English-speaking Caribbean can still shape the present day economy and institutions like the labour market.
Paper long abstract
Robinson and Acemoglu (2012) argue that historical structures shape economic and political institutions, which can have lasting effects on development. This paper traces the organisation of economic activities and the labour market from 1800 to today in four English-speaking Caribbean countries (Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago), interrogating areas of persistence vs change and offering explanations of both. Although all four countries are former British colonies, there is variation in the length of colonial rule and forms of governance across the countries. The paper is methodologically interdisciplinary, drawing on historical analysis of archival material and economic analysis of contemporary quantitative data. Preliminary findings show that both the organisation of economic activities and the labour market have transformed from agrarian systems of the 1800s, to primarily service-driven economies in Barbados and Jamaica, and energy-based economies in Trinidad and Tobago and now Guyana. A commonality among the four, and most developing countries, is the comparatively nascent manufacturing sectors. We analyse these patterns against the historical structures which encouraged ‘monoculture’ economic activity, structures of economic and political governance that encouraged systems of extraction (as argued by dependency theorists), and the agency of the post-independence governments to set policy.