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

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

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

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 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

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

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.

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.