Paradigm Shift or Business as Usual? Workers’ Views on Multi-stakeholder Initiatives in Bangladesh

The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multi-stakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the ready-made garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyer-driven, compliance-based model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperation-based approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers.     

Multi-actor Initiatives after Rana Plaza: Factory Managers’ Views

The Rana Plaza factory disaster in April 2013, which resulted in the death of a large number of factory workers and injured many more in Bangladesh's ready-made garment industry, highlighted the sustained failure of the government of Bangladesh to address safety in the workplace. In the wake of the tragedy two significant transnational governance initiatives emerged — the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance). For the first time, different key stakeholders worked together to address fire, electrical and structural safety of factory buildings. This study analyses the perceptions of factory managers in Bangladesh regarding the Accord and Alliance agreements. The article argues that although there have been significant breakthroughs in terms of developing a culture of safety adhered to by the government and entrepreneurs, the suppliers have encountered difficulties in implementing these initiatives. The limited support from buyers has posed a major challenge for the sustainability of these two multi-stakeholder agreements.     

Feminist Mobilization,Claims Making and Policy Change: An Introduction

More than two decades after the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, gender equality policies have not delivered in the ways envisaged. This special cluster of articles seeks to understand why. Women's mobilization and feminist activism was central to the Beijing process and the advocacy that followed, yet their influence on policy processes seems constrained in the current context of global political and economic changes. The articles in this cluster explore the negotiations between different actors, institutions and discourses — and the tensions and contradictions therein — as explanations for why certain domains of women's rights remain at the margins of political agendas and others receive more attention. Specifically, why have women's labour rights and the demands of the unpaid care economy failed to gain policy traction? The articles point to the importance of political practice, which includes the ‘framing’ of policy demands as compelling narratives, engagement with state entities and the forming and managing of alliances. There are trade‐offs inherent in each of these elements, for example, between transformative gender equality objectives and the pragmatic impulse to frame claims in less politically and socially threatening ways. Further, in a context of increasing globalization, mobilization is required at multiple levels — from the local to the transnational. The articles thus seek to deepen our understanding of how policy change for women's rights occurs.     

Putting Porter into Practice? Practices of Regional Cluster Building: Evidence from Sweden

In the last decade there has been an increased interest in the cluster approach as a tool for boosting regional competitiveness. In this article practices and processes of regional cluster building in Sweden are examined in order to better understand the key traits that seem to be common to successful regional cluster initiatives. It is argued that regional cluster building may be formed through long running policy processes that are crucially constituted by public and private actors' collective vision of what cluster policy involves and what a cluster can look like. Results from a study of 13 cluster initiatives in Sweden are presented. Out of these, four key examples are presented in detail to illustrate four distinct 'models' of cluster approaches that emerged: (a) industry-led initiatives to build competitiveness and competence within an existing base; (b) top-down public policy exercises in brand-building; (c) visionary projects to produce an industry cluster from 'thin air'; (d) small scale, geographically dispersed, natural resource based, temporal clusters that link or dip into global rather than national systems, sources of innovation and competitive advantage. The article closes with the presentation of a checklist of some common elements that successful cluster initiatives in Sweden have shared. It is hoped that they may trigger further research or be useful to policy-makers working in the area. It is concluded that though many questions and problems persist over the use of the cluster-approach it can be a useful tool for regional development.     

Labour in Global Value Chains: Work Conditions in Football Manufacturing in China,India and Pakistan

A critical challenge facing developing country producers is to meet international labour standards and codes of conduct in order to engage in global value chains. Evidence of gains for workers from compliance with such standards and codes remains limited and patchy. This article focuses on the global football industry, a sector dominated by leading global brands that manage dispersed global value chains. It assesses the working conditions for football stitchers engaged in different forms of work organization, factories, stitching centres and home‐based settings in Pakistan, India and China. It draws on detailed qualitative primary field research with football‐stitching workers and producers in these three countries. The article explains how and why work conditions of football stitchers differ across these locations through an analytical framework that interweaves both global and local production contexts that influence work conditions. In doing so, it argues that current debates on the role of labour in global value chains have to go beyond a narrow focus on labour standards and corporate social responsibility compliance and engage with economic, technological and social upgrading as factors that could generate sustained improvements in real wages and workers’ conditions.     

Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic instrument for more ‘rational’, effective and efficient environmental policy or by their critics as an exogenously imposed conduit of hegemonic neoliberalism. This introductory article to the special issue that follows advocates for and demonstrates a more grounded and historically situated approach for understanding the conformation and outcomes of PES in actual practice. It proposes a framework for examining individual PES initiatives as shaped by dynamic interactions between imposed structure and the development pathways and situated agency of actors in the territories in which they are implemented. It finds that certain ubiquitous components of this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — provide potential openings for articulation and engagement that can allow these initiatives to be contested, adapted, hybridized or more fully co-opted and captured. This framework opens a pathway for more inclusive, nuanced and grounded research on PES and on market-based environment and development policies more broadly.     

Managing the Global–Local Dimensions of Clusters and the Role of “Lead” Organizations: The Contrasting Cases of the Software and Medical Technology Clusters in the West of Ireland

The purpose of this paper is to investigate “leading” firms in an industrial cluster to understand how the balance between global and local dimensions of the cluster can be managed. Two cases of industry clusters, the software and medical technology clusters in the west of Ireland, are employed to examine how certain organizations can occupy a “lead” position and how—if at all—such organizations generate an agglomerative effect in a cluster. In the case of the medical technology cluster, the study shows that when large firms enact a leading role by influencing the technology trajectory of the region and stimulating the local dynamic, they can generate agglomerative effects, thereby enhancing the relevance and sustainability of clusters. Most significantly, it shows how leading organizations act as an important facilitator in connecting the global and local dimensions of clusters even in the absence of extensive local formal linkages. At the same time, the case of the software cluster reveals that the presence of large organizations alone does not inevitably stimulate such a clustering effect and emphasizes that appropriate characteristics and conditions need to be in place. Overall, while the study substantiates previous research on the significance of temporary and organized forms of proximity, it also shows the value that permanent geographical proximity can have, thereby contesting recent research that downplays the relevance of the clustering institution (e.g. Lorentzen, A. (2007) The geography of knowledge sourcing—A case study of Polish manufacturing enterprises, European Planning Studies, 15, pp. 467–486; Wickham, J. & Vecchi, A. (2008) Local firms and global reach: Business air travel and the Irish software cluster, European Planning Studies, 16, pp. 693–710).     

Securing the World and Challenging Civil Society: Before and After the ‘War on Terror’

Following President Bush's declaration of a ‘War on Terror’ in 2001, governments around the world introduced a range of counter‐terrorist legislation, policies and practices. These measures have affected not only human rights and civil liberties but also civil society and aid frameworks. Although the Obama administration has renounced the language of the ‘War on Terror’ and taken steps to revoke aspects such as water‐boarding and the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the bulk of the legislation and practices associated with the post‐9/11 global security framework remain. The cluster of papers which follow provide detailed studies of the effects of the War on Terror regime on civil society in four contexts: the USA, Spain, Kenya and Uzbekistan. In this way it lays a basis for civil society actors and aid agencies to reflect more strategically on how they should engage with security debates and initiatives in a way that best protects the spaces of civil society and the interests of minority and vulnerable groups. This introduction sets out the three key themes pursued throughout the cluster articles, namely, the selective impact of counter‐terrorist measures on civil society; the particularity of civil society responsiveness to these measures; and the role of aid and diplomacy in pursuing security objectives and its consequences for civil society.     

全球视野下的价值链治理研究

在全球化背景下,以地方产业集群为发展模式的区域经济,其竞争力的提升需要在全球价值链中与区域外的经济行为主体积极互动,并实现升级。而价值链治理分析是经济地理学理论研究地方产业集群升级的关键。在这种研究视角下,本文以价值链治理为研究对象,首先界定了价值链治理的概念;并从理论上讨论了全球价值链治理模式的主要类型和演化过程;然后,进一步分析了价值链治理产生的原因、价值链治理的应用,以及价值链治理对地方产业网络升级的影响;最后,本文对国际现有的价值链治理理论进行了比较深入的讨论,并提出进一步研究的展望。     

Geographies of religion and spirituality: pilgrimage beyond the ‘officially’ sacred

Abstract

The papers in this special issue, Geographies of Religion and Spirituality: Pilgrimage beyond the ‘Officially Sacred,’ are placed in the context of a comprehensive theoretical overview of the role that the sacred plays in shaping, conducting, controlling, and contesting pilgrimage. As scholarship examining the lived experiences of travelers has demonstrated, pilgrimages need not necessarily be religious in nature, nor be officially sanctioned. Rather, if pilgrimages are perceived as ‘hyper-meaningful’ by the practitioner, the authors in this special issue argue that a common denominator of all of these journeys is the perception of sacredness—a quality that is opposed to profane, everyday life. Separating the social category of ‘religion’ from the ‘sacred,’ these articles employ an interdisciplinary approach to theorize sacredness, its variability, and the ways in which it is officially recognized or condemned. Thus, the authors pay particular attention to the authorizing processes that religious and temporal power centers employ to either promote, co-opt, or stave off, such popular manifestations of devotion, focusing on three ways: through tradition, text or institutionalized norms. Referencing examples from across the globe, and linking them to the varied contributions in this special issue, this introduction complexifies the ways in which pilgrims, central authorities, locals and other stakeholders on the ground appropriate, negotiate, shape, contest, or circumvent the powerful forces of the sacred. Delving ‘beyond the officially sacred,’ this collective examination of pilgrimages, both well-established and new; religious and secular; authorized and not; the contributions to this special issue, as well as this Introduction, examines the interplay of a transcendent sacred for pilgrims and tourists so as to provide a blueprint for how work in the geography of religion and the fields of pilgrimage and religious tourism may move forward.     

Exploring the context and elements of local environmental stewardship: An embedded case study of the Niagara Region,Canada

Environmental stewardship—a concept that describes the relationships between humans and the environment—is gaining increased attention as an approach that can address planetary sustainability issues. In-depth empirical investigations of local environmental stewardship are needed to understand how social-ecological context influences stewardship, as well as the arrangement of conceptual elements in applied settings. This study addresses these needs by conducting an in-depth exploration of environmental stewardship in the Niagara Region of Canada. A single embedded case study design is employed, with environmental stewardship initiatives constituting the individual units of analysis with the case. Analysis of the spatial arrangement of a total of 89 initiatives indicated that initiatives tended to cluster closer to the Niagara River and in more populous municipalities. The significance of collaboration, tensions between the environment and economic development, and concerns about political impacts emerged as themes across contextual factors. The configuration of stewardship elements reveals interesting discrepancies between initiatives and previous stewardship research focused on larger scales, individuals, and organizations. Further analysis is encouraged to illuminate environmental stewardship in other settings as well as advance relational understanding of conceptual elements.     

‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China

This article deploys the concept of ‘classes of labour’ to map and compare non‐factory labour relations in the garment chain across Delhi and Shanghai metropolitan areas. It contributes to commodity studies by unpacking the great complexity of mechanisms of ‘adverse incorporation’ of informal work in global commodity chains and production circuits. Field findings reveal the great social differentiation at work in informalized settings in the two countries, and suggest that while the margins of garment work are characterized by high levels of vulnerability, they may also open up new possibilities for workers to resist or re‐appropriate some degree of control over their labour and reproductive time. While these possibilities depend on regional trajectories, informal labour arrangements do not only result from capital's quest for flexibility. Workers actively participate in shaping their own labour geography, even when exposed to high employment insecurity. The conclusions more broadly discuss the merits of comparative analysis to study labour in global production circuits.     

Exclusion in Area-based Urban Policy Programmes

Area-based urban regeneration programmes such as the New Deal for Communities in the UK, the German Soziale Stadt and the Danish Kvarterloft are based on a participatory approach emphasizing active citizen participation and the involvement of local stakeholders. The article argues that these initiatives are not as open and inclusive as they strive to be, and in this article, we explore the different types of exclusion that can take place when such programmes are implemented. Based on the theoretical literature and on empirical data from the Danish Kvarterloft project, we identify three types of exclusion—structural, discursive and deliberate exclusion—and offer a theoretical analysis and an empirical account of these exclusions. The article concludes that practitioners as well as politicians need to reflect critically on different types of exclusion in order to create transparent and inclusive democratic processes.     

Branding halal: A photographic essay on global Muslim markets (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In the rapidly expanding global market for halal products, Malaysia and Singapore hold a special position as the only two countries in the world where state bodies certify halal products, spaces (shops, factories and restaurants) as well as work processes. In these two countries and in shops all around the world, consumers can find state halal‐certified products that carry distinctive halal marks. This photographic essay explores the properties of halal marks in Malaysia and Singapore within a framework of visual systems and the conditions of their interpretation, relating the particular systems to the complexities of which they are a part. More specifically, I explore the visual systems of halal marks on products, advertisements, shops as well as restaurants.     

Seeing Eye-to-eye: How do Public and Private Sector Views of a Biotech Cluster and its Cluster Initiative Differ?

As clusters have developed from an analytical concept into a key policy tool, numerous cluster initiatives, or collaborative organizations designed to enhance the competitiveness of clusters, have been implemented across the globe. However, while research on clusters is abundant, research specifically focusing on these emerging organizations is scant to date. This paper analyzes one such cluster initiative and its cluster, and in particular examines to what degree the public and private sectors (1) have the same understanding of the cluster's competitiveness and underlying strengths and weaknesses and (2) what activities the cluster initiative should conduct.     

Innovating in Cluster/Cluster as Innovation: The Case of the Biotechvalley Cluster Initiative

It has been noted that innovation seems to take place to a higher degree in clusters than elsewhere and we have lately seen a worldwide wave of emerging cluster initiatives and similar innovation policy projects. Some of these are realistic efforts based on existing regional strengths and partly existing cluster structures. Most, however, are grasping at straws. The latter is especially true when it comes to technologies such as IT and biotech. We could subsequently add a new label—“pathetic clusters”—to the already existing list of embryonic, emerging, world-class or stagnating clusters. But what do we make of such “pathetic clusters” (are they really pathetic)? Although economic geographers often tend to explain innovation (competitiveness) by looking at cluster dynamics, in such accounts, the cluster concept itself can actually function as an innovation, imposing similar effects on the economy as more familiar types of innovation would, i.e. by creating a local competitive edge. It is reasonable to believe that if “pathetic clusters” play important roles in regional economies, then they do so in the form of social and organizational innovations rather than as Porterian drivers of innovation and industrial dynamics on a large scale. This function of the cluster concept—as a local innovation—is the focus of the paper at hand.     

Dynamics of Value Chain Governance: Increasing Supplier Competence and Changing Power Relations in the Periphery of Automotive Production—Evidence from Bursa,Turkey

Adopting a global value chain (GVC) approach, this paper focuses on the ways in which global automotive transnational corporations coordinate their value chains with suppliers in the periphery of automotive production. In particular, it directs attention to particular forms of chain relations established by lead firms with suppliers in Turkey and the ways in which these chains are coordinated. Findings indicate that as component suppliers in the periphery of automotive production, such as those in Bursa, have gained the competencies not only to manufacture to the cost, quality and flexibility specifications required by their customers but also of design and product development, lead firms in the automotive industry have turned to modular value chains, where competent suppliers provide a range of services with less dependence on their customers, as a way of sourcing from these suppliers. I use this evidence to argue that GVC governance is dynamic and suppliers in the periphery have some room for breaking power asymmetries associated with specific modes of governance in GVCs.     

Developmentalities and Calculative Practices: The Millennium Development Goals

Abstract: This paper focuses on wide‐ranging governmental discourses that enable new ways of shaping social and economic affairs in the field of development. Directing particular attention to the Millennium Development Goals, we refer to these discourses as developmentalities. As a form of governmentality produced through these Goals, developmentalities draw on the turn of the century to recast certain development problems and offer reformulated solutions to these problems. We argue that they rely on three forms of neoliberal rationalities of government—information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks, and their calculative practices, to shape global spaces and new capacities for individuals and social groups. Our analysis is based on extensive policy documents, reports, and development initiatives affiliated with the United Nations and other organizations, as well as insights derived from in‐depth interviews and conversations with United Nations policy and research personnel from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).     

The Evolution of Biotechnology in Three Continents: Schumpeterian or Penrosian?

This Editorial introduces the Special Issue on ‘Biotechnology Clusters and Beyond’. Drawing on the interventions of five commissioned articles from Canada, Germany, Israel, the UK and the US it suggests that biotechnology clusters are interesting and important intellectually and for policy deliberation. They pose questions about basic cluster theory because localized networks, though intense, may not be as extensive as global ones in firm practices, especially as these evolve over time. Moreover, innovation is more deeply embedded in the publicly funded science base than for ‘Porterian’ clusters. Regarding innovation, biotechnology is also less obviously Schumpeterian, there being little market-driven ‘creative destruction’, and is arguably, with its strong emphasis on both large- and small-firm ‘capabilities’—Penrosian—an emphasis in clustering research and applications that warrants further investigation. Finally, at the specific technology-exploitation phase, market interactions assert themselves over milieu characteristics because scientists know the value of their discoveries and there is accordingly high appropriability associated with such knowledge capabilities.     

Global Value Chain Participation and the Labour Share: Industry-level Evidence from Emerging Economies

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) has been proposed as a central means for emerging economies to develop and technologically upgrade. However, the effects of GVCs on income distribution in the global South remain underexplored. This article presents an econometric analysis of the determinants of the labour share in seven emerging economies for the period 1995–2014. Drawing on industry-level data from global input-output tables, the authors focus on how GVC participation — in particular offshoring of production from advanced to emerging economies — affects the labour share of different skill groups within manufacturing and service industries. They also estimate the effects of GVCs on productivity, real wages and the capital–value added ratio, to shed further light on the channels through which GVCs affect the labour share. In both industry groups, findings show that integration into GVCs with advanced economies has a negative effect on the labour share in emerging economies, particularly for medium-skilled workers. In contrast, higher union density and government consumption spending have positive effects on the labour share. Thus, labour in emerging economies loses out relative to capital as production becomes more integrated across borders.