2 research outputs found
Outsourcing Governance: States and the Politics of a ‘Global Value Chain World’
Politics, and by extension states, are marginal in debates about the genesis, evolution
and functioning of the GVC-based global economy. We contend here that the core complexity of
state agency and state power needs to be much more carefully understood in GVC and related
debates, as a basis on which the governance of the evolving GVC world can be properly
theorised as revolving around the inseparability of economic and political power. We advance a
framework for understanding the role of politics and states in the construction and maintenance
of a GVC world, using a three-fold typology of facilitative, regulatory and distributive forms of
governance, and propose a notion of ‘outsourcing governance’ as an attempt to capture the
ways in which states purposefully, through active political agency, have engaged in a process of
delegating a variety of governance functions and authority to private actors. Our overarching
argument is normative: ‘outsourced governance’ of the form we currently observe is associated
with regressive distributional outcomes, and is antithetical to an inclusive and sustainable global
economy