Automotive global value chains in Mexico: a mirage of development?

ABSTRACT

International monetary organisations argue the ‘developing countries’ should foster linkages to the world economy as a means to overcome backwardness. In this article we refute the narrative that Mexico has experienced industrial upgrading. Rather, industrial growth in Mexico over the last 40 years has been shaped by neoliberal economic policies which have turned the Mexican economy into an export-led manufacturing platform designed to supply the North American market, sustained by a precarious labour market. As a result, Mexico occupies the most labour-intensive and low value-added segments of regional production chains. To make this argument, we perform an in-depth analysis of the Mexican automotive industry, demonstrating that instead of being an engine for domestic industrial development, the auto industry has become a dominant economic sector through productive hyper-specialisation concentrated in the northern Mexican border states, a reliance on transnational capital, particularly from the United States, a disconnect with domestic markets, and the super-exploitation of labour.     

The EU’s preferential trade agreements with Singapore and Vietnam. Market vs. normative imperatives†

By negotiating Free Trade Agreements the EU aspires both to increase the competitiveness of its industry and contribute to sustainable development in the partner country. It pursues a flexible approach to norm promotion which aims at supporting developing countries in their attempt to adjust to international standards. Ideational and institutionalist scholars interpreted this approach as a manifestation of its normative power. We show that in the negotiations with Singapore and Vietnam the positions of the EU were not consistent with its declared goals, since they put stronger pressures upon Vietnam to adjust to regulatory standards. We explain this lack of consistency as the result of different patterns of interest group mobilization in the two negotiations. Those patterns, in turn, depend upon the bargaining power the EU has with single trade partners, competition between the EU and third countries, especially the US, and the structure of the economy of the trade partners.     

Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.     

Elite-led development and Mexico’s independent coffee organisations in the wake of the rust epidemic

Abstract

Between 2012 and 2016 a virulent strain of coffee rust reduced Mexican yields by more than 50%, and it is still devastating production. The government has responded by replacing traditional arabica plants vulnerable to the pathogen with resistant, high-yielding varieties to recover the sector and encourage long-term adaptation to a disease that cannot be eradicated. However, this contribution will attempt to show that the intractable nature of the epidemic and the biological characteristics of resistant varieties threaten the survival of independent coffee organisations and their agroecological shade coffee systems. With little or no possibility of recovering production without the use of resistant plants, the alternative production and marketing models that these organisations have constructed over the past three decades face unprecedented challenges.     

‘People and personal projects’: a rejoinder on the challenge of teaching development studies

Abstract

In response to Juan David Parra Heredia’s criticism of her earlier article about her use of post-development as a tool in teaching development studies, Wendy Harcourt reflects further on how the course analysed in 2016 has evolved in the last three years and corrects the misreadings of the pedagogical position-taking by the teachers in the course.     

The value of pointillism? Integrating trade and development and the European Union as a global actor

As the contributions to this volume make clear, the intersection between the European Union's (EU) trade and development policies is populated by a diverse array of policies. The EU's selection of policies reflects, in part, the level of development of the developing country and competing understandings of how to best foster development. The contributions also hint at significant contributions to wider debates about the EU as a global actor, particularly the extent to which it is motivated by normative considerations and how affective it is in achieving its objectives. This article reviews the main findings of the contributions to this volume and advances some suggestions so as to enable a clearer picture to emerge that could more readily inform wider debates.     

China’s development: a new development paradigm?

The emergence of China as a development actor across the global South has raised significant questions regarding the extent to which the country presents new development opportunities to its compatriots in the South. My aim is to reflect on and parse out the experiences and policies that have shaped China’s development to assess how it can inform the field of development studies. I argue that we need to critically engage in China’s development process, as China’s own development has led to the emergence of many more problems than solutions, ranging from increasing inequality to exclusionary development practices pertaining to ethnic minorities.     

Water crises: political construction or physical reality?

Various definitions of water crises emerge from epistemic communities deploying a great disparity of methodologies and fundamental hypotheses. Scientists' perceptions of which power structures legitimately carry out water management affect their definition of a crisis, their capacity to ask questions and the manner they formulate them. This determines the stakes and the actors they can observe or the scale of analysis they find relevant. This leads some to recommend a ‘solution’ that appears to be a disaster to others. This article examines how three epistemic communities have each built their science by promoting very specific understandings of what is a water crisis. Proponents of the ‘global water crisis’ spawned Integrated Water Resources Management while proponents of the ‘municipal water crisis’ locked the perception of water equity within the Millennium Development Goals. Researchers on small-scale irrigation and property regimes have often disagreed with such recommendations, often presented as inevitable.     

Unethical power Europe? Something fishy about EU trade and development policies

This article analyses the impact of European Union (EU) policies in the field of fisheries on development in Africa. It contests the premise that the EU promotes local economies, and argues that it often contributes to depleting fish stocks, distorting African economic policies and harming fishers’ communities. In so doing, the EU is violating its basic duty to avoid harm to other states. However, it is now committed to sustainable development. This article offers suggestions on policies which would enable the EU to take on both its negative and positive duties.     

Whose world? Development,civil society,development studies and (not only) scholar activists

The current international development discourse focuses much on the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs) as part of a global social contract in support of international cooperation and governance, with the debate on the post-mdgs and the Sustainable Development Goals (sdgs) indicating a shift. These goals are at least in part addressing developmental constraints confronting the world as a result of the effects the dominant growth models have had on limited resources and global goods. Rio+20 was a forum which brought to the fore the conflicting issues at stake and the challenges for any development paradigm seeking to enhance global justice and equality. This article explores the discrepancies between dominant paradigms cultivated in official discourses, on the one hand, and alternatives for another development presented as anti-hegemonic counter-models for survival strategies. It considers the role of civil society agencies and scholar activists in development studies.