Global-local Linkages Research Articles

Global Local Linkages in Contemporary Environmental Movements: Networking, Diffusion and Scale Shift in the Niyamgiri Movement of Odisha

Taking the tribal resistance against Vedanta Alumina at Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha in India as a case in point, the present article deciphers the nuances of contemporary environmental movements. It discusses the manner in which movements like Niyamgiri address global environmental issues with local environmental actions. It examines the issue of scale shift of environmental activism and the process in which a local struggle over livelihood and resource capture becomes a global environmental movement. It unravels the subtle negotiations that the local agents of the movement engage in with their global counterparts. The major arguments of the article are based on empirical research at the site of contestation with the help of qualitative methods. The article vividly narrates the emergence of the Niyamgiri movement from that of a localised struggle against land acquisition to that of a transnational movement raising serious ecological concerns, which bridges the gap between the local and global in contemporary environmental movements. It argues that rather than an emphasis on ‘locale’, the point of departure should be the movement’s ability to establish networks with related as well as non-related social movement organisations, who share similar concerns with nature, and are ready to be a part of the mobilisation process.

Global value chains and policy practice: The making of linkages in the Ivorian cashew industry

The global value chain framework has gained increasing prominence as a policy tool for resource-based industrialization. Focusing on synergies between the commodity-producing and related manufacturing and service sectors, value chain interventions assume that buyer-supplier linkages facilitate the upgrading of local industries. This study investigates these synergistic assumptions in the context of the Ivorian cashew industry. The Ivorian case exemplifies how the value chain concept, with its associated focus on local-global linkages, has placed collaboration with foreign lead firms at the heart of the industrial policy agenda. While these collective arrangements are crucial for negotiating inter-firm relationships along global value chains, this study finds little evidence that they have initiated upgrading for local industries. Instead, the emergence of foreign buyers as strategic partners for policy-makers has created opportunities for these lead actors to reinforce their dominant position, stemming from access to finance and technology.

Local–global linkages: Challenges in organizing functional communities for ecosocial justice

ABSTRACTCommunities face “glocalized” ecosocial problems. Functional Community Organization bridges local problems with globalized issues, organizes community, and meets need. Models describe glocal linkages and their outcomes, but little is known of processes and challenges in organizing. This article qualitatively explores ecosocial organizing challenges in a Community Technology Center in a US city, which organized around e-waste and digital inequality. Findings indicate that Functional Communities may face challenges in organizing aims due to complexities in balancing need while concurrently addressing global problems and issues in structure, funding, and process. This may be mitigated through communication, focus, self-awareness, and reflexivity.

“We are here to make money”: New terrains of identity and community in small-scale fisheries in Lake Victoria, Tanzania

Fishing communities are at the heart of policies of co-management in small-scale fisheries around the world, including Lake Victoria. The assumption is that, fish and the activity of fishing being carriers of locally shared values and identity underlying ‘fishing communities’, devolution of power (to the communities) will initiate a virtuous circle that can minimise exploitation and favour sustainable resource management. This article builds on emerging literature that has questioned these assumptions with an ethnography of community as developed in conjunction with heightened globalizing forces, and examining the effects of local-global linkages of identity. It emerges that fish continues to be central in determining identity and community but in novel ways, that is as a commodity to be exploited for economic success rather than as carrier of local identities. The local-global market linkages that have triggered this transformation have thus created new identities away from identity as ‘fisherman’, and grounded in individual rather than collective experience, but nevertheless leading to new short-term communities that emerge across space around particular business-related agendas. Fisheries policies need to be re-examined in light of this transformation; stronger attention needs to be paid to the broader socio-economic context in which ‘communities’ emerge for more effective co-management of resources. • ‘Fishing communities’ around Lake Victoria today are subject to transformations. • Local-global market linkages impact on the configuration of ‘fishing communities’. • Ethnography can unearth values underlying ‘fishing communities’ today. • Policy implications need to be evaluated for better management of fishing resources.

Untangling global-local linkages: The case of the Right to Information Act in India

ABSTRACTTransparency laws have proliferated worldwide: between 1990 and 2010, 76 countries promulgated laws or ordinances on the freedom or right to information. By examining the domestic and global processes involved in the passage of the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTIA) in India, this article locates the global trend within the local context. It argues that the RTIA signifies institutional change because it replaced the norm of secrecy—nested and perpetuated within the Indian state since colonial times—with the norm of openness. But was this change a result of an endogenous process, or did exogenous factors—such as the global policy stimulus toward transparency and accountability or the “good governance” agenda of international financial institutions—play an instrumental role? The existing scholarly literature argues that international influence was “marginal” and the process of institutional change was largely “homegrown.” By considering historical archival material and internal government documents, this article attempts to unravel the process of norm diffusion from the global to the local and to determine how much exogenous factors and global norms affected institutional change in India.

Local-global linkages in the food regime: global history and the internationalization of Brazilian agribusiness

Abstract This paper analyzes the internationalization of the Brazilian agricultural sector through a “global history” approach. The goal of the paper is to understand the internationalization of agribusiness as a smaller part of a transformation in the global food regime. In tracing the trajectory of agribusiness internationalization in Brazil, the paper explores patterns of local-global interaction and the new opportunities that emerge in global food regimes as a result. Finally, the paper probes the internationalization of Brazilian agribusiness under the state-agrarian elite partnership that has taken advantage of local and global transformations in agribusiness in recent history.

Identifying the Sources of Agglomeration Benefits within China's Economic and Development Zones

This paper examines the ability of place-based policies in China to foster agglomeration economies via Marshallian-based externalities that are expected to arise due to the reduction in transports costs associated with supplier-buyer linkages, labor pooling and knowledge spillovers. Empirically, I measure and quantify the relative contribution of each Marshallian source to the productivity of Chinese firms located in areas with and without economic and development zones (EDZs). I deal with the identification problem by exploiting temporal variations in the designation of EDZs, and matching techniques combined with a differencein- differences estimation approach. The results show that EDZ policy improves firm performance by fostering externalities that arise from each Marshallian channel, especially customer-buyer linkages. Moreover, EDZs that are designed to promote global-local linkages are more successful at moderating these agglomeration forces compared to those designed to promote domestic high-tech industries.

Coverage of the Financial Crisis in English Language Print Media in India

The news media in a neoliberal economy often act as channels through which the values of neoliberalism are articulated and perpetuated, being shaped by advertising-driven content and deployed as instruments of reforms. This article examines how the recent global recession was covered in the three most circulated English dailies in India. The two themes that emerged from a thematic analysis of the news stories discuss the local–global linkages in the framing of the financial crisis, as well as attend to the moral panics and responsibilities that are put forth as legitimating responses to the crisis, voicing the flow of affect in logics of financialization.

Linking Up to Development? Global Value Chains and the Making of a Post‐Washington Consensus

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, the global value chain (GVC) approach, with its associated notions of chain governance and firm upgrading, has proliferated as a mode of analysis and of intervention amongst development institutions. This article examines the adoption and adaptation of GVCs at four multilateral agencies in order to understand the purchase of value chain approaches within the development field. Mixing GVC perspectives with other theoretical influences and applied practices, these institutions deploy value chain frameworks to signal a new generation of policies that promise both to consolidate, and to advance beyond, the market fundamentalism of the Washington Consensus. To achieve this, value chain development frameworks craft interventions directed toward various constellations of firm and non‐firm actors as a ‘third way’ between state‐minimalist and state‐coordinated approaches. The authors identify key adaptations of the GVC framework including an emphasis on value chain governance as an instrument to correct market failure in partnership with state and development agencies, and upgrading as a de facto tool for poverty reduction. They find that efforts are ongoing to construct a ‘post’ to the Washington Consensus and that the global value chain is enabling this process by providing a new language and new object of development intervention: ‘the chain’ and the local–global linkages that comprise it.

Local–Global Linkages in Environmental Governance: The Case of Crop Genetic Resources

The loss of biodiversity is a global environmental problem that poses important governance challenges. Effective governance of crop genetic resources as a component of biodiversity is essential, given that such resources are the building blocks of today's modern agriculture. This article examines the formal governance framework in place for crop genetic resources, as embodied in the Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and compares this to alternative modes of governance proposed by peasants' organizations such as Via Campesina. The author argues that the existing formal governance framework falls short of providing an effective mechanism for the conservation of crop genetic resources. Alternative governance mechanisms may more effectively connect the local and the global in a way that recognizes the contributions of local communities to conserving genetic resources in centers of diversity, and re-embeds their control over agricultural production processes.

Research on Collective Learning Mechanism and Influencing Factors of Industrial Cluster Innovation Network

This study attempts to contribute to the cluster innovation literature by adding the collective learning perspective and propose an analytical framework on collective learning of cluster. Industrial cluster is viewed as a prevalent mode for technology innovation in knowledge-based economy. Collective learning outlines how local innovation network and spatial proximity between actors influence the sharing and creation of skills and knowledge in cluster. Firstly, this study discusses the structure and character of innovation network within industrial cluster. Secondly, it analyzes the collective learning mechanism of industrial cluster, which is involves in three dimensions: horizontal learning, vertical learning and multi-angle learning. Then, it focuses on some influencing factors of collective learning within innovation network. Finally, this study analyzes the role of global-local linkages in the dynamic capability of cluster innovation network.

City infrastructure supporting innovation

This paper considers the capacity of urban network and community-based planning to generate global knowledge flows and human-scale environments. It presents a study investigating the presence, relative density and distribution of innovation-supporting infrastructure surrounding major train stations in five cities. Four are highly-innovative, mid-size cities: Boston, Portland, Stuttgart and Dusseldorf. The fifth is Joondalup, a city in Western Australia which has similarly targeting knowledge development and innovation but has not received the same global recognition. This paper contributes to discussions of how local-global linkages and social capital building capacity of local urban planning can support innovation and knowledge development. It suggests that an analysis of localised spatial infrastructure and amenities of innovation indicate a region’s propensity to fulfil new economy priorities.

Does Spatial Clustering of Foreign Direct Investment Foster Global Production Networks? The Case of Qingdao, China

This article examines how spatial clustering of foreign direct investment (FDI) can foster a global production network (GPN). The cluster concept, in general, stressed inter-firm relations between local and regional firms while neglecting global–local linkages in the spatial context. In contrast, GPN focuses on the advantages of international production organization and governance structure but underestimates regional or localized channels of production arrangement. By integrating the conceptual framework of spatial clustering of FDI and GPN, this paper provides empirical evidence of various channels to knowledge and innovation transfer between domestic firms and foreign-invested enterprises. This paper demonstrates that the different types of linkages formation are key determinant factors for establishing cluster through contributing to local economic development.

Borderlands and border narratives: a longitudinal study of challenges and opportunities for local traders shaped by the Sino-Vietnamese border

AbstractIn this article I examine the relevance of utilizing a ‘Zomia-like’ approach to interpreting upland livelihoods in the China–Vietnam borderlands, rather than the more commonly employed nation-state lens. I explore the challenges and opportunities presented by the international borderline between the provinces of Yúnnán, southwest China, and Lào Cai, northern Vietnam, for local populations, namely ethnic minorities Kinh (lowland Vietnamese) and Han Chinese. Investigating the creation and solidification of this borderline and border space, I undertake a historical and contemporary analysis of cross-border trade networks. This focuses on two time periods in which global–local linkages have been especially important in directly shaping border negotiations: the French colonial period and the contemporary economic reform era. Present-day border narratives collected in both countries during ethnographic fieldwork with local traders managing important highland commodities shed light on the means by which the borderline and borderland spaces are continuing to shape both prospects and constraints.

REINVETING DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

Development research, despite or due to its emergence out of the colonial and postcolonial era, seeks to make a difference by focusing on issues of power and marginality. This makes it even more loaded and contested than other kinds of research, along with the responsibility to have policy influence. Despite tremendous achievements in development indicators, which researchers must subject to critical scrutiny, several challenges remain. These include an outmoded concept of ‘development’, the lack of attention to issues concerning culture and identity, uneasy relationships with policymakers, the lack of genuine interdisciplinarity and macro/micro divides. To survive over the coming decades, development research needs to focus more squarely on the ‘pedagogy Lawrence Haddad of the powerful’, address the increasing interconnectedness between North and South, local-global linkages, social change in the north and more genuine interdisciplinarity.

Local To Global: Transnational Networks And Indian Women's Grassroots Organizing

By focusing on grassroots groups of the Indian women's movement, we suggest that localglobal linkages often involve several intermediary levels—specifically levels below the nationstate. Grassroots organizing in India illustrates how a variety of intermediary networks are complexly intertwined within the nation state and beyond. Grassroots groups are localized, rural- or urban-based, and can be informal (such as in Bada Bhilwara and the case of MSK) or formal in character (such as Sanlaap). These groups actively build lateral and vertical networks. Austerity and structural adjustment programs have placed pressures on Third World women, forcing them to devise survival strategies to meet basic needs that combine efforts to change gender relations. Grassroots groups are built around daily needs and survival, and often challenge economic liberalization policies that have negative consequences for women—especially poor women.

Global finance and the growth of offshore financial centers: The manx experience

The globalization of the world economy and the concomitant increasing complexity of the global financial system has resulted in a large number of relatively small places functioning as offshore financial centers (OFCs). OFCs provide an alternative avenue for capital to be invested (literally) in offshore markets. This paper argues that these small places have to strive hard to link in to the global economy in a reputable fashion and have to do so through the creation of spatially focused financial regulation and supervision. The importance of the constructs of trust, knowledge, reputation, and networks in the functioning of offshore financial services is explored. A conceptual framework is developed to illustrate how OFCs link in to the global economy along three dimensions: regulation, location, and function. A case study of the rise of the Isle of Man as an OFC provides empirical evidence regarding global-local linkages and the importance of creating an appropriately balanced regulatory regime.