Regional Political Economy Research Articles

Between Eating and Being Fed: Competing Ethics of Community-Based Road Building in Nepal

ABSTRACT: This paper explores locally-situated logics of ethical judgment underpinning practices of road building in Nepal, and how those logics are attuned to the challenges of navigating complex socio-political dynamics, socio-natural environments, and regional political economies. In so doing it challenges homogenizing discourses of corruption that commonly surround infrastructure development. Building on ethnographic research on rural road construction in two agrarian districts, we argue that different understandings of who is responsible for contributing to infrastructure development, and what forms of private gain from public road budgets are justifiable, do not always conform to official understandings of the public good. Such discrepancies arise, we suggest, from the practical role that certain forms of rule breaking play in getting roads built, as well as from the contested legitimacy of the rules themselves. The politics of participatory development bring to light the ambivalent morality of certain forms of public/private transgressions, and tensions between competing imaginaries of the "public" nature of "local" rural roads—which constitute important, and largely overlooked, dynamics in infrastructure development. Attention to such dynamics is needed to better understand the challenge of building high-quality rural roads and, we contend, to inform just and sustainable approaches to infrastructure development.

Climate resettlement and livelihood transformation in Rwanda: the case of Rweru Model Green Village

ABSTRACT This study investigates whether relocating rural communities from areas exposed to high climatic risks can be transformative and in what ways. Using the Rweru Model Green Village as a case study and drawing on regional political ecology and sustainable livelihoods framework, the study shows that climate-related resettlement as an act of transformation is mediated by development vision and policies, multi-scalar dynamics, and micro-politics. Our semi-structured interviews with households resettled in the Rweru village revealed the double-edged nature of transformation. Resettlement was shown to increase access to modern facilities and social services for two remote island communities. However, new and potentially severe livelihood constraints emerged due to limited natural and financial capital, intra-community inequities, and microclimate variations between the origin and resettlement sites. These findings suggest that resettlement as a form of transformative adaptation requires careful navigation of the interplay between community expectations, government development plans, and shifts in the local, regional, and global political economy.

What did COVID-19 really teach us about science, evidence and society?

What did COVID-19 really teach us about science, evidence and society?

Economic statecraft, geoeconomics and regional political economies

In this introduction to the special issue, we establish the overarching objective for the collection; to investigate the salience and efficacy of conceptions of Economic Statecraft (ES) and Geoeconomics for understanding and explaining shifts in state-market relationships in a number of regional political economies. After a very short overview of different generations of ES research, we establish the set of common questions that each of the papers address, and how we arrived at them as the research project evolved. We point to the importance of ensuring that ES is not just thought of as something that the more powerful regional states engage in, and the need to adopt a three-part analytical distinction between different components of ES: motivations and objectives; actions and tools; and outcomes and consequences. This allows us to trace the relationship between goals and effects, provides a basis for comparative studies, and makes it easier to make a distinction between ES and other forms of state involvement in the economy.

Competitive Liberalization, Postneoliberalism, and Hegemony: The Case of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement

ABSTRACTPostneoliberal regionalism in Latin America has failed to live up to the expectations of its proponents and analysts in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Several causes explain its disappointing result, but a relatively understudied cause may be found in the US policy of competitive liberalization. This policy not only aimed at securing US economic and trade interests but also served as a counterweight against emerging postneoliberalism and as a tool for reaffirming US hegemony. This article presents a case study of one example of competitive liberalization in action, the US-Peru FTA, in order to assess how the policy functioned and contributed to curbing the posthegemonic moment in Latin America. It observes a combination of coercion and the political influence of beneficiaries of free trade, and it considers how these dynamics worked to strengthen US influence, both in Peru and in the wider regional political economy.

The role of development models in Japan’s and Korea’s relations with Central Asia: Discourses and practices

This article examines the policies of development cooperation promoted by Japan and Korea in Central Asia, focussing on the roles of discourses treating Japan and Korea as potential non-Western models for the region’s development and modernisation in their relations with Central Asian states. We trace the evolution of relevant developmental approaches made by Japan and Korea, analysing discourses and practices of sharing experiences, as well as the key drivers behind those shifts, and we seek to locate these changes in the larger context of regional political economy and international relations. Furthermore, the article seeks to address the ideational and normative aspects of Japanese and Korean development cooperation in Central Asia. We conclude with a recap comparison of Japan’s and Korea’s sharing of development experiences.

Canadian Federalism and the Political Economy of Energy and the Environment

These two books draw attention to the role of Canada's oil-producing provinces—“petro-provinces” for Angela Carter and “carbon provinces” for Douglas Macdonald—in the politics of energy, environment and climate change, but they do so in very different ways. Carter's volume examines the erosion of environmental protections in the oil-rich provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador, while Macdonald's focuses on the way interest-based conflicts rooted in regional energy political economies have driven federal/provincial dynamics around energy and climate policy. Both books are well written (not always a given in academic publishing), and they should interest anyone concerned with the politics of energy, environment and climate change in Canada.

Global Commodity Markets, Chinese Demand for Maize, and Deforestation in Northern Myanmar

This paper makes a significant contribution to understanding the logic of deforestation in Northern Myanmar and connects global trends and regional political economy with local environmental changes. Methodologically, through a combination of remote sensing GIS analysis, for which we use a newly available Myanmar Forest Change dataset produced by TerraPulse and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, as well as on-the-ground field research observations and interviews with farmers, this paper examines how the expansion of maize plantations in the northern part of Myanmar has implications for deforestation in the region. It argues that a combination of global commodity price shock around 2011–2012 plus easy market access to China generated strong incentives for local farmers to increase the cultivation of maize. The paper contributes to how we understand the environmental impacts of Chinese demands for agricultural products in Southeast Asia.

Covid-19 Pandemic and Foreign Bank Performance in Asia-Pacific

The covid-19 pandemic affects all aspects of human life, including the economy. Investments, transactions, and other financial services got a surprising shock as the effects of the pandemic. However, as time goes by, the pandemic starts to re-normalize turning into a new normal. Even, some countries in the Asia Pacific commencing a new-normal life, like, China, South Korea, and Singapore. Despite the good news, it seems the grassroots is not fully recovered from the shock. Therefore we argue that the positive outlook may not give a lot of positive senses and confidence, hence skepticism in the economy persists, especially in economic growth, despite some aspects, such as international banks or financial institutions in Asia set an optimist target. Further, this paper would like to explain the Behavioral Political Economy perspective and the case of CIMB Group in Indonesia for capturing regional political economy explanation and analyzed the relation of grassroots condition and the target’s positivism post the pandemic, as Indonesia is the second-largest market in the Asia Pacific and CIMB is one of the prominent universal bank groups in ASEAN and beyond.

Defence spending, burden-sharing and strategy in NATO’s Black Sea littoral states: domestic, regional, and international systemic factors

ABSTRACT The allocation of scarce resources is a grand strategic question – burden-sharing behaviour has clear effects on states’ ability to contribute to collective defence. Both NATO and the European Union encourage members not just to spend more on defence, but to focus those expenditures on equipment modernization and shared operational requirements. After NATO allies formally pledged to improve burden-sharing along these lines in 2014, and EU members followed in 2016, transatlantic debates on defence spending have become increasingly tense, particularly since 2017. What actually drives states’ choices to allocate resources to shared defence priorities? I operationalize transatlantic burden-sharing in line with NATO’s ‘Cash, Capabilities, and Contributions’ approach for a mixed-methods analysis of the burden-sharing behaviour of NATO’s Black Sea littoral states – Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. Using a multi-method analytical approach, I find that national and particularly regional political economies drive burden-sharing choices more than geostrategy, at least in the current strategic environment.

Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

AbstractThis article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

ПОИСКИ НОВОЙ МОДЕЛИ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО УЧАСТИЯ В РЕГИОНАХ: ПРАЙМЕРИЗ «ЕДИНОЙ РОССИИ» И ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОЦЕССЫ В ЕВРОПЕ

Subject. The article analyzes the experience of the preliminary voting of the United Russia party in the context of the problems of strengthening the party-political system of the state. Topic. The search for a new model of political participation in the regions: the primaries of United Russia and political processes in Europe. Purposes. To analyze the experience of the preliminary voting of the United Russia party in the context of the problems of strengthening the party-political system both in the regions of the Russian Federation and in the states of Europe. Methodology. Complex systems approach, classical institutional method, neoinstitutional approach, elements of critical theory and poststructuralism, political and cultural method. Results. The primaries of United Russia are a step towards the consolidation of the party and political system, an important act that allows improving the personnel composition of the current government structures, as well as supporting all healthy political forces in the country. The importance of new media in shaping the party agenda, as well as the significant role of electronic voting in the digital age in the context of the emergence of influential political networks, is emphasized. Russia is moving away from the crisis electoral models that exist in the West in the conditions of stagnation of neoliberal globalization, and is forming its own vector of strengthening the political participation of voters in real political processes. Scope of application. The results of the research can be applied by specialists in the field of regional policy and political management, regional and world economy, teachers and students of higher educational institutions. Conclusions. The testing of the model of political participation of citizens during the preliminary voting in May — June 2021 has shown its effectiveness and can play a constructive role in the political processes in the regions and in Russia as a whole. Keywords: Political participation, primaries, electronic voting, populism, new electoral models.

Defense planning in the fog of peace: the transatlantic currency conversion conundrum

ABSTRACTResource allocation to and within defense budgets is grand strategy. NATO and the EU coordinate defense planning and encourage fair burden-sharing among their members. We analyze the effect of agreed planning processes, namely the “NATO Defense Planning Process (NDPP)” on the conversion of political will to resources and then to capabilities development across the transatlantic security community. In a “fog of peace” featuring diverse threats, and in which allies may disagree on strategic rivals and sources of risk, national and regional political economies shape strategy, not the other way around.

Review and Prospect of Regional Economics and Regional Political Economy:

Review and Prospect of Regional Economics and Regional Political Economy:

The Geopolitics of Gulf Sport Sponsorship

ABSTRACT The names of two major Gulf airlines, Qatar Airways and Emirates, have saturated the European football scene for many years, sponsoring some of the most prominent European teams and FIFA itself. These state-backed airlines are also active in motorsports, rugby, cycling, tennis, golf, cricket, and equestrian sport, while several prominent Gulf elites and royal family members have recently taken over major sports franchises in Europe and elsewhere. How should we understand these far-reaching sponsorship agendas in the Gulf? What can they tell us about the politics and ethics of international sport on the Arabian Peninsula? Moving beyond the general readings of Gulf sport sponsorship as an exercise in ‘soft power,’ this article shows how these deals are strategic nodes for diverse actors in the Gulf and in the international sporting community to advance various interests: personal, political, financial, and otherwise. Informed by a critical geopolitics lens that questions the coherence of the ‘state’ as an actor, I ask what it means to say that ‘the Gulf’ sponsors sport, and more specifically investigate the relevant actors behind these sponsorship deals. To do so, this article examines regional and global political economy through a focus on three Gulf airline sponsors, Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways, and three elite sports sponsors—the UAE’s Sheik Mansour, Qatar’s Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaïfi, and Sheikh Nasser of Bahrain. By decentering ‘soft power’ approaches to sport that unduly emphasize the ‘state’ as an actor, this article suggests a more grounded approach to the geopolitics of sport in the Arabian Peninsula, which simultaneously acknowledges the complicity of Western actors and institutions in the rise of Gulf sports sponsorship deals in the past decade.

Psychic Landscapes, Worker Organizing and Blame. Uljanik and the 2018 Croatian Shipbuilding Crisis

AbstractThis article analyses worker narratives of discontent in relation to a series of crises at the Uljanik Shipyard in Pula, Croatia, over the course of 2018. It draws on five months of fieldwork conducted in the period between two worker protests at the shipyard surrounding the late payment of wages, the second of which developed into a large-scale strike. The author describes the crises, provides historical details about the shipyard and about trade unions and other forms of worker organizing, and offers notes on the political context. He analyses the psychic landscape of the most recent crisis period, with a focus on how anxiety, fear and suspicion were manifest. Finally, he discusses rumours and the blaming strategies adopted by workers, relating them to the importance of personalized relations in the regional political economy.

Burden-Sharing, Geopolitics, and Strategy in NATO’s Black Sea Littoral States

The allocation of scarce resources is a grand strategic question – burden-sharing behavior has clear effects on states’ ability to contribute to collective defense. I operationalize transatlantic burden-sharing in line with NATO’s “Cash, Capabilities, and Contributions” approach for a mixed-methods analysis of the burden-sharing behavior of NATO’s Black Sea littoral states – Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. Using a multi-method analytical approach, I find that national and particularly regional political economies drive burden-sharing choices more than geostrategy, at least in the current strategic environment. Specifically, Bulgaria appears to be hedging between Russia, NATO, and the European Union, resulting in rhetorical commitments to NATO and the EU but limited behavioral changes. Romania, on the other hand, seems to be prioritizing protection from NATO against Russia in an almost obsequious way, rapidly increasing defense spending to meet the Wales Pledge criteria. Finally, Turkey has focused on terrorism and its Kurdish issue, both within its own borders and in neighboring Syria, testing allies’ loyalty.

Defence Planning in the Fog of Peace: The Transatlantic Currency Conversion Conundrum

Resource allocation to and within defense budgets is grand strategy. NATO and the EU coordinate defense planning and encourage fair burden-sharing among their members. We analyse the effect of agreed planning processes, namely the ‘NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP)’ on the conversion of political will to resources and then to capabilities development across the transatlantic security community, adding to conversations on hierarchy and order in international politics. In a ‘fog of peace’ featuring diverse threats, and in which allies may disagree on strategic rivals and sources of risk, national and regional political economies shape strategy, not the other way around.

Fiber Spinning During the Mapungubwe Period of Southern Africa: Regional Specialism in the Hinterland

The Middle Iron Age (MIA) of southern Africa is a period characterized by increased social complexity centered on the polity of Mapungubwe. This article considers the role that fiber spinning played in the regional political economy of the period. At Mutamba and other sites in the southern hinterland of Mapungubwe, spinning was a significant economic activity. Evidence from 187 spindle whorls from the site suggests that intensive spinning of cotton was practiced by households. This enabled hinterland communities to actively participate in regional trade networks and acquire trade goods, including objects that were often restricted in the Mapungubwe heartland. This casts hinterland communities as active participants, rather than passive bystanders, in the regional economy.

Uncovering Heterogeneity in the Resolution of Bank Failures: The Role of Regional Distress and Political Economy

How can the public assess the performance of regulators who administer the resolution of troubled banks? Economic theory indicates that regulators best serve the public interest when they act to discourage moral hazard and preserve channels of financial intermediation. I study the resolution of failed financial institutions in the US over the period 1984-1992, characterized by concurrent crises in the banking and Savings and Loans(S&L) industries. I determine whether regulators in the two industries conformed to norms of optimal resolution by developing a Bayesian estimation algorithm to uncover their decision rules. The results show that the banking regulator provided assistance and carried out liquidations with higher probability when failures occurred amid adverse and benign local economic conditions respectively. Whereas the former's actions align with theoretical recommendations, the S&L regulator did not distinguish across failures based on underlying economic characteristics. These findings provide insights into the differences in responses that contributed to the resilience of the banking regulator through the crisis and the eventual insolvency of the S&L regulator. The estimation approach developed here addresses unobserved heterogeneity, allows straightforward inference on quantities of interest and offers a coherent framework for model comparison.