Event: Should Rich Nations Help the Poor?
Join Professor David Hulme and Mike Kane MP for the launch of Should Rich Nations Help the Poor? in Westminster, 16.00-17.00, 18 July.
Professor Hulme’s new book explores the moral and practical arguments for why rich nations should help the poor. He contends that while aid is necessary, it is not sufficient to lift the 1.2 billion people around who remain trapped in poverty and calls for a radical rethink in the policies and priorities of rich nations.
If you’d like to attend, please register here.
If you’d like David to speak about his new book at your event, please drop an email to gdi@manchester.ac.uk
“Life is random”: Dr Hubert Escaith, Chief Statistician at World Trade Organisation visits the GDI
Judith Krauss, Post-doctoral associate and Aarti Krishnan, PhD researcher, Global Development Institute
“Let me say the most important thing first: I am the father of three daughters.” This memorable sentence kicked off a unique masterclass with Dr Hubert Escaith, the World Trade Organization’s Chief Statistician. His visit, jointly organised by the Rory and Elizabeth Brooks Doctoral College and the Global Production Networks, Trade and Labour research group, encompassed a masterclass with PhD researchers and a public lecture on ‘Global Value Chains, Trade and Development: Evidence-based Policy-Making’. The student-led seminar was to help PhD candidates look beyond academia, both in terms of making links to policy and practice, and regarding career prospects. And look beyond we certainly did, prompted by Hubert’s colourful and generously shared stories, openness, encouragement and inquisitiveness, culminating in the (fortunately rhetorical) question: “What do you want to do with your life?”
Even though Hubert protested vehemently that he was no ‘master’ with insights to share with a ‘class’, his distinguished career in international organisations, joy in conversing and desire to engage with young researchers suggests otherwise. After completing a PhD at Toulouse University in Applied Mathematics, he started working for the United Nations in Baghdad, Iraq. His work has since taken him via senior positions in monitoring and evaluation, statistics and economics across the world, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, to his current work as WTO’s Chief Statistician, publishing throughout. “Something I have learned is that you don’t manage your life. You just make the most out of what you have.” In opposition to our current era, compulsively planning career prospects from a very young age, he instead pointed to his own experience as a succession of opportunities taken against the backdrop of growing up in humble beginnings, with the first priority always remaining the well-being of his family: “Life can be random.”
In school, Hubert loved history, philosophy and Greek, and was (by his standards) bad at mathematics, English and Spanish. He has since done a PhD in applied mathematics and has spent his working life in English and Spanish-speaking contexts. His very well-rounded outlook on life was a breath of fresh air, with his professionalism as a civil servant complemented by abiding interests in philosophy, literature and music: Hubert credited activities independent of work, such as choir-singing and theatre, with helping him grow in confidence at a young age. “In my time, nobody told you to find a job that you loved. I just always liked the job I had.”
He then turned his attention to his work for the last 10 years – the magical and yet sometimes slightly cumbersome world of DATA, and explained exactly how it can support bridging the academia-impact divide through evidence-based policy. A statement he made shocked academic data junkies like us: “Data is not used for policy-making, whatever gave you that idea – policy is made in parliaments on decisions of politicians.” That left us perplexed and a tad worried! But right after that, he said what was probably one of the most profound words we have ever heard: “Data can change the apriori of an opinion, and this is the power academics have – the ability to use data to change an apriori… a perception… to show policy-makers how things might really work rather than the way they think it does.” That sentence was worth a PhD: it allowed us to understand that data was actually a means to give a voice to the voiceless public, be it through large or small-scale surveys, a way we could build a narrative on what makes this complex world tick and use what we learnt to feedback into theory. Why is this process so important? Because as aptly put by Snepschuet: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is”.
Hubert Escaith’s career spanning several decades also allowed him to point out the vagaries of dominant thought and the repercussions of it changing, emphasising how in economics, Keynesianism was the order of the day during his studies, to be replaced by monetarist thinking as the dominant paradigm only fifteen years later. What does not change, however, is firstly the need for professionalism, and professionalism trumping ideological inclinations to avoid convictions getting in the way of truthful research and conduct. Secondly, the human condition is such that altruism is not as reliable a driver as self-interest, citing the “Fable of the bees”: bees’ work produces benefits for a wider audience; however, their inherent goal is serving themselves and their community. According to Hubert’s experience, the ‘dark side of the force’ a.k.a. the convergence of enlightened self-interest with public good fulfilment, was a tool to promote development rather than encumber it.
As the day came to a close participants of the masterclass and attendees of the lecture left feeling intellectually stimulated. But what truly left the biggest impression was his pointed question “what do you want to do with your life?” It is guaranteed to stay with all fifteen masterclass participants for a long time to come, highlighting not only that there is (a) life beyond academia, but also the need to think carefully about priorities. However, Hubert also would not have been Hubert had he not ended on a tongue-in-cheek adage: “Take my advice – I don’t use it anyway.”
Can we make anti-poverty programmes better?
By Minna Lehtinen, Communications Officer
One way that governments can help reduce poverty is by implementing social welfare programmes for those with low incomes, but the design of such programmes must be done with great care to make sure they actually achieve their poverty-reducing objectives.
A group of programmes that give cash to households with the expectation of breaking the inter-generational transmission of poverty are known as human development conditional cash transfer programmes. Typical transfer conditions include spending on schooling, going to the doctor regularly, and other investments intended to ensure that the cash is not only supplementing the household’s income and consumption, but also boosting the household’s own productive capacity. This follows the principle that poverty eradication is not limited to helping citizens meet their basic needs, but must also empower citizens to secure their own livelihoods.
In many such programmes, participants are periodically assessed on whether they continue to qualify for the programme, and once they have achieved a socio-economic status above the entry criteria, they exit the programme.
“Exit as entry” results in welfare losses
Juan M. Villa, Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute (GDI), and Armando Barrientos, Professor at the GDI, examined Colombia’s Familias en Acción programme in a recent GDI Working Paper. They found that current practice using of entry criteria to determine programme exit is not supported conceptually, analytically, or empirically, and can in fact be associated with welfare losses for excluded households. This, of course, is the opposite of what the programme is trying to achieve, and has significant implications for the design and implementation of any anti-poverty transfers programmes (conditional cash transfers, but also social pensions and family subsidies) using socio-economic status to determine when households leave the programme.
Click here to read the Working Paper, or read on below for a summary of the findings.
Exit as entry as a flawed concept
For an agency managing an anti-poverty transfer programme on a fixed and insufficient budget, using entry criteria to determine when households exit is assumed to maximise the programme’s poverty reduction effect by ensuring only those below the critical threshold participate in the programme. But this approach is not compatible with the objectives of a human development conditional cash transfer programme (which uses conditionality to build long-term capacity in households to keep them out of poverty for good). It doesn’t place a value on preventing households above the poverty line from falling back into poverty. Achieving this requires paying attention to how households can exit the programme sustainably, stay out of poverty and therefore, treating entry and exit criteria separately.
Analytical and empirical evidence from Colombia
Villa and Barrientos examined households who participated in Colombia’s Familias en Accion programme by 2006 but were excluded the following year because their welfare score was above the entry threshold. The research compares the households’ actual outcomes to what could have been expected had they remained in the programme, and the findings show that exit from the programme impacted the households negatively in three different ways:
Impact on schooling
Compared with those who remained in the programme, children in excluded households experienced:
- 12 fewer completed years of education
- Male children impacted more than female children (0.147 compared to 0.086 year shortfalls in education, respectively)
- Older children also suffered a higher shortfall than younger children (0.11 and 0.07 years respectively)
- Lower school attendance across the board, of just below 1 percentage point, which is modest but may have significant cumulative effects
Impact on work
As their incomes were reduced, households were forced to re-structure their work lives after exiting the programme, so exclusion resulted in:
- Fewer women going to work (2 percentage points reduced labour force participation)
- More men going to work (1.3 percentage point higher labour force participation)
- More men working in the informal sectors (about 1 percentage point increase)
- Households with children in school while in the programme experienced a more significant net effect from re-allocation of labour (and 4.2 percentage point increase in children under three in excluded households)
Impact on socio-economic status
Households who exited in 2007 were 3.8 percentage points more likely to be eligible for the programme than the households remaining in the programme in 2011, with rural households worse off than urban ones at 4.2 points. This represents a significant drop in the socio-economic status of excluded households, so it is clear that their exit did not happen sustainably.
Ways forward
Agencies implementing conditional cash transfer programmes are paying increasing attention to exit criteria and some have already adopted a range of strategies to address the issues “exit as entry” causes. For example, in 2013, Familias en Acción introduced a guaranteed two years leave to remain in the programme for households with welfare scores above the entry threshold but below a vulnerability threshold. Villa and Barrientos’s findings suggest more innovation in programme design and implementation is needed to better fulfil the programme objective to build household capacity to ensure they are able to exit and stay out of poverty in the longer term.
Focusing on aid means we miss more effective ways to promote development
Over the last few years, UK aid has acted as a lightning rod for criticism as it has risen to meet the international target of 0.7% of GNI, while other government spending has been subject to significant reductions.
The Daily Mail in particular has aggressively pursued a campaign against the aid budget and mobilised 230,000 supporters to sign a parliamentary petition calling for the 0.7% target to be scrapped as they claim it results in “huge waste and corruption”. The petition was recently debated by a packed room of MPs, the vast majority of whom lined up to defend UK aid spending, highlighting the positive impact it makes around the world.
UK aid is some of the most closely scrutinised in the world, by various parliamentary committees and independent external bodies. The Department for International Development is a leader in aid effectiveness and transparency, which helps drive up the standards of less progressive donors. And while the £12 billion annual aid budget is certainly a significant sum, it represents just 16p in every £10 of government spending. Collectively, we throw away much more in food waste (an estimated £19 billion) than we spend in aid.
However, I’m concerned that the apparent fixation we have on the aid budget in the UK means we’re ignoring even more effective ways to help poorer nations.
The idea that development can be achieved largely through foreign aid alone has been discredited. Countries that have experienced significant improvements in the well-being of their population in recent years have largely achieved this through engaging with markets and international trade, boosted by the end of the Cold War, China’s return to the global economy and favourable commodity prices. The creation and diffusion of relatively simple technical knowledge about health, hygiene, nutrition, organization and technologies has also played an important role. While effectively given aid, provided in the right context can provide vital assistance to people in need, it cannot ‘create’ development for whole societies.
If the UK and other rich nations are serious about helping to catalyse development across the world, there are five key policy areas that require urgent attention, which I explore in depth in my new book ‘Should Rich Nations Help the Poor’:
- Reform international trade policies so that poor countries and poor people can gain a greater share of the benefits derived from trade.
- Recognize international migration as an element of trade policy and a highly effective means of reducing poverty.
- Take action against climate change (mitigation and supporting adaptation) and take responsibility for the historical role of rich nations in creating global warming.
- Reform global finance to stop the siphoning off of income and assets from poor countries to rich countries by corporations and national elites.
- Limit the arms trade to fragile countries and regions and carefully consider support for military action (budgets, technology and even ‘feet on the ground’) in specific cases, such as the successful Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone.
This holistic approach to global development is the type of response envisaged by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which the UK signed up to just last September. However a recent report by the cross-party International Development Select Committee of MPs was highly critical of the lack of any sort of joined up thinking across government on key aspects of the 17 goals
In strident tones, the report highlights “a fundamental absence of commitment to the coherent implementation of the SDGs across government.” Without a proper cross government strategy, they fear “it is likely that areas of deep incoherence across government policy could develop and progress made by certain departments could be easily undermined by the policies and actions of others.” A formal mechanism to ensure policy coherence across Whitehall is called for.
Many of the SDGs are inherently political, calling for reductions in inequality, improvements in governance and for gender equality. In many areas, national ownership by citizens and state are vital. However in other issues that go beyond aid, there’s a clear agenda for action by countries of the Global North. But it’s precisely these issues, such as international tax and trade reforms, which will be hampered without clear commitment and coordination across governments like the UK. If we continue to focus on aid alone as a proxy for development, it’s also these issues that won’t receive the attention they deserve from policymakers.
From climate change to spiralling inequality, given the challenges the world faces it’s both morally right and in our own self-interests for rich nations like the UK to help the poor. But if we’re unable to move beyond aid and properly consider the most effective ways we can help poor countries, we’ll leave a world to our children and grandchildren that’s more unstable, less secure and with more people mired in poverty than there needs to be.
Listen | John Knight on China’s effective but flawed economic governance
Professor John Knight, The University of Oxford, recently spoke at the GDI on ‘the principal-agent problem, the developmental state, subjective well-being and social instability: China’s effective but flawed economic governance.’
Listen to the talk in full below
‘I feel trapped in limbo with my Syrian passport’
Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia PhD researcher, Global Development Institute
The ongoing war in Syria has left millions of people in conditions of displacement either within or across national borders. Not all Syrian asylum seekers and refugees fled following direct threats and violence. As the experience of Noor illustrates, some left their country to pursue their professional and academic careers but then, because of dynamics of war, cannot not return.
Hand painted tile stating “Pray for Syria”.
This is the story of Noor, an international student who could not return to Syria because of the civil war. She is now hoping to be granted refugee status in the UK.
Noor, which in Arabic means ‘light’, came to England as an international student in 2014. By the time she arrived, the conflict in her country was being represented internationally as the ‘Syrian crises’. Coming to England has for long been an aspiration for Noor. She spent many years learning English and gaining the academic qualifications necessary to be accepted at a British university. However, she recalls that when she was accepted by The University of Manchester she was concerned about whether or not she would be able to obtain a visa, having heard that visas for Syrians, even those who are sponsored students, were being rejected. Everything worked out fine, however and Noor was able to come to England and pursue her dream of studying at a British University.
By 2015, the conflict in Syria had worsened and was no longer being described by the international media as a ‘Syrian crises’ but was being referred to as the ‘Syrian war’. Opportunities for Syrians to obtain visas were limited and millions were trapped within Syria or were able to flee to neighbouring countries. And others made the hazardous journey and tried to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
Despite the escalation of the conflict, as soon Noor finished her studies she returned ‘home’ as planned. However, after only one day home in Damascus it became clear to her that what had initially been referred by international media to as an ‘uprising’ and later as a ‘crisis’ was indeed a ‘war’. Noor realised that ‘home’ was no longer a safe place in which she could pursue her dreams and achieve her aspirations. When Noor returned to England to attend her graduation ceremony it crossed her mind that England, a place in which she had had such a wonderful and productive time, could become her next home.
Noor applied for refugee status and immediately shifted from being an international student to being an asylum seeker. While waiting for the Home Office decision, and despite having the financial support of her family in Syria, Noor has been moving from one place to the other in order to keep her expenses down.
Noor’s story tells us something about what and where home is and what it means. Noor herself says that ‘home’ is a tricky concept and one that is hard to define. Ultimately she says, home is neither my country nor the physical house I was living in Damascus. Home to me is more a feeling”. Having spent a significant part of her life living in other countries including France, Saudi Arab, Lebanon and England, Noor says, “I see life as a train station. I am always ready to move”. She experiences home as a mobile space. “I feel at home in a place I like. I think family is central for my understanding of home but home is also the place you feel you can contribute the most. I am volunteering as a research assistant and bringing support to refugees in the UK, so I think England could now be my home”. She stresses that she is an independent woman able to work and contribute to this society as do other refugees. She added “If I am granted permission to stay, I will work, I will pay taxes and I will do my best to contribute to this society”.
However, waiting for the Home Office concerning her status in the UK is not free of tension and she is anxious about the future. Noor told me “I feel trapped in limbo. I am not saying I feel in limbo living in England. I can make this place my home. What I mean is that I feel trapped in limbo with my Syrian passport. I cannot work or move anywhere. [] In order to feel at home I need papers. I need the permission to stay”.
Noor’s emphasis on the need of ‘papers’ to feel at home in England can be better understood if we consider the role of the symbolic value of material things in the process of home-making. I asked Noor if she had brought anything with her to England that reminded of her home in Damascus. In response, she recounted a little story. When she had left her home in Damascus to get a job in a neighbouring country, her mother had asked her if she wanted to take something with her to remind her of her family at home. Noor had looked at her belongings and chose an envelope. This is the same envelope Noor brought to England. It contains her academic diplomas, language test results, letters of reference and her passport. When asked why she chose the envelope she simply replied “that is what I am. Thus, that is what I need to make a home for myself in this country”.
Noor’s experience is only one of millions of Syrians who have fled conflict or who cannot return to their country because of the escalation of war. Having to make a new home away is an experience shared by many of the over 60 million people currently living in conditions of displacement across the world.
Today, in celebrating the Refugee Day, the narrative of Noor calls our attention that refugees, as Maja Korac stresses, are ordinary human beings living in extraordinary circumstances. They are just people like us trying to find a safe place to live in the world.
Will small development charities survive?
Yesterday the Global Development Institute’s David Hulme represented a research project run jointly by GDI and SIID (the University of Sheffield), at the Small Charities International Development Debate in the House of Lords. The research project is seeking to map and give insight into the operations of and relationships within the UK-based international development NGO (INGO) sector.
Hosted by the Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI), the debate was part of FSI’s Small Charity Week, and asked ‘will small international development charities survive?’ David took the affirmative, as did S.A.L.V.E. International CEO Nicola Sansom and SNP National Secretary and Westminster Spokesperson on International Development Patrick Grady. On the opposing team were campaigner, writer and consultant on NGO strategy Deborah Doane, and founder and CEO of Teach a Man to Fish, Nik Kafka. The debate was chaired by Bibi Van der Zee, Editor at the Guardian’s Global Development Professional Network.
Speaking first, Nicola Sansom pointed out that small INGOs are risk-takers, have low overheads and develop and maintain strong networks. She also noted that increasingly affordable comms routes mean costs are less of a barrier to awareness-raising, and also make it easier for charities to exercise transparency with donors and other stakeholders. David also made a case for small INGOs’ capacity for networking and partnerships, pointing out that they play an important role in connecting complex debates at an interpersonal, community level and in diversifying ‘official’ development messaging and activity. He argued that plenty of donors are still looking to engage with small INGOs in their capacity as an important, active component of civil society. However, as the current SIID & GDI mapping research has so far shown, David acknowledged that the biggest 9% of UK NGOs receive 90% of all development spending, and that if small charities are to survive there exists a clear need for better distribution of funds.
The SNP’s Patrick Grady argued that small INGOs can and should survive, and therefore that they will. He emphasised that there will always be a desire amongst people at the grassroots to contribute to humanitarian causes, as donors and volunteers. He also noted that the larger INGOs often rely on smaller partners for actual, in-country project delivery, concluding that there is certainly a need for flexibility and adaptability as the development sector continues to change, but that its reforming will include big opportunities for small INGOs.
The opposition presented some convincing counterpoints, with Deborah Doane taking the stance that small charities are unlikely to survive in their current form. She made the point that NGOs and donors alike are feeling the financial pinch, and that, generally speaking, philanthrocapitalists tend to push small INGOs to operate as social enterprises not charities, and in so-doing undermine the charity model. She also noted a growing hostility toward donors on the part of recipients in the Global South, and a desire amongst the latter to take ownership of their countries’ development needs. She summarised by saying small INGOs won’t survive as they are today because of: the changing funding environment; the global assault on civil society; and the fact they’re ‘too damn authentic’.
Nik Kafka agreed that the current funding environment is not conducive to the survival of small charities; donors are increasingly ‘honing in’ on causes with very specific mandates (such as ‘educating girls in Uganda’), rather than more general approaches that allow for a wider range of small INGOs to benefit. He also argued that the costs of conclusively monitoring and demonstrating impact are rising. Similarly, while technology is generally cheaper now, it is still costly to purpose-build tools (like apps) that could improve operational efficiency; funds that small INGOs don’t tend to have. Conversely, he did make the point that while big INGOs may be good at securing donor support, they don’t always have the specialist knowledge needed for effective project delivery.
Ultimately, there was general consensus that there is a future for the small charity cohort, but that adaptability and an openness to working collaboratively are crucial. It was noted by FSI co-founder and Chief Executive Pauline Broomhead that networking is a strength for many small charities, but not all are as good at developing these connections into active collaborations and partnerships.
The debate provided compelling context for the SIID and GDI mapping project. Research is still in progress, but has produced interesting preliminary findings, including that:
1. Growth of the sector was most vigorous in the mid-2000s. But it is premature to view current (downward) trends as indicative of a long term decline in vigour of growth in numbers of organisations
2. The development sector is substantial, with expenditure equalling approximately 50% of current ODA
3. Distribution of expenditure is highly unequal, with less than 9% of organisations accounting for nearly 90% of expenditure (and 1% accounting for 50% of expenditure)
4. The sector has experienced growth generally, but the largest organisations experienced a dip in expenditure in 2012. Smaller organisations have experienced a decline in expenditure in recent years
5. Change in expenditure is highly variable, with the smaller organisations most likely to experience declines from one year to the next
More information on the project is available at on the Mapping Development NGOs website.
Small Charity Week was first established by the Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI) in 2010, to celebrate and raise the profile of the small charity sector. The week is one of a series of activities and initiatives to support and raise awareness of the hundreds and thousands of small charities that, every day, make a huge difference to vulnerable communities right across the UK and the rest of the world. Thank you to the organisers for their work, and what was a thought-provoking event!
Blog by Sarah Illingworth for SIID.
Should the UK abandon aid?
A petition organised by the Daily Mail calling for an end to the 0.7% aid spending target will be debated in parliament today after gaining 230,000 signatures.
In his new book, ‘Should Rich Nations Help the Poor’, Professor David Hulme examines the increasingly polarised debates around aid. He concludes that while we must be mindful that aid spending alone won’t end poverty, effectively given aid is both morally right and in the self-interest of a rich nation like the UK.
In a new video, he argues that UK aid is some of the most well scrutinized in the world and that working in fragile states like Somalia or Afghanistan are inherently risky – but hugely important.
Buy Should Rich Nations Help the Poor? from Wiley for £7.49, using the discount code: PY724.
Should Rich Nations Help the Poor?
GDI Executive Director, Professor David Hulme, has written a short and accessible analysis of why and how rich nations should help poor people and poorer countries. The book is ideal for general readers and students new to Development Studies and is available from Wiley for £7.49, using the discount code: PY724.
1.2 billion people still live in extreme poverty and around 2.9 billion cannot meet their basic human needs. We know that foreign aid is necessary, but not sufficient to end global poverty. Spiralling inequality and the growing impact of climate change on poor people threatens to derail the progress that’s been made over the last 25 years.
Hulme explains why helping the world’s neediest communities is both the right thing to do and the wise thing to do – if rich nations want to take care of their own citizens’ future welfare.
The real question is how best to provide this help. The way forward, Hulme argues, is not solely about foreign aid but also trade, finance and environmental policy reform. But this must happen alongside a change in international social norms so that we all recognize the collective benefits of a poverty-free world.
“David Hulme has provided an invaluable primer on why and how we should help the poor of the world. He rightly sees the key issues as climate change and inequality. In the end, we are all in this together, rich and poor alike.” Angus Deaton, Princeton University and Winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics
Global production networks and social upgrading: emerging research on a persistent challenge
Dr Rory Horner, Global Development Institute
In a global economy increasingly structured through global production networks, existing public and private governance approaches are struggling to promote improved labour conditions and sustainability, while new challenges are also emerging.
With this in mind, the Global Development Institute’s (GDI) Global production networks, labour and trade research group hosted a workshop earlier this month on “Global value chains and social upgrading”, to take stock of this field and to bring together a group of more than 20 emerging scholars to discuss their recent research on this issue. The workshop was generously funded by the Brown International Advanced Research Institute (BIARI) Alumni Research Initiative, as follow-up support to alumni – GDI’s Rory Horner and Rachel Alexander, GDI alumni Shamel Azmeh, Fabiola Mieres, Vivek Soundararajan and Annika Surmeier – of their fantastic two-week annual summer school which focuses on addressing global issues. The GDI also provided considerable support, with Manchester having led much of the growing field of research on social upgrading in global production networks, notably through the Capturing the Gains project.
In her opening keynote plenary on “Global value chains, market-making and the rise of precarious work”, Jennifer Bair traced cases of precarious work from New York city a century ago to contemporary Bangladesh to highlight how outsourcing through global value chains gives rise to challenging labour conditions.
Within global value chains, private governance has proliferated in recent years, and Greg Distelhorst, Judith Stroehle and Scott Sanders all sought to explore the impacts of, and limits to, compliance with private standards. Samia Hoque provided evidence from her recent collaborative paper on Bangladesh.
Gale-Raj Reichert’s work on the electronics industry, Vivek Soundararajan’s work on sourcing agents and boundary work and Annika Surmeier’s work on tourism presented further examples of labour challenges across a variety of sectors.
Fabiola Mieres provided an alternative notion to corporate-driven mechanisms through a notion of “worker-driven social responsibility”, while Matthew Alford highlighted public-private governance challenges in South African fruit. Indeed the challenges for both public and private governance was a recurring theme in the workshop discussions.
As public governance attempts at addressing social upgrading issues, international trade agreements are also now including social standards, as highlighted through Mirela Barbu’s work on the European Union’s Free Trade Agreements, and Shamel Azmeh’s presentation on the case of the Jordan-US trade agreement.
Prospects for social upgrading must consider gender, power, and embeddedness, as highlighted through Nikita Pardesi’s work on oil and gas in Trinidad and Tobago, Eleni Sifaki’s work on grape production in Greece and Judith Krauss’s recently completed doctoral research on sustainability challenges in the cocoa sector.
The challenges for better social outcomes in GPNs also go beyond labour. Anke Hagemann explored the impact of participation in GPNs on urban areas, while Rachel Alexander demonstrated the difficulty UK cotton-garment retailers face in promoting sustainability in their extended supply networks from India.
At the same time, new challenges for social upgrading emerge. The growth of transnational online labour markets within “virtual production networks” warrants growing attention as Alex Wood highlighted. Now more than ever, in today’s increasingly multi-polar global economy with growing South-South trade, social upgrading must also be considered beyond end markets in the global North. Jinsun Bae’s work on Myanmar’s garment industry, Corinna Braun-Munzinger’s work on corporate social responsibility in China and Natalie Langford’s work on social standards and tea production in India all made this case.
Workshop participants received detailed feedback and had opportunities to discuss their work with leading scholars in this field – Jennifer Bair (University of Colorado-Boulder), Peter Lund-Thomsen (Copenhagen Business School) and Andrew Schrank (Brown) as well as Manchester’s own Stephanie Barrientos, Martin Hess, and Khalid Nadvi.
With continued challenges for both private and public regulation of labour and sustainability issues in the global economy as well as new challenges emerging, the debate must continue. Look out for the research of these emerging scholars we hosted at GDI as it pushes this conversation forward.