 Outsourcing governance: states and the politics of a ‘global value chain world’Frederick W. Mayer and Nicola Phillips New Political Economy, 2017, vol. 22, issue 2, 134-152 Abstract: Politics, and by extension states, are marginal in debates about the genesis, evolution and functioning of the global value chain (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. Date: 2017 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:22:y:2017:i:2:p:134-152 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2016.1273341 Access Statistics for this article New Political Economy is currently edited by Professor Colin Hay More articles in New Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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