CfP AAG 2019: Financing for Development
With the usual apologies for cross posting. Please forward as appropriate. * American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2019, Washington DC, 3-7 April Deadline for abstracts: 22 October 2018 Session Title: Finance for Development Organizers: Ilias Alami (Maastricht University), Adam Dixon (Maastricht University), and Emma Mawdsley (Cambridge University). The realm of international development is in a period of turbulent change. Neo-mercantilist and geopolitical considerations are being re-centered in donor strategies, in a context of a rapidly changing development landscape, and the partial fracturing of the North-South axis that historically framed mainstream development imaginaries and interventions. At the same time, a growing number of countries across the income spectrum have established state-sponsored strategic investment funds with a domestic development mandate to co-invest with private partners and other sovereign entities, bringing the tools of modern finance into contemporary industrial policy-making (e.g. India’s National Infrastructure Investment Fund’s USD 1 billion investment agreement with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority). Conventional development institutions have, for their part, re-centered private sector-led economic growth in their narratives, policies and partnerships, and signaled a move from ‘foreign aid’ to ‘development finance’. The growing buzz has been around drawing in vastly bigger financial resources by using overseas development assistance (ODA) to catalyze and leverage private sector investment on a massive scale. The financing slogan of the Sustainable Development Goals is ‘from billions to trillions’, and is predicated precisely on a world ‘beyond aid’. This deepening and expanding of finance and financial markets in the name of development entails partnerships with actors that were not traditionally involved in development finance, such as hedge funds, venture capital, investment banks, credit rating agencies, global accountancy firms, and financial intermediaries. These trends have occurred at the same time as incredible expansion in financial instruments, practices, and programs targeting individuals, households and small-and-medium enterprises across the Global South, and in the management of land, nature, infrastructure, land and energy. This session offers a forum to present scholarship exploring the emerging geographies of finance and development that result from the messy articulation and tensions between these developments across, within, and beyond the Global South. In particular, we welcome contributions exploring: · The role of hybrid state-capital organizations (strategic investment funds, sovereign wealth funds, ‘marketized’ state-owned companies, development banks) in financing development. · The increasing role of private financial actors (such as hedge funds, venture capital, investment banks, credit rating agencies, global accountancy firms, financial intermediaries, etc.) in financing development. · The growing role of financial logics, practices, and instruments in development. · The protracted and contested re-purposing of ODA, the transformation of traditional DFIs, and new partnerships with private financial actors, and private development actors. · The discourses, narratives and rationales for the legitimation of finance in development: ‘patient capital’, blended finance, social impact, green bonds, etc. ‘doing well while doing good’ · The role of aid and other forms of state support in the opening of new circuits of financial investments in emerging markets, frontier markets, and peripheral spaces of global finance, and in ‘de-risking’ private financial investment. · Tensions between national and geopolitical interests, and the expansion of finance and market development. The organizers will also be inviting representatives from outside academia (e.g. think tanks; DFIs; financial services) as panel discussants who are engaged with financing for development. Please submit paper abstracts (max. 250 words) to Ilias Alami (ilias.al...@maastrichtuniversity.nl) no later than 22 October 2018. Specific questions regarding the session can be addressed to any of the organizers.
Second CfP AAG Annual Meeting 2020: Political geographies of the new state capitalism
Meeting 2020: Political geographies of the new state capitalism American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2020, Denver, Colorado, 6-10 April Deadline for abstracts: October 25, 2019 Session Title: Political geographies of the new state capitalism Organizers: Ilias Alami (Maastricht University), Adam Dixon (Maastricht University) Sponsored by the Economic Geography Specialty group State capitalism is back. At least that is what we are told. An avalanche of books and articles, both in academia and for the broader public, have recently argued that the more visible role of the state across the world capitalist economy signals theresurgence of state capitalism (e.g. Bremmer 2010; Kurlantzick 2016; Musacchio and Lazzarini 2014; MacDonald and Lemco 2015; Spechler, Ahrens, and Hoen 2017). Indeed, the new polymorphism of state intervention is manifest, from the mass bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis to the expansion of marketized state-owned enterprises (SOE), sovereign wealth funds (SWF) and other state-sponsored investment funds, national and regional development banks, to the renewal ofindustrial policy and various forms of economic nationalism in the advanced capitalist economies and the consolidation of state-led development in China and elsewhere. For many commentators, these developments suggest that state capitalism is once again taking center stage in the global political economy. However, despite the widespread use of the latter term, there is neither consensus about what it exactly means and what is qualitatively new about it within and across academic disciplines (Alami and Dixon 2019). For instance, scholars have deployed the concept (and cognates) to designate a national variant of capitalism (Nölke et al 2015); a specific brand of state-owned enterprise and/or state-sponsored investment fund (Lyons 2007; Carney 2015); a particular type of state-business relation (Zhang & Whitley 2013; Nölke 2014); a threat or an alternative to (Western) liberal capitalism (Brenner 2008; McNally 2013) ; a reconfiguration of the global ‘state-capital nexus’ (van Apeldoorn et a. 2012); and the use of market mechanisms for the promotion ofgeo-economic and geopolitical goals (e.g. Kurlantzick 2016). The session aims to stimulate geographical engagement with this literature, which has so far been dominated by other academic communities and disciplines (International Political Economy, Varieties of Capitalism/Business Systems, Developmental statetheory, Strategic management & International Business). In particular, the session aims to enhance our scholarly understanding of the recent polymorphism of state intervention by exploring its attendant economic and political geographies. In particular, we welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions exploring the following topics: - The nature of the new state capitalism: Explaining the more visible role of thestate in the economy and society at large from a geographical perspective. What are the wider geopolitical and geo-economic shifts in which the rise of the new statecapitalism is embedded? What is new about the recent ‘wave’ of state capitalism across the global economy? What are the strategic, structural/epochal, and contingent drivers of its emergence? - Variegated state capitalism(s): Explaining the diversity of state capitalism across the spaces of the global capitalist economy, from Sino-capitalism and its one-party state to the oil-rich Middle Eastern rentier states: where isstate capitalismgeographically located? Is there one, or several varieties of state capitalism? Are there state capitalisms across regions? What are the drivers of diversity in state capitalism, i.e. the common tendencies and the continuous reproduction of difference both between state capitalism and other forms of capitalism, and between different varieties of state capitalist configurations? - Spatializing the new state capitalism: Studying state capitalism beyond methodological nationalism. The spatialities and scales at which state capitalism is produced, enacted, and imagined. The spatial practices, flows, and strategies of the new state capitalism at a variety of scales that cut across the national, as well as their interconnection. State capitalist strategies and the reconfiguration of economic territory and political authority. The changing spaces and scales of state intervention (e.g. Hameiri & Jones 2015; Alami 2018). The fragmentation of the state and the question of multi-level governance (e.g. Gu et al. 2016; Jones and Zou 2017). The role of the local state, the internationalization of the state, the continuous importance of the national scale? - State capitalism and uneven and combined geographical development: Scrutinizing the growing integration of state capitalism into transnational circuits of capital (including global networks of production, trade, finance, infrastructure
