The Restructuring and Resilience of Global Production Networks in the Age of Polycrisis
We are seeking contributors for a special issue in the Journal of Economic Geography on the restructuring and resilience of Global Production Networks in the age of polycrisis. We will develop draft papers at a fully-funded workshop in Brighton, UK in June 2024.
Call for papers and workshop participants
The world is fractured by a series of conjunctural and interweaving crises. Climate breakdown, geopolitical tensions, renewed conflicts, financial instability, unprecedented global inequality, rising costs of living, and the enduring impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic are ravaging lives and economies around the world, affecting most profoundly the poorest and most marginalised communities. These events have led Tooze (2022) to declare the present conjuncture as the ‘age of polycrisis’. Polycrisis denotes the causal interaction of crises across global systems, where a crisis in one global system has knock-on effects that cascade or spill over into other global systems, creating or worsening crises there (Lawrence et al., 2022). Moreover, a polycrisis can be understood as a set of multiple crises that are not caused by one another, but rather have different origins and yet come together in one space and time to impact in significant ways the operation and organisation of economies. Creating feedback loops, crises interact in (un)forseeable ways, emerge from a range of causal pathways, and have diverse effects (Hobson, 2022; Davies and Hobson, 2022).
The notion of polycrisis and its reverberations across, within, and beyond the global economy are now gaining increasing traction within the field of economic geography broadly (Leyshon, 2023; Dixon et al., 2023; Kogler et al., 2023; Barnes, 2023; Yeung, 2023). However, the interrelations of the polycrisis with global production networks have yet to be fully explored within the literature. Despite this, as a “concatenation of systemic risks … greater than the sum of its contributory parts” (Dixon et al., 2023), the polycrisis has already shaped and will continue to (re)shape the reconfiguration of global production networks. Most importantly, the polycrisis has amplified profound fault lines in the functioning of global production networks and exposed the fragility of a business model characterised by high interdependencies between lead firms, geographically dispersed suppliers, and a highly disposable labour force (Smith, 2015; Coe, 2021). Thus far, most research on the reconfiguration of global production networks in this context has focused on discrete crisis moments, rather than the complex manifestation of multiple crises. The proposed special issue therefore takes up Barnes’s (2023:1-2) call to appreciate “the full extent and power of the existential threatening changes that are unfolding and are propelling the world's polycrisis”. It explores the potentially sweeping and radical changes for the operation and conceptualisation of global production networks.
In the current context of polycrisis, global production networks are displaying volatile characteristics that are likely to re-shape their organisation and operation into the future. For example, the polycrisis has fuelled an increasing emphasis on the reshoring and regionalisation of production as an alternative to reliance on fragile and disrupted global production networks (e.g., Gong et al., 2022). In the USA, this is also associated with the management of geopolitical risks through the concept of ‘friend-shoring’. The underlying notion is that locating suppliers in proximity to markets could alleviate risks of disruptions (Hamilton, 2023). Second and relatedly, suppliers are devising new strategies including diversification of production to locations beyond their national borders in order to align with lead firms’ re-shoring and near-shoring plans. Third, labour is profoundly implicated in and impacted by the current polycrisis. Workplaces are one of the front lines of the polycrisis as production networks are reconfigured with consequences for levels of employment and the conditions of work. In an extreme example, over 450 million people working in global supply chains are estimated to have lost jobs, faced reduced income and or were furloughed due to the Covid-19 pandemic alone (Human Rights Watch, 2020). Others have identified the worsening of working conditions in global production networks through, for example, increased use of forced labour (e.g., Hughes et al., 2023). Fourth, with continuing trade tensions and disputes between China and the West, a significant portion of production is likely to be diversified away from China, either wholesale, or more likely through so-called ‘China+1’ strategies. Here, firms seek another secure production base in addition to China, which remains important in part due to its huge domestic market. This is likely to create both opportunities and challenges for other sourcing countries, with some losing out on investments. Finally, global production is pushing the climate beyond critical warming levels (War on Want, 2023), with new strategies being advocated for more sustainable production, embedded in concepts of decarbonising, de-growth, recycling, upcycling, and circularity (Coe and Gibson, 2023). Climate change instils an urgent “need to de-carbonise production and restructure supply chains if we are to mitigate global warming” (Potts, 2023) but there is little consensus on if or how this change will or should be meted out.
It is these critical questions that this Special Issue (SI) of JoEG seeks to address. We welcome theoretical, conceptual, and empirical papers addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:
What are the emerging disruptions and reconfigurations in the way global production networks are organised? How likely are global production networks to persist in future and in what ways is the polycrisis reshaping the organisation of global production and trade relations?
What are the new trends of sourcing and production evident during the polycrisis (i.e., re-location, re-shoring, near-shoring and the shifting geography of production contracts)? What do these trends tell us about the new economic geographies of production networks? Who stands to gain and who will lose?
How are workers implicated in a range of struggles over livelihoods and conditions of employment in the age of polycrisis? What do we know of workers’ varied roles in reproducing, resisting, and transforming the impacts of the polycrisis on their conditions of existence?
How do we ensure a just and equitable transition of climate-changed production networks? What is potential of adaptation strategies such as recycling, de-carbonising, upcycling and circularity? How do these new ways of undertaking business in production networks intersect with their social and economic performance and the geographies of economic activity? Who are the winners and losers from these changes?
Is the polycrisis a transformative moment for global production networks, fundamentally reshaping the era of hyperglobalisation? If so how can we reconceptualise, reimagine, and rethink global production networks in the age of polycrisis? Or, conversely, does it represent simply a series of wrinkles in the progression of business-as-usual global capitalism?
Guest editors
Shyamain Wickramasingha, University of Sussex Business School, UK
Sabina Lawreniuk, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK
Neil M. Coe, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Australia
Adrian Smith, University of Sussex Business School, UK
Paper development workshop
The guest editors will organise a fully-funded, residential paper development workshop ahead of submission. The workshop will take place at the University of Sussex Business School in Brighton, UK, between 24th and 26th June 2024. The aim of this workshop is to help strengthen the contributions and refine the overall coherence of the special issue ahead of the final submission to JoEG. Funding will cover (international and local) travel, accommodation, and catering for all selected contributors. Participants for the workshop and special issue will be selected based on the quality, relevance, and contribution of the paper as outlined in their abstracts. We particularly welcome submissions from women, early career researchers, and underrepresented communities.
Ahead of the paper development workshop, selected participants will be asked to submit a shorter, draft version of their article (around 4,000–5,000 words). At the workshop, participants will receive feedback on their papers by the guest editors, as well as by the other participants, and be expected to contribute feedback to fellow contributors.
Key deadlines
Abstract submission:15 February 2024
Announcement of selected participants and papers: 5 March 2024
Submission of a draft paper for the workshop: May 2024
Paper development workshop (fully funded): 24–26 June 2024
Submission of final papers to JoEG: November 2024
Instructions to submit the abstract
Interested authors are invited to submit a title, 300-word abstract, and a 200-word bio to s.wickramasinghe@sussex.ac.uk and sabina.lawreniuk@nottingham.ac.uk by 15 February 2024.
References
Barnes, T. (2023) ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’: And what's economic geography going to do about it? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (online ahead of print).
Coe, N.M. (2021) Advanced introduction to global production networks, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
Coe, N.M., Gibson, C. (2023) Progress in Economic Geography? Decarbonising Global Production Networks (GPNs). Progress in Economic Geography, 1(1): 100002.
Davies, M., C. Hobson. (2022) An embarrassment of changes: International relations and the Covid-19 pandemic. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 77(2): 150-168.
Dixon, A. D., Peck, J., Alami, I., Whiteside, H. (2023) Making space for the new state capitalism, part III: Thinking conjuncturally. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(5): 1207-1217.
Gong, H., Hassink, R., Foster, C., Hess, M., Garretsen, H. (2022) Globalisation in reverse? Reconfiguring the geographies of value chains and production networks. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 15(2): 165-181.
Hamilton, E. (2023) The global supply chain consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war. Available online at: https://news.ufl.edu/2023/02/russia-ukraine-global-supply-chain/. [Accessed 9 October 2023].
Human Rights Watch (2020) Covid-19 puts millions of global supply chain workers at risk. Available online at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/02/covid-19-puts-millions-global-supply-chain-workers-risk. [Accessed 9 October 2023].
Hobson, C. (2022) Polycrisis: In this valley of dying stars. Available online at: https://imperfectnotes.substack.com/p/polycrisis. [Accessed 9 October 2023].
Hughes, A., Brown, J., Trueba, M., Trautrims, A., Bostock, B., Day, E., Hurst, R. and Bhutta, M. (2023) Global value chains for medical gloves during the COVID-19 pandemic: confronting forced labour through public procurement and crisis. Global Networks, 23(1): 132-149.
Kogler, D. F., Evenhuis, E., Giuliani, E., Martin, R., Uyarra, E., Boschma, R. (2023) Re-imagining evolutionary economic geography. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, (online ahead of print).
Leyshon, A. (2023) Economic geography II: The economic geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Progress in Human Geography, 47(2): 353-364.
Lawrence, M., Janzwood, S., Homer-Dixon, T. (2022) What is a global polycrisis. Cascade Institute, Technical Paper, 4. Available online at: https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/what-is-a-global-polycrisis/#:~:text=A%20global%20polycrisis%20occurs%20when,systems%20not%20so%20deeply%20interconnected. [Accessed 9 October 2023].
Potts, S. (2023) (Re) centring the geopolitical: A response to Henry Yeung's intervention on ‘troubling economic geography’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (online).
Smith, A. (2015) Economic (in)security and global value chains: the dynamics of industrial and trade integration in the Euro-Mediterranean macro-region. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(3): 439-458.
Tooze, A. (2022) Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis. Available online at: https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33. [Accessed 9 October 2023].
War on Want (2023) Fashioning the Future. Available online at: https://waronwant.org/resources/fashioning-future. [Accessed 9 October 2023].
Yeung, H. W. (2023) Troubling economic geography: New directions in the post-pandemic
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