Category: Industrial Politics

Sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Global Working Group Beyond Development.

Monday, July 28, noon

Register here

Industrial policy is largely state-led and state-focused. How has civil society interacted with these policies? Have trade unions, community organizations, and environmental NGOs had a place at the table or have they largely opposed industrial policies because of the negative effects–on the environment, on communities, on labor standards–of state policies?

Has the resurgence of industrial politics been good for the planet and people given the current climate breakdown? Can the industrial politics that arise from these interactions between state and civil society generate a new kind of transformational approach?

Ariel Salleh is Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production, Queen Mary University of London and Visiting Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. She is the author, most recently, of DeColonize EcoModernism!

Kennedy Manduna is a visiting scholar and fellow at the University of Potsdam and a research fellow at Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. He is the author of the forthcoming Extractive Industry Indigenisation in Zimbabwe.

Lala Penaranda is the Latin America Coordinator for Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED). She is completing an MA in Law and Economics of Climate Change in FLACSO Argentina. She has also worked as a tenant organizer at Met Council on Housing and an editor at NACLA.

sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Global Working Group Beyond Development.

July 8, 10 am EST

Register here

Over the last decade, mainstream neoliberalism hit a dead end and right-wing economic models of libertarianism have surged in popularity in places like the United States under Trump, Argentina under Milei, and Italy under Meloni. At the same time, industrial policy has also experienced a resurgence, both in the Global North (in the European Union and the United States under Biden) as well as in Global South countries like Indonesia. 

What are the reasons for this resurgence of industrial policy? How have global institutions adjusted to these changes? Have the rapid shifts in economic policy under Trump undermined the basis for the economic planning necessary under industrial policy?

Jayati Ghosh is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. In March 2022, she was appointed to the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism

Daniel Chavez is the coordinator of the Global Green Industrial Policy Lab, an open, collaborative and non-extractive platform for knowledge production launched by the Transnational Institute (TNI) that connects researchers, progressive government officials, trade unionists, and social and environmental activists across the Global South.

Isabel Estevez is an institutional and development economist. She is Co-Executive Director of the industrial strategy think tank i3T and former deputy director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute’s Climate and Economic Transformation Program. Her most recent publication is Planning to Build Faster: A Solar Case Study.