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What is in your Salad? An Ecological Political Economy of the Salad Bowl of CaliforniaCalifornia produces one third of the food eaten in the United States and exports billions of dollars worth of agricultural products. Monterey County, California, has some of the most intensely farmed landscape of the world and one of the most prosperous farming regions of the global North. It produces about 40 percent of the total exports originating from California. The Salinas Valley, known as the ‘Salad Bowl’, produces a large portion of the total exports originating from California. The lettuce, broccoli, celery, cauliflower, spinach, asparagus, tomatoes and carrots produced here, may be part of industrialized ‘precision’ farming but are heavily dependent on human labor, specifically migrant labor. This paper interrogates the ‘nature’ and the ‘dirt’ on agriculture/ecology in light of California’s global agribusiness. It adopts an ecological political economy approach to examine the foundations of this agribusiness based on the desire to maximize productivity and profit in order to compete in a global market. It examines the systematic transformation of food into a commodity that hides devastating ecological and social costs. In particular, it examines the heavy dependence on migrant labor and conditions of labor camps to make connections between economy and ecology. The paper also examines how Salinas Valley communities are reclaiming resources, human dignity and confronting consumption.It compares these efforts to the Landless Movement in Brazil and the Organic Movement in India. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine the tensions between trilateralism and multilateralism in the IBSA partnership. While one of the stated goals of the partnership is multilateralism and the reform of the United Nations (IBSA Communique, 2005), the trilateral partnership that IBSA embodies appears antithetical to the representation of broader interests in each member’s region. This issue came to a head in the months preceding the debates on UN reform in September 2005, when India, Brazil and South Africa each voiced their interest in permanent representation on the UN Security Council, but failed to win the support of their regional neighbours. More recently, it is evident in the prominence of India and Brazil in exclusive trade talks with the EU and US to save the Doha Development Round. The paper draws on the middle power literature, which sees middle powers as committed to multilateralism, but problematises this commitment by considering the growing economic and strategic significance of these states. Trilateralism is not pursued to the exclusion of North-South links, as evidenced in Brazil’s and India’s increasing closeness to the US. It is thus not an alternative to robust North-South relations, as older forms of South-South solidarity (NAM and G-77) were portrayed. The paper concludes thus that the IBSA partnership is not a successor of older forms of South-South solidarity premised on multilateralism, but rather a vehicle for the development and increased levels of participation in international affairs of its three members. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The startling findings of Goldman Sachs'2003 report about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the continuous rapid economic growth of BRIC countries, and their much closer bilateral relationships have raised significant questions-Are the BRIC countries able to work together as an alliance? If a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences would it play regionally and internationally, and how will other big powers respond? Unfortunately, it is hard to get the answers to these questions from existing literatures because not only there have been few works that study the BRICs so far, but current studies on the BRICs are mainly made from an economic perspective. The analysis of potential political and strategic influences of the BRICs has been ignored or underdeveloped. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is, to certain extent, to fill this blank.In this paper, I first establish a theoretical framework of a modern alliance of states. Subsequently under this framework, I analyze the realistic possibility of establishing a BRIC alliance by surveying the increased bilateral relations that have been occurring between the BRIC countries, primarily since the turn of the century. Besides the driving-forces to the alliance creation and the potential gains that the BRIC countries can get by working together, the obstacles to their cooperation will be studies as well. Third, I briefly predict if a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences it would play on Asian politics and the Asia-Pacific relations, and what relevant possible responses from other powers to possible future directions of the BRIC alliance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The startling findings of Goldman Sachs'2003 report about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the continuous rapid economic growth of BRIC countries, and their much closer bilateral relationships have raised significant questions-Are the BRIC countries able to work together as an alliance? If a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences would it play regionally and internationally, and how will other big powers respond? Unfortunately, it is hard to get the answers to these questions from existing literatures because not only there have been few works that study the BRICs so far, but current studies on the BRICs are mainly made from an economic perspective. The analysis of potential political and strategic influences of the BRICs has been ignored or underdeveloped. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is, to certain extent, to fill this blank.In this paper, I first establish a theoretical framework of a modern alliance of states. Subsequently under this framework, I analyze the realistic possibility of establishing a BRIC alliance by surveying the increased bilateral relations that have been occurring between the BRIC countries, primarily since the turn of the century. Besides the driving-forces to the alliance creation and the potential gains that the BRIC countries can get by working together, the obstacles to their cooperation will be studies as well. Third, I briefly predict if a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences it would play on Asian politics and the Asia-Pacific relations, and what relevant possible responses from other powers to possible future directions of the BRIC alliance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the efforts of developing nations to gain access to the economic, security, and political benefits of space. The analysis in this paper compares the efforts of several developing nations and identifies the extent to which developing nations have been successful in gaining access to the many benefits of space. In measuring ?success? the analysis focuses on whether developing countries individually and/or collectively have been able to develop space capabilities and thus the essential elements of national ?space power.? Particular attention is given to the cases of India, Brazil, and China. However, attention is also given to the efforts of several other developing nations in regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The paper concludes by identifying several common factors that have constrained the respective efforts of developing nations and ensured that they have remained dependent upon the space capabilities and assistance of more developed nations. This dependency undercuts the ability of these aspiring space powers to improve their respective positions vis-à-vis the more developed nations. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal democracies in the developing world?despite important differences in executive-legislative organization, party systems, and other institutions?may experience similar challenges to centrally-initiated programs of structural economic reform. Regional governments, facing electorates of their own, can reap political benefits from pursuing profligate fiscal policies, while shifting the economic costs of persistent deficit spending to the country as a whole. Central leaders, dependent on regional party-mates and coalition partners for political support, may lack the ability to impose the sub-national reforms needed to consolidate macroeconomic liberalization.In recent years, central leaders in several federal developing countries have consented to allow the World Bank to engage directly with regional governments?effectively thrusting external conditionality downward in hopes that the Bank would impose harder constraints on regional budgets. This paper investigates policy-based lending by the World Bank to sub-national state governments in India and Brazil, the first countries where it implemented such an approach beginning in the mid-1990s. Utilizing data from official interviews and primary document analysis, the paper shows that central authorities in both countries envisioned Bank conditionality as a ?two-level game? strategy for triggering reforms in the states: that is, the Bank?s conditions represented courses of action that the central authorities wanted the states to take anyway, but could not enforce on their own. While the paper argues that the two countries? reasons for authorizing sub-national adjustment lending are essentially analogous, it also shows that there have been important differences in implementation of the approach, which follow both from institutional variations in Indian and Brazilian federalism and from specific tactical decisions by the Bank in both cases. In the Brazilian case, the Bank?s state loans were soon rendered marginal and redundant by broader state debt negotiations and the passage of fiscal responsibility laws, and have receded to a small share of the Bank?s overall lending to the country. In India, state-lending became more fully articulated through two successive coalition governments at the center, and may be helping to catalyze a nascent shift to a more performance-based federal resource allocation regime. Ultimately, the analysis shows that while international institutions can shape sub-national economic governance in significant ways, in at least two of the most important countries in the developing world, such influence is still mediated through institutions of the national state. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established disciplines such as International Relations (IR) & International Political Economy (IPE), and even more explicitly interdisciplinary ones like Development Studies & Strategic Studies, are not always adroit in recognizing, let alone anticipating major trends. This deficiency is highlighted by the lamentable gaps in scholarship concerning the continuing reverberations from the end of bipolarity. Symptomatically, it was not scholars but a donor agency (DFID) which noticed in early 2005 that a quarter of the world's +/-200 states were 'fragile'. This paper explores whether a small group of 'emerging' economies might impact global politics, economics & societies through the first quarter of the new century as the NICs did towards the end of the last one. It is an early, experimental product of a novel collaborative project at CIGI on Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, ASEAN & Mexico (BRICSAM). The paper focuses on four interrelated aspects of the emergence of BRICSAM on the world stage:i)non-state as well as state impacts on - local to global - governance;ii)regionalisms, institutional as well as 'new' informal modalities;iii)orthodox as well as 'new' (human) security; &iv)implications for various forms of multilateralism as a possible antidotes to US inclinations towards unilateralism. The paper concludes by reflecting on such a possible shift in geopolitics for the analysis & practice of IR & IPE, Development & Security Studies. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American hegemony has passed its peak. The twenty-first century will see a more multi-polar international system. Yet Western European countries may not be the United States' main foils in decades to come. Four new poles of the international system are now widely known in the business and financial press as the "BRICs economies" (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Does the concept of "the BRICs" have meaning within a rigorous political science framing? From the perspective of an economic liberal employing neoclassical assumptions to understand the world economy, the category's justification is surprisingly weak. In contrast, a political or economic realist's framing instructs us to focus on states that are increasing their relative material capabilities—as each of the four is. Finally, within a liberal institutionalist's mental model, the BRICs countries are a compelling set, yet one with a deep cleavage between two sub-groups: large emerging powers likely to remain authoritarian or revert to that state, and those that are securely democratic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of democracy at the subnational level vary significantly in many federations, especially in developing democracies such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. Instances of subnational authoritarianism are not uncommon in such nations. The literature on democracy and democratization, however, has mainly focused on regimes at the national level. Using quantitative evidence from the 24 Argentine provinces, I test theories of democracy that have been proposed by the national-level literature, and argue, drawing on rentier and fiscal theories of the state, that a key factor explaining variance in subnational democracy is the extent to which the incumbent in each unit benefits from rents. A burgeoning recent literature has studied the regime effects of natural resource rents (such as those produced by oil), and has suggested that, in very poor countries, foreign aid functions as a form of rent that hinders democracy. I argue that, in middle-income federations such as Argentina, the main source of subnational rents is the redistribution of tax revenues collected by the federal government. Rules and practices that disproportionally allocate these fiscal resources to poorer or smaller units provide their incumbents with generous rents that allow them to restrict democratic competition. Thus, fiscally progressive redistribution often results in politically regressive outcomes. A recursive OLS regression model shows that, in Argentina, the larger the federal fiscal (and oil) rents a province receives, the lower its level of democratic competition, even after controlling for modernization and other alternative theoretical accounts of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might we think about "varieties of capitalism" outside the set of advanced capitalist democracies? I argue that the essential source of variation among national capitalisms outside the industrial core originates with the underlying pattern of political domination, that is, the political regime type. This essay identifies six ideal-types of national political systems hypothesized to have implications for the evolution of alternative national economic regulatory frameworks, and illustrates the model with a pair of cases from 19th century India and Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing relevance of courts in the political processes of emerging democracies has triggered at least two waves of academic response. On the one hand it has engendered a proliferation of labels, from "gouvernement de juges," to judicialization, to juristocracy, to legalization. And on the other, it has caused a great deal of handwringing and concern regarding the democratic credentials of a practice that puts judges squarely in the middle of vital policy debates. In this paper we explore the contours of the phenomenon which we call "legalization," with an eye to understanding its internal processes and dynamics. After establishing an empirical foundation for how courts and legalization actually work, we argue that courts are most effective when they fulfill certain political functions. Courts can be most consequential, we argue, when they intervene in three stylized situations - resolving governance deficits (removing roadblocks); monitoring policy success (raising "fire alarms"); and monitoring compliance with incomplete commitments. The paper is based on a five country (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and South Africa) empirical analysis of litigation for the rights to health and education. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite working under the same international regulatory framework, domestic HIV/AIDS policy in Brazil and India is quite distinct. Our paper seeks to explain this puzzle through a comparative historical analysis utilizing recently compiled data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is no longer divided along the neatly defined poles of ideology and development. With growing discontent around the results of economic globalisation there is a resurgence of South-South cooperation and a need to develop an alternative to the current orthodoxy that shapes the global agenda and the international political economy at large. But the response from the South is far from united. Despite a common need to address inequalities and unacceptable levels of poverty, countries are divided on basic approaches to achieve the ambitious outcomes required. These are compounded by ideological differences and power struggles of influence, which have traditionally hampered progressive South-South dialogue in the past. The India, Brazil, South Africa (IBSA) alliance is different. With common goals and objectives, and a coherent agenda, IBSA proposes a feasible plan to address some of the most pressing issues in the developing world by integrating the South, engaging the developed north and effectively using multilateral fora to truly benefit the marginalised masses in developing countries. IBSA proposes greater coherence and dialogue toward tangible economic and developmental outcomes as opposed to the ideologically loaded rhetoric that tends to dominate other (and previous) alliances of the South â€" united in what they are against, but vague on feasible alternatives for progress forward. This paper will explore the role of IBSA - and its priorities - in shaping the new and emerging economic order from the South. IBSA forms the hard core of developing countries that is carving out a new path for economic development for less developed countries and seeks to integrate the majority of less developed countries that have been largely excluded from the formal global economic systems. This approach of engagement and targeted development programmes will be discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international coalition formation process has played a central role in the dynamics of multilateral and regional trade negotiations, particularly as concerns the outlook for the re-balance of central-peripheral forces of the international system. The reopening of a new round of multilateral negotiations, focusing precisely on new thematic challenges regarding international trade and routes to development, reintroduces the centrality of the role of South-South alliances.In practice, cooperative efforts of this nature are already making themselves felt with the formation of a series of coalitions, whereas emphasis must be placed on G-20 and G-3 (IBSA). The essential aspect to be retained is that, taking into consideration the dimension of the convergence of international business interests strictly speaking, the partnership between India and Brazil, at the starting point of efforts to build international coalitions, is clearly counterintuitive.With a basis on the Compared Foreign Policy Analysis, the objective of this paper is to contribute towards a more comprehensive understanding of the bases (domestic and international) of the formation of international coalitions, of the South-South type in the new context of the multilateral agenda. A comparative matrix will be built as an analytical instrument. Based on databased with variables, the compared analysis of these variables will permit the itemization of vectors of convergence and divergence among the countries capable of indicating the stability and effectiveness of the coalition. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to address the difficulties of understanding between countries on courses of action regarding the regime of Climate Change, focusing the position of Japan and Germany on one hand and Brazil and India on the other, in the process that has ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing role of India, alongside the other so called BRICSA countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), in the global economy is one of the most significant and talked about issues in contemporary IPE. Much has been written about India’ ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In face of today’s increasingly fragmented, fast-changing and complex international order, key governments in the South are seeking to coordinate multilateral action by establishing smaller coalitions of like-minded states and narrower goals â€"a clear depa ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue design of the legislative policy process drives lobbying behavior. This is supported by analysis using 2006 survey data of organized business interest groups in Brazil & India. It tests 3 alternative theories â€" sector, issue and institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lobbies affect the information asymmetry between parties and members. This strengthens parties in systms where institutions allow them to identify, reward, and punish members; & weakens them otherwise. I use survey data on lobbies from Brazil & India ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]