Sociologists have long recognized uneven development within nations and differential patterns of poverty and prosperity across places. In analyzing why some places fare better than others, researchers largely focus on market forces. Few studies have considered the role of the local state. Yet in many countries today local governments have gained responsibilities and control as national governments offload responsibilities. This shift toward localized government is often associated with neoliberalism. The conventional view is pessimistic about local governments, stressing their potential to reinforce poverty and inequality. Our research challenges this view. We advance a counter-perspective that builds from two subnational literatures, one on poverty and place and the other, mesocomparative research on the state. Focusing on the United States, we examine whether local governments are linked to poverty and income inequality. Using unique data that span all communities (over 3,000 county areas) over the Great Recession, we show that the institutional capacity and spending policy of local governments at the outset of the recession influenced how communities fared subsequently. To our knowledge, this is the first sociological study that integrates theoretical understanding of local state processes and research aimed at explaining poverty and inequality across the United States.

Much of the research on international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) emphasizes their role as transnational actors on a global scale, but INGOs also have a national dimension—they originate in home countries, and they carry out activities in host or recipient countries. How can we understand the way they are shaped by and operate across these multiple contexts? This paper examines differences between U.S.-based, Japanese, and South Korean INGOs in Cambodia. Specifically, we analyze interorganizational relationships between INGOs and their donors and local partners, which we conceptualize as “aid chains.” This comparative analysis of aid chains provides insight into the dynamics that produce patterned variation in the development field.

We summarize the history of Latin American urbanization with a focus on the evolution of cities from the colonial and post-colonial eras to the adoption of the import-substitution model of development and its subsequent replacement by a neoliberal adjustment model. Consequences for the urban system of both import-substitution and neoliberal policies are examined, with a focus on the evolution of the urban population and trends in several strategic areas. We examine indicators of unemployment and informal employment; poverty and inequality; and urban crime and victimization rates as they evolved from the import-substitution era to the implosion of the neoliberal model that replaced it in the early twenty-first century. The consequences for cities of the disastrous application of this model are summarized as a prelude to the analysis of more recent trends. Based on the latest statistical indicators available, we document a significant decline in unemployment and economic inequality in six Latin American nations that jointly comprise 80 percent of the population of the region. Employment in the informal sector also declined steadily, although it still comprises a large proportion of Latin American labor markets. Consequences of this situation for the citizenry and alternative government policies to address it are discussed.

We revisit and recast two prominent theories of environmental degradation: the treadmill of production and the treadmill of destruction. This recasting is guided by critical realism, focused on theorizing generative mechanisms that produce and shape empirical events. Our theorization is informed by Marxist and Weberian insights into environmental sociology contributions. In this critical realist recasting, the treadmill of production and the treadmill of destruction are conceived of as generative mechanisms. A treadmill refers to a process in which powerful organizations appropriate nature to amass power and capital. These organizations degrade the environment, and they suppress and distort information about the environmental damage they cause. The macrosocial context, the organizations at the center of them, and the elites that command these organizations make these treadmills distinct. A treadmill spans the biophysical and the social/cultural realms. Whereas the biophysical is necessary for the social/cultural realm to exist, it exists independent of human knowledge of this realm. As such, historical contingency and social change are at the center of analysis when studying the waxing, waning, transformation, and demise of treadmills. Adopting a critical realist stance, future theorization and research can and should engage a wide range of theories advanced in environmental sociology. The goal is not to establish the single best unitary theory, but to identify and gain insight into the generative mechanisms that shape and constrain human interactions with the environment.

The world environmental regime has influenced government policy and improved environmental conditions around the globe, but its influence on governance is sometimes decoupled from, or loosely connected with, actual practice. This article examines the influence of the environmental regime on foreign aid and proposes that economic incentive, in the form of FDI, is a source of decoupling between aid donors’ stated environmental goals and actual aid commitments. Using a three-dimensional panel design (donor × recipient × year), I test allocations of environmental protection and fossil fuel aid in a two-stage process where first the aid recipient is chosen, and then the aid amount. I find that although donor and recipient environmental regime integration are associated with higher likelihood of exchanging environmental aid, other factors (donor/recipient GDP, recipient democracy, etc.) determine the amount of aid. Regime integration does not reduce the likelihood of exchanging fossil fuel aid, but donor regime integration is associated with giving less fossil fuel aid, contingent on the donor’s level of FDI in the recipient nation. I conclude that the world environmental regime and the global economy exert contradictory pressures on aid organizations that result in policy–practice decoupling. The world environmental regime, therefore, has only been partially successful in improving foreign aid, and its effect is constrained by donors’ economic incentive to ignore environmental norms.

Prior reviews have discussed the potential relationship between global economic integration and smoking prevalence, but for the most part, these non-empirical studies have only offered speculative observations. This cross-national study employs two-way fixed effects regression models and a three-way interaction to test whether integration into the global economy, measured as imports (% of GDP), affects male and female smoking prevalence across country income groups (developed vs. less developed nations) and time from 2000 to 2015. We observe that the effect of global economic integration on female smoking prevalence increased in magnitude over time in both income groups, but we see no such effect on male smoking prevalence. The effect does not differ by income group. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of our findings, along with policy recommendations.

Development ethics emerged as a joint critique of economic development research and practice, giving rise to three alternative traditions: human development, sustainable development, and participatory development. The ethical issues surrounding the mainstreaming of these schools have implications for investigators. In this article, I revisit the transformative values at the root of these traditions to articulate common research principles for an international and interdisciplinary field. Ethicists are asking development researchers to deliver actionable and multiparadigmatic understanding by improving measures, aligning values and approaches, and decolonizing knowledge. While these emerging research models can strengthen development relevancy and impact, they are challenging to facilitate and vulnerable to elite co-optation. Not only should the production of knowledge be rigorous and accurate, but scholars also have a responsibility to query power and embrace difference. The principles presented in this article comprise a set of shared values that may be used as a practical guide for planning, conducting, and evaluating development research across methods, topics, and disciplines.

Many scholars assert that the U.S. state promotes free market economic policies abroad through the leverage it wields within international financial institutions (IFIs), such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Other scholars have focused on U.S. bilateral aid programs, such as those implemented by USAID, and their emphasis on free market economic policies. In many middle-income countries, though, IFIs and U.S. development agencies do not maintain economic development programs. If the U.S. state cannot promote free market policies through IFIs and its bilateral development agencies, how does it promote them at all in middle-income countries? In this paper, I provide a case study of U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela, a middle-income country, under the government of President Hugo Chávez (1999–2013). I draw on interviews with U.S. state elites, including several former ambassadors and State Department employees, and U.S. state documents to show how the U.S. encourages free market economic reforms through its support for civil society organizations that embrace these reforms. In particular, I focus on the work of the Center for International Private Enterprise, which has explicitly linked political freedom with economic freedom. Through this organization, the U.S. works with free market think tanks and promotes free market initiatives, all in the form of political rather than economic assistance.

The rise of participatory democracy in urban Latin America has increased citizen deliberation in local politics, improved access to state officials and given residents greater control over municipal budgets. Simultaneously, welfare state retrenchment across the region has ensured the continued importance of the informal sector in securing citizen livelihoods, including informal political arrangements such as clientelism. Given their documented co-existence, how do informal political strategies operate in this new landscape of formal, local democracy? To answer this question, this article analyzes 21 semi-structured interviews with urbanists in Mexico City who evaluate the informal tactics of two groups that mobilize through participatory democratic initiatives: street vendor unions and white collar neighborhood councils. Urbanists regularly denounce informal, corporatist-clientelistic political strategies when they are used by street vendor groups. However, when deployed by white collar neighborhood councils, these tactics are tolerated and even celebrated. The differential reception of informal political tactics by city officials draws attention to how they construct the legitimacy or illegitimacy of informal political action. I argue that considering legitimacy adds a new analytical category to studies of informal politics that captures which groups are able to use informal tactics to advance their claims in local participatory democracy.

Although existing studies of international women’s rights norm diffusion demonstrate the importance of international linkages for fostering change, few examine their influence on individual attitudes. Of those that do, none consider how ties to different world cultural domains—world polity vs. world society—impact this process, despite their divergent roots. Whereas world polity via CEDAW facilitates diffusion by holding states accountable, world society via women’s international NGOs (WINGOs) appeals to citizens by encouraging activism and awareness. Focusing on trends in developing nations, which remain underexamined but theoretically relevant, I assess the unique effect of each on diffusion to attitudes. I further expand the literature to examine the direct and interactive effects of national-level compliance (quotas) on this process. Using a multilevel analysis of World Values Survey data from 31 developing nations, I demonstrate that the duration of CEDAW ratification (world polity) and nationally mandated legislative quotas (national-level compliance) directly facilitate this diffusion, but WINGOs (world society) alone do not. Yet, where quotas exist and global ties are sufficient, WINGOs become significant, and CEDAW’s effectiveness increases. These results suggest that world polity and world society are both salient for diffusion to attitudes but should be considered separately and in conjunction with national-level outcomes that moderate their effects.

Research has highlighted the relationship between production expansion and the creation of sacrifice zones in advanced capitalist economies. Yet, less attention has focused on the establishment of such regions within authoritarian, state-socialist countries. We draw theoretical and conceptual insights from treadmill of production theory and the Gramscian theory of hegemony to delineate the interaction between legitimation processes used by authoritarian states to justify the physical destruction of the environment. Our analysis focuses on the historic case of environmental destruction in Czechoslovakia’s North Bohemian coal mining region. We analyze data from various sources, including in-depth interviews with residents, state media articles, and state archival sources. We find that the interactive processes of coercion, domination, and consent were used to propel the development and legitimation of environmental exploitation in this area. We argue that these processes, and the resultant sacrifice zones, are a central component of the treadmill of production. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for further analyses of sacrifice zones.

I review three key claims regarding the impact of production globalization on manufacturing workers worldwide, and subject them to empirical scrutiny. Some argue that production globalization causes a “race to the bottom” that leads to a downward convergence of manufacturing workers’ labor power worldwide. Others suggest instead that production globalization leads to an upward convergence of labor power among manufacturing workers worldwide. A third perspective is agnostic with respect to the average level of this labor power, but predicts divergence between the global North and global South. Using a novel empirical approach to cross-national and temporally comparable measurement of manufacturing labor market power, I show that both the (country-average) level and (between-country) dispersion of labor market power have increased worldwide since the mid-1960s. To explain these trends, I juxtapose insights from Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory with those from the interdisciplinary literature on global value chains and production networks. Both predict that globalization should increase labor market power more in the global North than in the global South. However, the former focuses on labor demand shocks from international trade, while the latter focuses on relationships between firms in the North and South in light of the strategic behavior of network/chain leaders. Augmenting the empirical approach to the measurement of the aggregate positional power of national manufacturing firms developed elsewhere, I show that both international trade and positional power matter for the distribution of manufacturing labor-market power worldwide, but the latter effects are stronger. I conclude by positioning these results within larger debates about the fate of labor in a globalized manufacturing economy.

An extensive literature is dedicated to examining the proliferation of private sector-led, market-based approaches to address gender inequality. Drawing on insights from feminist environmentalism and environmental sociology, I explore how and why this phenomenon is connected to the environmental crisis. First, I analyze the World Bank’s gender strategy papers for 2001–2023. I highlight the organization's role in entrenching a neoliberal discourse of women's empowerment that erases socio-ecological contexts. Next, I provide an overview of Project Shakti, a women’s empowerment program run by Hindustan Unilever, a subsidiary of the Unilever conglomerate and a corporate partner of the World Bank. Secondary data on program outcomes show that the organization’s selective use of gendered ideologies has increased HUL's rural market share. On the other hand, the benefits for participants are less clear, particularly when considered in the context of the program’s social and environmental footprint. Finally, I present the Exxon Mobil's Foundation's gender portfolio to illustrate how exclusive networks and non-participatory program evaluations have been used by private sector actors to normalize an understanding of women's wellbeing that is devoid of environmental considerations. Together, these cases illustrate how feminist ideals have been used to support elite economic agendas with high environmental costs, while also marginalizing those who seek sustainable development through systemic reform. This phenomenon exacerbates an environmental crisis that disproportionately affects the people these programs purport to empower.

Stakeholders in the transnational aid sector are increasingly calling for more aid “localization”: relying more on local workers to implement aid projects in their respective home countries. This paper asks: What do aid organizations expect from their local employees, and how do these expectations shape local employees’ work routines? Drawing on data collected from over seven months of fieldwork in Jordan, a major global aid hub, I find that organizations hold cultural assumptions about local workers that shape their recruitment and their expectations of their local employees. Furthermore, these assumptions and expectations are much more ambivalent and conflictual than existing scholarship suggests. Employers want locals who are “Westernized professionals”: impartial, objective, transparent, and dispassionate workers. But they also expect local employees to act in “non-Western” ways, as “traditional locals” (reifying orientalist tropes related to corruption and Arab culture), to make aid projects work. Echoing Bhabha’s argument that colonial subject stereotypes are strategically ambivalent—“almost the same, but not white”—I show how locals engage in specific types of extra work for their employers—what I call hybridized labor—to try to meet these conflicting expectations.

A growing body of scholars in natural resources management have called for the examination of the roles of social capital and social networks in the effective maintenance of community-based projects. Yet, the role of social capital in collective action cannot be effectively understood without studying agency. The goal of this study is to examine how agents’ individual characteristics and their structural social capital, along with broader cognitive social capital elements, shape possibilities for empowerment at the community level. Drawing from an embedded comparative case study of two community-based ecotourism projects in Ghana, we employed a mixed-methods approach combining Lin’s social capital model and Krishna’s agency model to identify and characterize legitimate agents of change in each community, as well as to evaluate the structure of their discussion and nomination networks (i.e., structural social capital). Differences between communities in the network structure of agents, as well as in their types and levels of engagement, resourcefulness, visions and perceptions of socio-ecological context, exposed key barriers to social capital mobilization. Overall, our results indicate that greater community empowerment is reported where greater community trust and a greater cohesiveness of agents with access to external resources are reported. Altogether, this study adds to past efforts in illustrating how a mixed-methods examination of change agents in a CBNRM setting can surface internal opportunities for and constraints on social capital mobilization toward community empowerment.

This paper offers an alternative to the view that high technology promotes development and low technology inhibits development. We differentiate between monopoly technology and accessible technology. Monopoly technology produces growth by producing monopoly rents. As a byproduct, it also produces substantial inequality, both within nations and globally. Accessible technology produces growth without monopoly simply by increasing the volume of production in a lucrative business. We illustrate this first with a consideration of successful agrarian-based development in the global North that was based on agricultural products that were not particularly monopolized. We then move to a detailed consideration of fishing in nineteenth-century Norway. Norway’s economic development depended on proceeds from fishing exports. Norwegian fishing had a distinctive technology that made it particularly low-tech and egalitarian. It produced substantial wealth for the nation while producing very little social inequality.

Promoting the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was a key objective of the transnational women's movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, few studies examine what factors contribute to ratification. The small body of literature on this topic comes from a world-society perspective, which suggests that CEDAW represented a global shift toward women's rights and that ratification increased as international NGOs proliferated. However, this framing fails to consider whether diffusion varies in a stratified world-system. I combine world-society and world-systems approaches, adding to the literature by examining the impact of women's and human rights transnational social movement organizations on CEDAW ratification at varied world-system positions. The findings illustrate the complex strengths and limitations of a global movement, with such organizations having a negative effect on ratification among core nations, a positive effect in the semiperiphery, and no effect among periphery nations. This suggests that the impact of mobilization was neither a universal application of global scripts nor simply representative of the broad domination of core nations, but a complex and diverse result of civil society actors embedded in a politically stratified world.

Over the past century, the Mekong River Delta of southern Vietnam has undergone a series of transformations. In the early twentieth century, its forests and marshes were cleared for extensive rice production under French colonial rule; rice production was then intensified along Green Revolution lines under the post-colonial regimes of the 1960s to 1990s, before a dramatic shift toward export-oriented shrimp aquaculture since 2000. Drawing on archival and secondary data, as well as theories of extraction and unequal exchange, this paper traces the development, expansion, intensification, and eventually crisis of rice cultivation in the Mekong Delta. After a brief literature review, the paper consists of three sections. The first examines the origins and drivers of export-oriented extraction in the French colonial period; the second, the shift toward intensive rice production in the developmental states of the postcolonial period; and the third, the return to extraction, in the form of shrimp aquaculture, in the 1990s and 2000s. Building on Bunker's notion of “extractive cycles,” I argue that the Mekong Delta's history of extraction has exposed the region to ecological and economic crises, as well as shaping the long-term trajectory of subsequent development toward the extractive cultivation of export-oriented commodities.

Predominant analyses of energy offer insufficient theoretical and political-economic insight into the persistence of coal and other fossil fuels. The dominant narrative of coal powering the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain's world dominance in the nineteenth century giving way to a U.S.- and oil-dominated twentieth century, is marred by teleological assumptions. The key assumption that a complete energy “transition” will occur leads some to conceive of a renewable-energy-dominated twenty-first century led by China. After critiquing the teleological assumptions of modernization, ecological modernization, energetics, and even world-systems analysis of energy “transition,” this paper offers a world-systems perspective on the “raw” materialism of coal. Examining the material characteristics of coal and the unequal structure of the world-economy, the paper uses long-term data from governmental and private sources to reveal the lack of transition as new sources of energy are added. The increases in coal consumption in China and India as they have ascended in the capitalist world-economy have more than offset the leveling-off and decline in some core nations. A true global peak and decline (let alone full substitution) in energy generally and coal specifically has never happened. The future need not repeat the past, but technical, policy, and movement approaches will not get far without addressing the structural imperatives of capitalist growth and the uneven power structures and processes of long-term change of the world-system.

Using primary and secondary historical data, descriptive time-series data, and site observations, this study unpacks the developmental history of one of the United States' oldest, largest, and still working fisheries. This study uses narrative analysis to explore how processes of commodification and the institutional workings of capitalist food regimes drove specific developmental outcomes. Internal comparison across periods enables an analysis of why the fishery declined in recent decades. The case also reveals important dynamics of the capitalist world food system and demonstrates how intersectional considerations, particularly the intersection of race and class dynamics, can bolster the “tragedy of the commodity” theoretical framework. The study thus tests and expands on that framework by including the considerations of cross-cutting inequalities and the world food system. Overall, this study demonstrates how the demands of generalized commodity production, in conjunction with the institutional parameters of a world capitalist food system, link processes of development across terrestrial and aquatic food systems. Furthermore, the internal comparison elucidates the socio-structural factors that drove the severe decline of the 170-year-old Atlantic menhaden fishery.