scholarly journals The Singaporean natural gas hub: reassembling global production networks and markets in Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 1241-1262
Author(s):  
Alexander Dodge

Abstract Recently, economic geographers have sought to account for how regional and national initiatives shape the strategic decisions of actors in global production networks (GPNs). In this article, I intend to discuss the political and institutional dynamics by which GPNs evolve, and the capacity of states to shape emerging organizational and spatial arrangements in dynamic GPNs. Building on assemblage thinking, I conceptualize these political and institutional dynamics as the unbundling of legal, regulatory and institutional components of nation-state authorities that govern GPNs, and the subsequent reassembling of these components through emerging interactions with finance, technology and new forms of private authority. These emerging global assemblages are both partially embedded in global cities and stretch across and within the borders of nation-states. Building on this conceptual framework, this article explains how the exclusive nation-state authorities that traditionally governed liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade and markets are becoming unbundled. The article focuses on the initiatives of public and private actors in Singapore who are attempting to shape evolutionary dynamics in GPNs by establishing a hub for LNG trading and speculative financing in Asia. The article finds that Singapore’s capacity to shape LNG production networks is dependent upon the capacity of public and private actors in Singapore to establish cross-border connectivity to markets in Southeast Asia.

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-63
Author(s):  
Chirashree Gupta

Situated largely within the Marxist debates on imperialism—but addressing the liberal formulations too—The Changing Face of Imperialism: Colonialism to Contemporary Capitalism is an important intervention regarding the material basis of imperialism and its three-hundred-year-old history of unequal power relations. The book broadly addresses five issues: (1) the nature of finance capital and the novel yet familiar processes of value extraction; (2) the world of capital; (3) global production networks and labor regimes; (4) the institutional system of nation-states in the new global order; and (5) the nature of integration from colonial regimes to now.


2015 ◽  
Vol 794 ◽  
pp. 461-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Reuter ◽  
Jan Philipp Prote ◽  
Margarete Stöwer

In the last two decades a large amount of companies decided to establish productions sites all over the world in order to profit from cost benefits and to gain access to new markets and know-how. This internationalisation trend leads to more and more complex production networks. According to this development managers are confronted with growing intransparencies within their companies due to increasing information asymmetries, growing amount of interfaces and a growing effort for coordination. Nowadays a lot of strategic decisions, e.g. location decisions are made according to someone’s instinct. The usage of a valid data base within decision making processes can improve the quality of taken decisions. There are two ways to establish a sound data base: Manual data gathering, which is always associated with great effort or the usage of “big data”. Technologies from the era “Industrie 4.0” enable companies to gather and store a large amount of data. This data amount can establish transparency to support an objective assessment. Therefore the aim of this paper is the development of a method to aggregate production data systematically to support the strategic planning of global production networks.


Author(s):  
Susan Christopherson

Moving beyond theories of socio-technical adaptation, a new economic geography of energy transitions is developing that contributes to a deeper understanding of adaptation and change in energy systems. This new geography of energy transitions draws on concepts in evolutionary economic geography but moves beyond regional analysis to recognize the nation state as a critical venue for strategic action by firms. The dependence on the nation state for access to the resource; financing of exploration and production; favourable regulatory oversight; and the infrastructure to transport the commodity to profitable markets, make it the essential venue for strategic action. Drawing on the US case of shale gas and oil extraction, this chapter argues that, despite the emergence of global production networks in the oil and gas industry, national-scale governance remains central to understanding energy transitions.


Author(s):  
Tim Bartley

Social scientists have theorized the rise of transnational private authority, but knowledge about its consequences remains sparse and fragmented. This chapter builds from a critique of “empty spaces” imagery in several leading paradigms to a new theory of transnational governance. Rules and assurances are increasingly flowing through global production networks, but these flows are channeled and reconfigured by domestic governance in a variety of ways. Abstracting from the case studies in this book, a series of theoretical propositions specify the likely outcomes of private regulation, the influence of domestic governance, the special significance of territory and rights, and several ways in which the content of rules shapes their implementation. As such, this theory proposes an explanation for differences across places, fields, and issues, including the differential performance of labor and environmental standards.


Author(s):  
Tim Bartley

A vast new world of transnational standards has emerged, covering issues from human rights to sustainability to food safety. This chapter develops a framework for making sense of this new global order. It is tempting to imagine that global rules can and should bypass corrupt, incapacitated, or illegitimate governments in poor and middle-income countries. This assumption must be rejected if we want to understand the consequences of global rules and the prospects for improvement. After showing how a combination of social movements, global production networks, and neoliberalism gave rise to transnational private regulation, the chapter builds the foundations for the comparative approach of this book. The book’s comparative analysis of land and labor in Indonesia and China sheds light on two key fields of transnational governance, their implications in democratic and authoritarian settings, and the problems of governing the global economy through private regulation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-117
Author(s):  
Anna Beckers

AbstractReviewing the burgeoning legal scholarship on global value chains to delineate the legal image of the global value chain and then comparing this legal image with images on global production in neighbouring social sciences research, in particular the Global Commodity Chain/Global Value Chain and the Global Production Network approach, this article reveals that legal research strongly aligns with the value chain image, but takes less account of the production-centric network image. The article then outlines a research agenda for legal research that departs from a network perspective on global production. To that end, it proposes that re-imagining the law in a world of global production networks requires a focus in legal research on the legal construction of global production and its infrastructure and a stronger contextualization of governance obligations and liability rules in the light of the issue-specific legal rules that apply to said infrastructure.


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