O-06
The Local-Global Nexus and the Sustainability Challenge
Interestingly, empirical evidence suggests that such local systems do not react in the same way to external shocks. There is an increasing consensus that, other than ‘internal’ features to the cluster and the industry, ‘external’ ones are playing a key role, namely the way in which clusters or cluster firms have been able to engage in GVCs. What is missing, however, is a comprehensive understanding of the transformations taking place within clusters, IDs and other local systems, their relationships with GVCs, and the effects of global-local linkages on various development outcomes, such as economic and social upgrading, corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability. The proposed panel aims at tackling these research gaps, using comparative narratives that consider empirical settings both the Global South and the developed world. We adopt a broad definition of the ‘local’ dimension, including experiences from IDs, clusters, regions and nations.
We propose a collection of eight papers organized around two consecutive panels, which are structured thematically within the framework of emerging trends in global-local linkages. This second panel focuses on how a specific challenge: to address social and environmental concerns within the global-local nexus, including the agenda of corporate social responsibility, and the implications that arise from this upgrading around sustainability. Taken together with the first panel, which focuses on the reasons behind the resilience or decline of local systems, considering the ways that local productive systems and actors engage with GVCs, the nature of these relationships and their implications for local capability formation, these two panels offer new conceptual, empirical and comparative insights for a key area of scholarship on GVCs, namely the changing dynamics of global-local relationships and their implications for new intersections between industrial districts, clusters and GVCs.