Interdisciplinary Research Themes

Political Economy Futures Forum - Previous Research Seminars

Semester 2 (2025-2026)

21 January 2026 - Long-run Health and Mortality Effects of Exposure to Universal Health Care in Infancy

Paper: Long-run Health and Mortality Effects of Exposure to Universal Health Care in Infancy
Presenter: Tanya Wilson (Adam Smith Business School)
 
Wednesday 21 January 2026 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 223  ‖  
 
Abstract: We investigate how exposure to universal healthcare in infancy influences early life health outcomes and the extent to which impacts persist into later life. The introduction of universal healthcare through the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom in July 1948 presented a fundamental re-organisation of the healthcare environment. Immediate large decreases in infant mortality ensued. We show an immediate decrease in infant mortality ensued, particularly in i) the neonatal period, ii) for amenable causes of death, and iii) among low-income individuals. We use administrative data on hospitalisations and death records to compare individuals born in the immediate cohorts around the NHS introduction in a regression discontinuity design. Our findings indicate that age-specific survival rates (incidence of cardiovascular disease) in later life are systematically higher (lower) among those whose post-natal care expanded through the NHS. These long run impacts of infancy exposure to universal healthcare coverage through the NHS are economically significant. Exploiting geographical variation in the change in per-capita medical services induced by the introduction of universal healthcare reveals evidence of crowding out effects between pre-existing and incoming patients to the new system. Our analysis suggests that supply side constraints play a key role in the design of universal healthcare systems.

Semester 1 (2025-2026)

26 September 2025 - Artificial Intelligence and Illegal Markets

Paper: Artificial Intelligence and Illegal Markets
Discussant: Dr Alessio Azzutti (School of Law)
 
Friday 26 September 2025 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  
 
Abstract: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping our present and future society. In the context of illegal markets, its adoption has introduced a growing diversity of economic actors—both human and non-human—and enabled novel market practices and behaviours. These changes have fostered new socio-economic and socio-technical interactions in the production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services—including those enabled by or otherwise associated with AI. Yet despite these developments, a comprehensive conceptual framework that accounts for the complex and multifaceted ways AI shapes the architecture and characteristics of illegal markets remains lacking.
This chapter addresses this gap through an interdisciplinary lens, enriching socio-economic research with insights from law and AI studies. It embeds the concepts of ‘AI lifecycle’ and ‘AI value chain’ within a revised theoretical foundation for the study of illegal markets, aiming to inspire future inquiry. Building on this, it examines how AI adoption (i) shifts and blurs the boundaries between legal and illegal markets—proposing a new conceptual framework for understanding AI involvement—and (ii) reconfigures points of tension and ‘interfaces’ where these markets overlap or even converge. The chapter concludes by identifying key challenges for scholars investigating AI-related—including AI-driven—illegal markets, and by emphasizing the urgent need for further research in this rapidly evolving field."
 

10 October 2025 - PGR Session

Friday 10 October 2025 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  
 
First Paper: The Politics of Equivalence: Hong Kong as the Conduit between EU Influence and China’s Market Governance
Author: Xueqi Wang
 
Abstract: "This project examines Hong Kong’s role as an institutional conduit between China and the European Union (EU) in financial market connectivity. It argues that Hong Kong’s intermediary position is not a natural outcome of market forces, but a politically engineered and legally embedded structure that reflects the divergent logics of China’s state capitalism and the EU’s market-oriented legal governance.

China’s state capitalist model embeds finance within broader political objectives such as stability, control over capital flows, and the prioritisation of the real economy. These political foundations constrain direct capital-market liberalisation. Under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework, Hong Kong has been deliberately positioned as a politically acceptable intermediary that enables controlled internationalisation of Chinese markets while preserving central oversight. Its market architecture reflects a hybrid model: common law institutions and internationally recognisable regulatory standards coexist with mechanisms specifically designed to channel and restrict access to mainland markets, such as Stock Connect and Bond Connect.

This dual structure allows Hong Kong to perform a transmission function, providing a designed interface through which China engages with global capital markets in a limited and controlled manner. At the same time, the EU relies on Hong Kong as a regulatory gateway to sustain market linkages with the mainland. By analysing case studies under the EU equivalence regime—namely, trading venue access and the recognition of central counterparties—the project demonstrates how Hong Kong mediates between EU influence and China’s regulatory accommodation. In doing so, it highlights the political foundations and institutional architectures that shape financial connectivity across jurisdictions."
 
Second Paper: Do Female Councillors Change Spending Priorities? Evidence from UK Local Elections
Author: Zhou Zhou
 
Abstract: This paper examines whether female councillors influence local government spending priorities in England. Using electoral data on over 100,000 candidates merged with financial accounts of 211 local authorities between 2010 and 2019, I measure female representation as the share of elected councillors who are women. To address endogeneity, I exploit the alphabetical ordering of candidates on ballots, which generates quasi-random variation in electoral success and thus in female representation. The results show that greater female representation increases spending on care-related services, with small offsetting reductions in infrastructure and traditional services. These effects are concentrated in councils where women hold more than 30% of seats, consistent with a critical mass mechanism. The findings provide new causal evidence that descriptive representation affects substantive policy outcomes and underscore the role of institutional design in shaping both gender equality and public finance.
 
Third Paper: Justice and Governance in Water Reuse: A Critical Perspective
 
Abstract: This paper critically explores environmental justice in water reuse governance, focusing on how legal and institutional frameworks distribute benefits, burdens, and decision-making power. Drawing on my doctoral research, I argue that the European Union’s Regulation (EU) 2020/741 on water reuse reflects a technocratic and risk-based form of governance that prioritizes safety and efficiency, but sidelines questions of equity, participation, and recognition. The paper develops a critical theoretical framework that integrates distributive, procedural, recognition, restorative, and cosmopolitan justice with governance theories of governmentality and assemblage, as well as insights from Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ). This approach interrogates not only whether water reuse is safe and efficient, but also who benefits, who decides, and whose knowledge counts.

Empirically, the research applies this framework to EU water reuse policy and its implementation in agricultural contexts, examining how governance practices may empower or marginalize different actors, from smallholder farmers to migrant labourers. By situating water reuse within the broader political economy of climate adaptation and resource governance, the paper demonstrates how environmental justice struggles are shaped by legal architectures, power relations, and global inequality. This contribution aims to broaden debates on the political economy of environmental infrastructures, showing how justice-oriented analysis can illuminate the hidden distributive and procedural dynamics of climate adaptation policies.

17 October 2025 - From Meagre to Mugabe: The Actual and Perceived Impact of the Land Reform Act 2003

Paper: From Meagre to Mugabe: The Actual and Perceived Impact of the Land Reform Act 2003
Author: Jack Jones
Discussants: Flora Vern and Max Wiszniewski (Revive)
 
Friday 17 October 2025 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 224  ‖  
 
Abstract: At the core of this paper, is a curious paradox: Scotland is simultaneously recognized as a pioneer of progressive, innovative land reform and as the country with the most concentrated patterns of private landownership in all of Europe. Despite 25 years of targeted reforms, the concentration of private land ownership has increased, and the crisis of Scottish landownership has deepened. And yet, the Scottish Land Reform Agenda, is widely celebrated internationally (and in the rest of the UK) as an example of a progressive, innovative approach to land reform. This chapter seeks to wrestle with this paradox by examining the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 (considered by many as a watershed moment in Scottish land reform) and locating precisely where it fits into the wider context of debates around land reform. To do so, it begins with the academic literature on land reform more broadly, chiefly influenced by Bernstein’s influential ‘longer view’. Then, it moves to consider developments in Scotland, analysing the influence of neoliberalism on land reform, law, and community development in Scotland, before situating the rise of the LRSA 2003 within this wider context. Finally, it analyses the CRtB provisions in this legislation and questions whether they constitute a departure from the norms of neoliberal land reform outlined by Bernstein. Throughout the course of its analysis, this chapter seeks to foreground the specific role of law and legality in the wider context of Scottish land reform.

31 October 2025 - Neighbourly Influence: Local Economic Policy Diffusion in relation to Community Wealth Building

Paper: Neighbourly Influence: Local Economic Policy Diffusion in relation to Community Wealth Building
 
Friday 31 October 2025 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  
 
Abstract: Understanding how ideas flow both horizontally between local policy documents and vertically national and local helps us to understand the coherence and cohesiveness of policy design. This study explores how geographic proximity (neighbourliness) affects policy diffusion in local economic policymaking, using the specific example of community wealth building (CWB). The study is based on a policy corpora review of local and national economic policy from Ireland and Scotland (2014-2024). Text mining and natural language processing techniques are used to develop a novel dictionary of CWB terms, which is then used to assesses the similarities between geographically proximate local governments’ policies versus their similarity to national policies or local authorities with similar demographic or industrial profiles. Using the specific example of community wealth building this paper contributes to the field of policy diffusion by developing an understanding of horizontal policy diffusion and its relationship with vertical policy diffusion. We provide theoretical and methodological insights into how neighbourliness might create shared framings for problems and solutions to local economic development.

14 November 2025 - Inventing the Scottish economy

Paper: Inventing the Scottish economy
Author: Jim Tomlinson
Discussants: Graeme Roy and Niall MacKenzie
 
Friday 14 November 2025 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  
 
Abstract: Work at the intersection of ‘constructivist’ political economy and economic history has, over the last few decades, pinpointed the invention of the notion of the ‘national economy’ as a key feature of the politics and economics of the modern state. (Tooze 1998, 2001, 2016; Mitchell 2013; Schmelzer, 2016; Tomlinson 2017; Clavin 2013; Martin 2022; Shenk 2016). This work argues that the development of macroeconomics and modern economic statistics—including GDP, economic growth, inflation, unemployment, and balance of payments—enabled the economy to be conceptualized as a bounded, measurable entity. Once rendered legible to state management and expert intervention, the economy became foundational to a whole range of new policymaking regimes.
 
National economies are almost always conceived as sovereign states, with unified fiscal and monetary structures. Not sovereign since 1707, nevertheless in the twentieth century the idea of a Scottish economy developed even within the Union. By 1954 Cairncross, (The Scottish Economy, p.1) was able to assert: ’There is also a sufficient degree of segregation from the rest of the economy, and a sufficient diversity within Scotland, to allow one to speak of a Scottish economy, functioning as a unit and with an independent momentum’. The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of ‘the Scottish economy’, its underpinnings and its distinctiveness.
 
The underlying assumption is that the construction of a ‘national economy’ in Scotland whilst drawing on some of the same conceptual underpinnings as sovereign states, shows a distinct trajectory. Understanding this trajectory should help us understand some of the contingencies involved the whole idea of a ‘national economy’, and the consequences of its deployment.

28 November 2025 - Private Equity, Venture Capital, and the Panama Papers

Paper: Private Equity, Venture Capital, and the Panama Papers
Author: Pia Helbing
 
Friday 28 November 2025 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  
 
Abstract: The Panama Papers data leaks in 2016 revealed hidden offshore accounts. We exploit this shock to the economic system that turned private information public. Previous research is scare and focuses on public firms showing ambiguous effects. Especially for venture capital (PE) and private equity (PE), operating privately held, offshore accounts could be valuable from a tax avoidance perspective but problematic from an agency perspective. This depends on the overall institutional context as we assume that higher levels of economic freedom reduce the probability of being included in the Panama Papers. We test those intuitions on a comprehensive dataset from Pitchbook of venture capital and private equity deals between 2010-2024 and merge this to the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database.

12 December 2025 - Environmental data as a relational mediator of contentious publicness: data flows and environmental data activism in China

Paper: Environmental data as a relational mediator of contentious publicness: data flows and environmental data activism in China
Author: Yu Sun
 
Friday 12 December 2025 ‖  11:30am - 12:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  
 
Abstract: With the rapid development of digital technologies, big data serves as the new mediator of political interventions and actions, generating new forms of political activism. The tactical use of data technologies in enhancing social justices is seen as data activism. This talk presents how data technologies have been appropriated to develop new action repertoires and enhance public advocacy in the environmental realm by civil society organisations in China. Moving beyond the dualist approach to contentious politics of data, this work draws on the notion of contentious publicness to trace the interrelated material, spatial and temporal relations in data-mediated contentions to capture the relational struggles for environmental justice in the authoritarian context of China.

The paper focuses on a case of data activism initiated to tackle environmental pollution and reduce carbon emissions by The Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE), an ENGO based in Beijing. Through ethnographic case study, it explores the power relations that shape the material infrastructure and the space for the public to engage in environmental action and the sustainability of their action repertoires. This study sheds light on the material, spatial and temporal dimensions of the activists’ data practices to engage the public in monitoring pollution and carbon emissions.

2024-2025 Seminars

2 October - “The Price of the Past: Examining the Consequences of Odious Debt”

Paper: Patrick Shea (SPS), “The Price of the Past: Examining the Consequences of Odious Debt”
Discussant: Dania Thomas (ASBS)
 
Wed. 2 October 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Global Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: Abstract: Why do leaders rarely invoke odious debt claims despite their apparent domestic and moral appeal? Blaming past dictators or colonial powers for debt burdens could garner popular support and potentially alleviate financial pressures. Yet, despite their potential for political popularity, such claims are rarely made in practice. This study explores this puzzle, arguing that the international financial consequences of odious debt claims deter leaders from employing this strategy. We argue that these claims not only cast doubt on a country's commitment to its current debt obligations but also signal potential issues with future borrowing, leading to adverse reactions in credit markets. To overcome the empirical challenge posed by leaders' strategic avoidance of these claims, we examine Norway's unique 2006 debt relief action. Norway unilaterally forgave the debts of five countries, explicitly labeling the original loans as ``illegitimate." This action effectively imposed an odious debt claim on these states, bypassing the usual leader-driven process. By comparing these countries to others receiving conventional Norwegian debt relief, we isolate the impact of the ``illegitimate debt" framing. While Norway’s intentions were ostensibly well-intentioned, our analysis reveals that this program restricted the forgiven states’ credit access and increased their bond yield spreads by 300 basis points. This study contributes to understanding sovereign debt politics and the implications of challenging established international political norms.
 

9 October - “Institutional Pressures and Who Gets Believed, Trusted, and Dismissed”

Paper: Melea Press (ASBS), “Institutional Pressures and Who Gets Believed, Trusted, and Dismissed”
 
Wed. 9 October 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 237C ‖  Law & Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: Excluded, marginalized and vulnerable groups are routinely distrusted, accused, and dismissed. They are blamed, shamed and gaslighted. This project would explore the mechanisms of institutional exclusion and the ways that individuals attempt to combat the external assessment of themselves. This builds on the work of Fricker (2007; 2024) by highlighting how social injustice is embedded in the enactment of institutional structures, how vulnerable individuals would like to respond and how they actually respond given the constraints imposed by power differentials.

16 October - "Business power in populist times: democratic defender, populist enabler or quiet bystander?"

Paper: Kelly Kollman (PIS/IPED), "Business power in populist times: democratic defender, populist enabler or quiet bystander?"
 
Wed. 16 October 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 223 ‖  Corporate Accountability cluster
 
Abstract: To what extent and in what ways has business—individual firms and their collective associations—mobilised to support, counter or accommodate radical right movements since the financial crisis in different capitalist democracies?  The project addresses these questions and seeks to elucidate differential business responses by developing a novel analytical framework that marries contemporary research on business and far-right parties with older scholarship that examined how socio-economic groups structured national responses to past crises.  The latter lends contemporary researchers two crucial insights. First, business actors’ response to political upheaval is shaped by the potential coalition partners available within the national economies and society. Second, economic crises unmake established political coalitions and open opportunities for new alliances and bargains to form. I use this framework to compare developments in three contemporary democracies: Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom.  In each country I compare three aspects of business (non)engagement with radical right parties: (1) during elections (2) lobbying on policies championed by right-wing populists (3) coalition-building to promote these political goals. 

23 October - "Spatial Justice in Climate Adaptation: River edge ownership considerations"

Paper: Kat Fradera (Law/ GALLANT), "Spatial Justice in Climate Adaptation: River edge ownership considerations"
Discussant: Mingzhe Zhu
 
 
Wed. 23 October 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 223 ‖ Public & Collective Ownership cluster
 
Abstract: 
Our river edges and coastlines are changing. With sea levels rising, and continued coastal protection often financially and practically unviable, increasing thought is being given to managing a retreat from vulnerable areas along urban river edges and coast lines.
 

30 October - "Sharing is caring until hard times hit? How economic crises affect states’ funding for international organizations"

Paper: Giuseppe Zaccaria (PIS/IR) "Sharing is caring until hard times hit? How economic crises affect states’ funding for international organizations"
Discussant: Giedre Jokubauskaite
 
Wed. 30 October 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225 ‖ Global Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: This article examines whether and how economic crises in donor states affect their multilateral funding. More specifically, the article focuses on the effect of monetary, financial, and banking crises on the volume of earmarked funding provided to multilateral institutions and the degree of earmarking attached to those funds by donor states. To test its expectations, the article relies on data on multilateral funding flows and economic crises in donor states between 1990 and 2020. The results show that economic crises are associated with less earmarked funding as well as stricter earmarking by donors. The results also suggest that donor-considerations towards earmarked funding during economically challenging times may vary according to their relations with recipient countries and the perceived domestic consequences of crises. The results have implications for scholars of financing in the multilateral system as well as practitioners. 
 
 

6 November - "Neoliberal despotism and coercive totalization: an ethnography of the Bangladeshi garment industry"

Paper: Chandana Alawattage (ASBS) "Neoliberal despotism and coercive totalization: an ethnography of the Bangladeshi garment industry" 
 
Wed. 6 November 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225 ‖ Corporate Accountability cluster
 
Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladeshi garment factories, this study advances a nuanced political analysis of despotic labour control as a fundamental component of neoliberal production regimes in the Global South. The empirical evidence reveals that ‘coercive totalism’ underpins despotism at the point of production through a specific set of market, political and cultural apparatuses. Neoliberal despotism constructs the structural conditions for the coercive totalization of space, body and time, enabling the relentless pursuit of production targets, adherence to quality standards and expedited delivery schedules—all whilst minimizing costs. In the context of a weakened bureaucratic nation-state lacking the capacity to safeguard labour and human rights, the emergence of a mastaanocratic shadow state manifests itself within the manufacturing milieu. This mastanocratic framework engenders a factory-slum topography, wherein ghettoized labour is sustained through the exercise of coercive totalization facilitated by power dynamics, legal enactments, police surveillance, and violence, alongside an ingrained cultural hierarchy of paternalism. This study argues that the neoliberal market necessitates despotism, whilst despotism, in turn, sustains the neoliberal market. Within this interrelation, coercive totalization is rationalized as a prevailing mechanism through which competitive market forces extract profit, thereby derealizing labor from the precariousness of its existence. 
 
 

13 November - "Judicialization as Contestation. Ecocide, the Small Island States and the International Politics of Environmental Justice"

Paper: Ulrike Zeigermann & Philipp Gieg, University of Würzburg "Judicialization as Contestation. Ecocide, the Small Island States and the International Politics of Environmental Justice" 
 
Discussant: Dr Lorenzo Crippa, Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, incoming lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. 
 
Wed. 13 November 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 237C ‖  Law and Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: 

Over the past decade, the reemerging debate about the introduction of ecocide as an international crime has brought about increasing scholarly and public debate. Small Island States have played a major role in this debate arguing for sanctioning and codifying widespread and long-term environmental harm in international criminal law. While the diversity among the Small Island States must be recognized, we show that activists from local communities, but also public representatives of these countries have challenged existing international legal frameworks for dealing with environmental harms. With a qualitative document analysis, we scrutinize the agency of the Small Island States involved in global power dynamics around the judicialization of ecocide.

Based on our empirical analysis of public protocols, statements, reports and policy papers, we argue that the ‘unlikely pioneership’ of the Small Island States in international criminal environmental law can be conceptualized and analyzed as norm contestation revealing the “agency of the governed”. By discursively disapproving international norms – either regarding their validity per se (justificatory contestation), or regarding their general (applicatory contestation) or situational application (situative contestation) –, these actors formerly perceived as mere ‘norm takers’ have become norm entrepreneurs, actively shaping the international normative fabric.

20 November- “If we had just stood outside City Hall w/ banners saying ‘MUNICIPALISE NOW!’ it wouldn’t have worked”: Labour, deprivatisation & the conjuncture"

Paper: Beth Pearson (ASBS) “If we had just stood outside City Hall with banners saying ‘MUNICIPALISE NOW!’ it wouldn’t have worked”: Labour, deprivatisation and the conjuncture" 
 
Discussant: Brian Robertson, UNITE City of Edinburgh Council branch 
 
Wed. 20 November 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225 ‖ Public & Collective Ownership cluster
 
Abstract: There has been growing interest in using conjunctural theory to understand the mutating processes of neoliberalism and the ability of progressive actors to forge transformative change at the local level; particularly in the possibilities of this for democracy, participation, and sustainable cities. Existing work has positioned processes of de-privatisation and remunicipalisation in a conjunctural framing arguing that these developments should be situated as a critical current moment in a longer set of economic, social, and political processes linked to ongoing neoliberalisation. To date, however, there has been little attempt to position labour and trade union actors in these debates. The labour movement has played a key, if uneven and sometimes ambivalent, role in the growing and global wave of remunicipalisation of local public services. Existing scholarship on trade union renewal draws attention to both internal and external factors in shaping union strategy and reconceptualises renewal as a multifaceted transition, highlighting short-term adaptability. Based on interviews with key actors and campaigns at UK trade unions engaged in insourcing or de-privatisation campaigns, this paper engages with union renewal scholarship, but also widens and deepens the lens further towards an analysis that draws attention to longstanding neoliberal dynamics in the UK and the positioning of union actors in adapting to contemporary processes of neoliberal mutation.

27 November - "Credit and Voting"

Paper: Eleonora Brandimarti (ASBS) "Credit and Voting" 
Discussant: Saurabh Lall
 
 
Wed. 27 November 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225 ‖ Global Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: We investigate how credit constraints for subprime borrowers affect political polarization in the U.S. Using proprietary data on credit reports for 1% of the U.S. population over 15 years, we detect exogenous discontinuities in access to credit. We combine this data with Congressional elections and find that more credit-constrained individuals increase the Republican vote share. We rationalize this finding through political alignment among Republicans for laxer regulation of credit and mortgage markets. Our results are robust to trade exposure. 

 


 
 

4 December- "Are we nearly there yet? The struggle to end a century of international corporate tax misgovernance"

Paper: Alex Cobham (Tax Justice Network) "Are we nearly there yet? The struggle to end a century of international corporate tax misgovernance" 
 
Wed. 4 December 2024 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225 ‖ Corporate Accountability cluster
 
Abstract: In the 1920s, the imperial powers began to set international tax rules at the League of Nations. Their decisions, and the exclusion of most countries of the world from rule-setting, set the template for the century that followed. Attempts to establish the United Nations as the more inclusive forum for rule-setting on tax matters and on the wider regulation of multinationals, including accounting standards, were repeatedly thwarted by the erstwhile League of Nations members, including through the establishment of the OECD in 1960 to take on its mantle. But the scale of tax abuse by multinational companies has exploded since the 1990s, gradually bringing even the OECD’s members to demand meaningful reform. That reform process, however, has since its inception in 2013 failed to make any dent in the scale of tax abuse. For that reason, it has been possible for the first time to move forward proposals for a UN framework convention on international tax cooperation – which would not only deliver specific rules and standards, but more importantly provide a globally inclusive forum for future decision-making. The concerted resistance of a handful of OECD members including the UK and US may yet prove a serious obstacle; but the negotiation of the UN convention over the next three years provides the prospect of an unprecedented overhaul of international tax governance.
 
 

22 January - “Mobilising for Local Energy Justice in the United States: Confronting Political Lock-in and Private Capture in the Campaign for Public Power"

CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS
 
Paper: Grace Brown (ASBS)  “Mobilising for Local Energy Justice in the United States: Confronting Political Lock-in and Private Capture in the Campaign for Public Power”
 
Wed. 22 January 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Public & Collective Ownership cluster
 
Abstract: Across the United States, there is a growing grassroots movement for ‘public power’: manifesting in local and regional campaigns to take privatised energy utilities and infrastructures into public ownership and control. These campaigns utilise explicitly pro-public messaging to link everyday customer service concerns with broader questions of climate action and racial and economic justice. While there have been some notable achievements in local energy democracy, such as the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act (2023) in New York State after a four-year grassroots campaign, on the whole, these mobilisations have not translated into successful efforts to transform the energy system in the US. Despite public frustration with investor-owned utilities – especially in terms of high energy prices, reliability issues, and environmental negligence – the US energy system remains locked into privatisation and marketisation processes. In attempting to challenge these processes, campaigns for public power confront significant structural barriers, including corporate influence in the political system, regulatory constraints, and opposition from key stakeholders, including some labour unions.
 
There is a ‘regime of obstruction’ blocking energy democracy (Carroll, 2021) operating at different geographical scales, from the federal through state to the local, where powerful political and economic actors continue to ensure a ‘lock-in’ to neoliberal governance, despite its many contradictions and failings. In this paper, we explore these persistent tensions and problems, while also highlighting the trans-local learning processes that run alongside these campaigns in their attempts to tackle spatial and social injustices and transition towards more public and democratic energy regimes.
We illustrate our arguments by drawing upon recent fieldwork (undertaken in 2022-4) from two recent grassroots campaigns to municipalise the energy grid through the creation of community- and publicly owned utilities: a statewide campaign in Maine and one at city level in Rochester, New York.
 

15 January - “Bribes and Bureaucracy: When Administrative Burdens Become Corruption Catalysts for Firms”

Paper: Denisse Rodriguez-Olivari (ASBS) “Bribes and Bureaucracy: When Administrative Burdens Become Corruption Catalysts for Firms” 

Discussant: Wei Yang (ASBS)
 
Wed. 15 January 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Global Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: In many interactions between businesses and governments, firms resort to bribing officials to navigate actual or perceived operational barriers. From the government’s perspective, two factors enable this phenomenon: administrative burdens and officials’ discretionary powers. This paper focuses on the former administrative burdens, testing the ‘grease-the-wheels’ hypothesis using previously untapped firm-level survey data from 169,959 companies across 141 countries (both developed and developing) between 2006 and 2022. Specifically, we examine business licensing requirements, analyzing the time it takes firms to obtain operating licenses and how much they perceive regulations as obstacles. Our results show a significant positive correlation between administrative burdens and bribery practices, comparing firms within the same country, wave, and sector. These findings have implications for both theory and practice: (a) they highlight the importance of minimizing administrative burdens that incentivize bribery, and (b) they suggest that addressing administrative inefficiencies/burdens could have broad applicability across different political and economic contexts.
 

29 January - “A political ecology critique of China’s developmentalist paradigm of climate governance"

Paper: Mingzhe Zhu (Law) "A political ecology critique of China’s developmentalist paradigm of climate governance"
 
Wed. 29 January 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Law & Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: Since the 1980s, China has developed a developmentalist approach to climate governance. This approach is characterized primarily by framing climate change as a development issue rather than an environmental one. The state delegates the authority for formulating and implementing climate policy to the developmental and industrial departments of the executive branch. This allows them to integrate extensive green public investments with coercive institutional and legal measures to reshape the energy and industrial sectors. This paradigm is further justified by its potential to achieve both decarbonization and economic growth that particularly benefits underdeveloped regions. While China’s climate ambitions and accomplishments are widely recognized both domestically and internationally, the implementation of its climate policies risks exacerbating social inequalities. 

 

5 February - “Of Causality and Comparability: How Impact Evaluations Influenced Hybrid Organizing in Global Development”

Paper: Saurabh Lall (ASBS) “Of Causality and Comparability: How Impact Evaluations Influenced Hybrid Organizing in Global Development"
 
Wed. 5 February 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Corporate Accountability cluster
 
Abstract: Tackling grand challenges like poverty and climate change through hybrid fields like impact investing and social enterprise necessitates measuring impact. There is a tradition of measuring social impact through impact evaluations in the public and nonprofit sectors, which has recently been adapted to hybrid organizations. While there are many efforts to compare social performance, there is relatively less attention to answering underlying questions of causality, and how impact evaluations have informed organizing in hybrid fields. I use extensive archival data and observations from practitioner events to develop case studies of two impact investing sectors – microfinance and long-lasting insecticide nets. I draw on scholarship in program evaluation to develop a temporal model with four stages – construction, contestation, consensus, and conversion, to illustrate how impact evaluations have changed both normative and causal program theory in hybrid fields. My research has implications for scholarship in social impact measurement and hybrid organizations and fields. 
 

12 February - “The Ascent of the Prudent Man: Trusteeship and the Legal Origins of Financialization”

Paper: Sean Vanatta (SPS) “The Ascent of the Prudent Man: Trusteeship and the Legal Origins of Financialization"
 
Wed. 12 February 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 223  ‖ Law & Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: In the years after World War II, an alliance of lawyers and bankers rewrote the laws governing trust investments in the United States, a campaign that transformed American finance. The changes focused on state-level rules that determined how trustees—who oversaw estates, surplus corporate capital, and blossoming pension funds—could invest funds entrusted to their care. Before the war, most states followed New York’s “legal list” model. Legislatures and courts created strict criteria for permissible investments. These tended to be safe, low-yielding assets, like government bonds, mortgages, and corporate bonds meeting specific criteria. By contrast, Massachusetts and a few outliers followed the “prudent man” rule, which enabled trustees to invest “how men of prudence, discretion and intelligence manage their own affairs.” Here, trustees could invest not only in safe assets, but also in corporate bonds, stocks, and more exotic securities. 
 
Seeking to enhance their power over investment portfolios, in the late 1930s organized bankers and lawyers launched a sustained campaign to reframe trusteeship around the figure of the prudent man, supplanting government-mandated investments with the judgement of private fiduciaries. Over the 1940s and 1950s, the rule supplanted the legal list model in most states. 
 
State prudent man rules elevated prudent men—trust lawyers, bankers, investment advisers—granting them substantial authority over socially consequential capital allocation decisions that had, under the legal list model, resided in government officials. More broadly, the ideology of the prudent man led public and private investors to pursue maximal individual returns, to downplay systemic risk, and to reject public-spirited tradeoffs (effects especially visible, the paper will show, in public employee pension plans). The ascent of the prudent man was, in the last analysis, a formative vector of financialization. 

19 February - “The UK councils service provision, the neoliberal model and beyond”

Paper: Bilge Serin (SPS) "The UK councils service provision, the neoliberal model and beyond"
 
Wed. 19 February 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Public & Collective Ownership cluster
 
Abstract:
Over the past half-century, the neoliberal model has reshaped how social infrastructure is financed and delivered across the world. With the impact of austerity policies and cutting public funding for social service delivery, cash-stripped local governments implemented various ways of generating income to fund these services. While these practices established neoliberal urbanisation across cities, one of the most prominent strategies towards generating funding for amenities and services has been capturing the value generated through urban development.  The practice takes many forms: land value capture, infrastructure levy, betterment tax, revenue-sharing, or planning obligations.
The practice has usually been promoted as a way of distributing wealth generated in urban development projects to the city-dwellers. However, a deeper look is needed at how these (usually large-scale) urban projects are being developed, the negotiations between the project stakeholders, and the impact of the developments on cities and city-dwellers at large, especially regarding the risks attached to this model and the discontent by the impacted communities. The seminar questions the neoliberal model for funding the delivery of key public services through the value generated in urban development projects, with a focus on UK council practices. This questioning is critically important amid Labour’s growth agenda, the push for expanding construction in urban space, and the risks of depending on development-driven revenue to meet citizens' needs.

26 February - “Why are investors in a war committed with ‘genocidal intent’ bucking bond markets? Patriotism, Rational Calculation or Religious Passion”

Paper: Dania Thomas (ASBS) "Why are investors in a war committed with ‘genocidal intent’ bucking bond markets? Patriotism, Rational Calculation or Religious Passion” 
 
Wed. 26 February 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Global Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: This paper analyzes the contrasting trends in Israel's bond financing post the October 2023 Hamas attack. While retail investors, particularly in the US, have increased their investments in Israel Bonds, driven by a mix of patriotism and high-yield returns, commercial bond markets have shown caution, reflected in rating downgrades and rising interest rates. This discrepancy raises questions about the underlying motivations for investing in Israel Bonds, particularly in light of the ongoing conflict and international condemnation of Israel's actions. The paper explores whether the appetite for these bonds can be attributed to a religious and political investment in a future Judeo-Christian state, rather than solely economic or patriotic factors. 
 

5 March- “Global Threads: Sustainability, Indigeneity, and the Global Wool Trade in Peru"

Paper: Laura Bunt-Macrury (SPS) “Global Threads: Sustainability, Indigeneity, and the Global Wool Trade in Peru"
 
Wed. 5 March 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Corporate Accountability cluster
 
Abstract: The global wool trade is at a crossroads, where sustainability, luxury, and climate change intersect with historical patterns of world trade. This presentation explores Global Threads, a working project examining how Peru’s indigenous communities are reshaping their role in global wool supply chains amidst increasing demand for wool as both a sustainable and luxury commodity. For the first time, indigenous peasant communities (campesinos) are in direct dialogue with multinational corporations (MNCs) and international organizations regarding the production and sale of wool, marking a significant shift in their economic and political agency.  
 

12 March - "Towards a Legal Theory of Prices"

Paper: Anna Chadwick (Law) "Towards a Legal Theory of Prices"
 
Wed. 12 March 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 223  ‖  Law & Political Economy cluster
 
Abstract: The analysis of prices is an activity that has traditionally taken place within the domain of Economics, and legal scholars have had very little to say about how prices are formed. Yet as the impacts of price spikes for resources like oil or gas, the effects of long-standing inequalities relating to the terms of international trade, the contentious practice of pricing of sovereign debt, or the current cost-of-living crisis all underline, prices have significant implications for a matter with which lawyers have traditionally been concerned: justice. 
 
Legal institutions are increasingly understood by economic sociologists and institutionalist economists to be of critical importance in processes of price formation, yet there has been no systematic attempt to understand the role of law in the formation of prices. In this paper, I build on important foundations around ‘the just price’ to evaluate the potential of developing an alternative theoretical approach to analysing prices from a legal perspective. I identify and critically discuss four different ways of analysing the role of law in processes of price formation that take as their point of departure the following intellectual traditions: I) New Institutional Economics, II) Economic Sociology, III) Law and Political Economy, and IV) Marxist Economics. In addition to offering a comparative analysis of distinct legal-theoretical perspectives on the engineering of prices, I reflect on whether it is possible to advance a legal theory of prices that is both sociologically convincing and that also has explanatory power. 
 
Prices govern peoples’ lives and dictate courses of action to elected governments, often entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. Can a greater understanding of their legal engineering open up any avenues to making prices any more ‘just’?
 

19 March - "Circular clothing innovation project"

Paper: Lynn Wilson (ASBS) "Circular clothing innovation project"
 
Wed. 19 March 2025 ‖  3:00-4:30pm  ‖  ARC 225  ‖  Public & Collective Ownership cluster
 
Abstract: 

Academics are increasingly being encouraged to develop interdisciplinary research projects, that have impact beyond academia and that require access to large scale funding. Developing internal and external relationships and retaining them is complex, particularly when applying for funding is a precarious, time-consuming process. 

This presentation unpacks the early stage development of a project that addresses the overconsumption of clothing, which contributes to 3-8% of global carbon emissions by developing a circular clothing community demonstration project. The Circular Economy (Scotland) Act, 2024, focuses on behaviour change, skills learning and capacity building for a circular, low carbon future, but a strategy to implement the act has not been published. An interdisciplinary research team from the Adam Smith Business School (Dr Lynn Wilson (P-I), Dr Paulina Navrouglou (C-I) and Dr Yingru Li (Co-I)) and School of Health and Well Being (Dr Umberto Gostoli (Co-I) are working together to develop a coherent research project, theoretical framework and work packages. A stakeholder workshop was held in Perth at the end of February, and the team are reflecting on the outcomes and developing a pupil workshop to be held at the end of April. The project is currently seeking funding for an 18 - 36 month demonstration project that has the potential to influence circular economy education and circular economy policy across the UK. This presentation will discuss and share experiences of: 

  • defining interdisciplinary research 
  • building a research team 
  • public knowledge exchange and accessing external research collaborators 
  • Festival of Social Science 2024. Participant engagement and impact, pupil short film 
  • research scoping work 
  • attracting investment and in-kind support 

Lynn and the research team would like to use this opportunity to share experience and engage in critical discussion, that could help to build the next stages of the project.