UNDP's Engagement with the Private Sector, 1994-2011 

2014. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.  

ISBNs  978-1-137-44919-1; 978-1-137-44920-7

DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449207   Publisher site 

Over the past decade, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have significantly grown the number and scope of their partnerships with the private sector. In this context, IGOs have launched policy initiatives and projects that make the private sector's core competencies, expertise, and activities essential parts of the solution to poverty, inclusiveness, and development. As a result, the policy agendas of almost all IGOs currently incorporate the design and implementation of innovative business models and inclusive market strategies at the base of the income pyramid in developing countries. These organizations are also actively involved in the process of development, promotion, and diffusion of norms of sustainable development and corporate social responsibility. Despite the objective importance of the private sector to current development policy and practice, the causes of recent changes are among the least conceptualized and examined in the fields of IGOs, international relations theory, and development policy. Concerned with the implications that these changes in IGOs' engagement with the private sector may have for our understanding of current development policy and practice, this book asks how and why these changes occurred, and to what extent the process of norm development influenced this transformation.

Is “being foreign” a liability for mining companies? Locational liabilities and social conflict in Latin America (with Paul Alexander Haslam and Nasser Ary Tanimoune)

2019. Resources Policy, 63(101425), pp. 1-10.

DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2019.101425   Publisher site 

Do foreign mining firms face additional challenges and incur additional costs in host environments because of their nationality? This paper draws on the business literature on liability of foreignness (LOF), to examine whether foreign mining firms face a performance liability in comparison to locally-owned mining companies. In order to adapt this literature to the particular context of mining in developing countries, characterized by territorially-uneven costs of doing business abroad, and link it with stakeholder perceptions, we introduce the concept of “locational liabilities”. We show that foreign mining firms do experience a liability of foreignness associated with a higher likelihood of social conflict, than locally-owned firms, and that this effect can only be fully identified with the inclusion of locational liabilities that interact differentially with foreign and local firms. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these liabilities are not easily mitigated by corporate social responsibility practices, suggesting that foreign firms may have greater difficulty obtaining social license to operate. The article uses an original database of 634 mining properties in five countries of Latin America, and a novel empirical methodology based on highly-localized property-level sources of data drawn in part from geographic information system (GIS) analysis. 

Do Canadian mining firms behave worse than other companies? Quantitative evidence from Latin America (with Paul Alexander Haslam and Nasser Ary Tanimoune)

2018. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 51(3), pp. 521-551.

DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423918000185  Publisher site 

The effects of Canadian mining companies on local communities abroad is an increasingly contentious topic as activists and academics, citing case studies, have drawn attention to alleged problems.  Despite the policy relevance of this issue, there have been no generalizable analyses of whether mining companies headquartered in Canada behave differently from mining firms headquartered in other countries.  This paper conducts the first rigorous statistical analysis of the effect of country-of-origin, or more specifically, “being Canadian” on the occurrence of known social conflicts in Latin America.  We use an original database of 634 mining properties in five Latin American countries, which allows us to differentiate between a country-of-origin effect, and other probable determinants of social conflict in communities near mining properties.  We find that Canadian mining firms perform slightly better than other foreign firms, but worse than locally-owned firms. 

Territory, Place, Flow, and Scale: Spatial Analysis in the IPE of Trade (with Benjamin Forest & Juliet Johnson)

2024. Geopolitics (2024): 1-25. 

DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423918000185   Publisher site 

We assess the presence and use of the geographical concepts of territory, place, flow, and scale in the International Political Economy (IPE) literature on trade. While IPE scholars have arguably responded somewhat to earlier calls to embrace geography, the uptake remains limited. Relatively few articles incorporate such concepts explicitly and tend to ignore critical scholarship on these ideas. After summarizing the theoretical dimensions of territory, place, flow, and scale in geography, we analyze publications in six leading political science/IPE journals from 2010 to 2022 to identify articles related to trade that draw on one or more of these four concepts. Using a mix of quantitative text analysis and close qualitative readings of selected articles, we find that IPE scholars occasionally use territory, flow, and scale explicitly, but more often their use is implicit. In contrast, place is used rarely, only implicitly, but perhaps offers the greatest opportunity to frame new questions in studies of trade. More generally, we conclude that explicit attention to these four concepts and their use in critical geography scholarship, would help to develop richer, more critical IPE approaches.