ABSTRACTIn upland northern Vietnam ethnic minority farmers are cultivating what some global retailers refer to as the ‘champagne of cinnamon’. However, a closer examination reveals that this spice is not ‘true cinnamon’ but cassia, with the exact species remaining uncertain. Drawing on commodity chain literature and debates over the creation of value and quality, the aims of this article are twofold. First, it investigates the making of ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ as it moves from the hills of northern Vietnam to supermarket shelves in the global North, and the actors and livelihoods involved. Second, it explores how different actors define ‘Vietnamese cinnamon’ and infuse it with often‐contradictory values. Based on multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork over a four‐year period, the study finds that the state and cooperating non‐government organizations tend to ignore ongoing taxonomic confusion while creating a geographical indicator to highlight the uniqueness of this commodity. Yet, concurrently, exporters and retailers in the global North focus on other distinctions as key marketing tools including remoteness, ethnicity, taste and health benefits. The article thus calls for an expanded analytical focus on competing value creation for agro‐food products and on the impacts for commodity producers, in this case ethnic minority farmers in the global South.

ABSTRACTThe scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multi‐stakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the ready‐made garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyer‐driven, compliance‐based model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperation‐based approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers.

ABSTRACTResearch on Chinese trade unions has privileged a state‐centred, structuralist approach, while the question of union agency has remained undertheorized. Seeking to overcome this limitation, this article examines the agency, the strategies and practice, and the limits and potentials of enterprise union reform in China's auto parts industry driven by worker activism since the wave of auto strikes in 2010. Drawing on in‐depth fieldwork conducted in Guangzhou and Chongqing between 2011 and 2017, the authors reveal variegated but constrained grassroots union agency and identify four key factors to explain the variations in the operation and reform of enterprise unions. Contrary to the common perception that Chinese trade unions are of no value to workers, the authors argue that, driven by worker activism and under specific circumstances, democratically elected enterprise unions are able to exploit certain operational space within the existing political and institutional constraints to carry out substantive collective bargaining and adaptive, incremental reforms, which have improved workers’ material well‐being and union representativeness and effectiveness. However, given the authoritarian regime and state‐controlled union structure, the space for grassroots union agency is severely restricted and contingent on broader political and economic environments. With growing state repression, the future of worker‐driven grassroots union reform is unclear.

ABSTRACTIn its crudest form, development has traditionally been about dissecting the political, socio‐economic and cultural processes of black, brown and other subjects of colour in the so‐called global South and finding them regressive, particularly in comparison to the so‐called progressive global North. However, in the midst of a 21st century, de‐colonial scholarly pivot, ‘opening up development’ fundamentally demands turning the colonial, ‘white gaze’ on its head. In particular, contemporary social media movements challenging white supremacy such as #BlackLivesMatter have gained prominence while non‐white development actors such as China have emerged as enticing alternatives. These phenomena have pried open development with both positive and negative results, intended and unintended consequences. This article seeks to put Critical Development Studies into fluid conversation with Critical Race Studies in an examination of how scholars, policy makers and practitioners have simultaneously succeeded and failed in subverting the ‘white gaze’ of development.

ABSTRACTLong dismissed as too weak and fragmented to collectively organize, millions of informal workers have begun mobilizing for labour rights over the past 40 years. As informal workers gain a measure of power to reshape the structure and conditions of their work, but continue to face constraints due to their subordinated positions in the broader political economy, tensions may emerge between the imperatives of combatting exploitation and dispossession. Recent conflicts over recycler rights policy in Bogotá, Colombia are illustrative of this dilemma. For the first 25 years of its existence, the recycler rights movement experienced little tension between these two imperatives, as it had little capacity to do either. In recent years, however, recyclers have become powerful political agents, and since 2012 conflicts have erupted among recyclers and state officials over how to navigate the twin threat. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article exposes both potentials and constraints of state‐led interventions to improve informal livelihoods. Such interventions are likely to entail thorny tradeoffs as long as they occur within a broader system of social relations that is based on exploitation and exclusion.

ABSTRACTThis article provides a critical interrogation of the Brazilian tax on foreign exchange derivatives deployed between 2011 and 2013. It analyses the drivers of the policy‐making process that led to implementation of the measure, locates it within the broader policy response regarding the management of cross‐border capital flows and speculative finance, and assesses its political economy significance in light of class dynamics. The author makes three arguments. First, this innovative policy tool must be interpreted in terms of the emergence of a specific form of state power allowing for the continuation of finance‐led strategies of accumulation, while mitigating some of their worst consequences. Second, this form of state power internalizes the subordinate positionality of Brazil in the global financial and monetary system. Third, while financialization processes have eroded the efficiency of a number of policy tools, this policy experiment demonstrates the possibility of regulating complex financial markets, provided that appropriate resources are dedicated to the task, and that there is the political will to do so. The article concludes by discussing theoretical implications, for how to theorize state and financialization, as well as political implications.