Social and Environmental Upgrading through Global Value Chains? A review of the book by Selwyn and Bernhold.

In Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold provide a powerful critique of the mainstream global value chain (GVC) literature in its various versions. In particular, they criticise their emphasis on the possibilities of social and environmental upgrading through an expansion of GVCs. Instead, they convincingly argue that capitalist value chains (CVCs) intensify the exploitation of workers and the environment alike.  In this review, I will highlight some key contributions of the volume while raising a couple of conceptual and empirical concerns.

 

The Struggle for Development: CSSGJ Annual Lecture 2017.

On Monday, 27 November Ben Selwyn from Sussex University gave the Annual Lecture 2017 of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ). In his excellent lecture, Selwyn drew heavily on his new book The Struggle for Development (Polity, 2017). I will reflect on some of the key themes in this blog post including labour-centred development and the possibility of system transformation through democratisation of the economy.

Towards Labour Centred Development

In 2014, Ben Selwyn published the book The Global Development Crisis (Polity, 2014), in which he critically engages with market-led and state-led developmental models alike. Importantly, he puts forward the novel concept of labour centred development. In this blog post, I will discuss the main contributions of this remarkable book and explore further the possibilities of labour centred development.