Stefano Ponte

EMG-K stud­ies: 1) Kenya’s en­gage­ment in policy mak­ing in the United Na­tion’s In­ter­na­tion­al Mari­time Or­gan­iz­a­tion (IMO), which reg­u­lates ship­ping’s air emis­sions via the MAR­POL Con­ven­tion; and 2) the im­ple­ment­a­tion and en­force­ment of IMO MAR­POL Con­ven­tion’s An­nex VI in Kenyan ports.

Mari­time emis­sions abate­ment has been said to de­pend on a glob­al and uni­form im­ple­ment­a­tion of reg­u­lat­ory meas­ures as well as strong en­force­ment. This is a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge in the ship­ping in­dustry with footloose and glob­al op­er­a­tions.

PAC­SMAC ad­dresses sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment and cli­mate change by study­ing pro­spects for cli­mate-smart cof­fee us­ing a mul­tidiscip­lin­ary ap­proach. Fa­cing in­creas­ing tem­per­at­ures and pre­cip­it­a­tion changes, farm­ers are test­ing new plant­ing tech­niques and ge­net­ic vari­etals. PAC­SMAC ex­plores these activ­it­ies and how power dy­nam­ics across Glob­al Value Chains (GVCs) af­fect op­por­tun­it­ies for and be­ne­fits from cli­mate ad­apt­a­tion, ad­dress­ing three ques­tions:

-How does cli­mate change ad­apt­a­tion af­fect the gov­ernance of Ethiopia and Tan­zania’s cof­fee value chains?
-How does ad­apt­a­tion af­fect the dis­tri­bu­tion of value along the chain, up­grad­ing op­por­tun­it­ies and farm­er live­li­hoods?
-How does ad­apt­a­tion re­shape cof­fee pro­duc­tion and forest cov­er geo­graph­ies?

Our find­ings identi­fy ways cli­mate-smart ag­ri­cul­ture can sup­port live­li­hoods and cli­mate mit­ig­a­tion and ad­apt­a­tion

The glob­al­iz­a­tion of pro­duc­tion has yiel­ded new win­ners and losers with­in and across na­tions. Glob­al Value Chain (GVC) schol­ar­ship in eco­nom­ic so­ci­ology and eco­nom­ic geo­graphy shows that the par­ti­cip­a­tion of Glob­al South act­ors in GVCs has not led to sig­ni­fic­ant in­creases in value ad­di­tion with­in these coun­tries.

As in­equal­ity in the dis­tri­bu­tion of value ad­ded between Glob­al South and Glob­al North per­sists, we need more know­ledge on how lead firms ex­er­cise power over their sup­pli­ers and what kinds and com­bin­a­tions of power they yield. Re­search has fo­cused on asym­met­ries in bar­gain­ing power without ex­amin­ing how oth­er forms, such as in­sti­tu­tion­al, demon­strat­ive and con­sti­tu­tion­al power, un­der­pin or chal­lenge ex­ist­ing bar­gain­ing power im­bal­ances over time.

To ad­dress these lim­it­a­tions, PIPS de­vel­ops a new the­ory of power in GPSs from a North-South per­spect­ive and provides new point­ers for pub­lic au­thor­it­ies and so­cial move­ments on how to ad­dress in­equal­ity.