Claudia Sanchez-Bajo
Claudia Sanchez Bajo, Visiting Scholar at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas at Austin, has PhD in Development Studies (International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Netherlands). She was the Inaugural Chair in Cooperative Enterprises at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Winnipeg, Canada between 2013 and 2015, where she developed 4 full courses and the complete future Concentration on Cooperative Enterprises within the Business Department. Her work currently focuses on cooperatives and entrepreneurship and their role in social and economic development. She currently teaches at the Institute for Advanced Studies – IUSS- at Pavia University in Italy. Earlier, she taught at Kassel University in Germany, and earlier still, she concentrated her research on business actors in policy making, regionalism and globalisation, on the one hand, and parliaments and legislation on the other. Expert consultant for the ILO (Geneva). While in Canada, she was board member of the Canadian Association for Studies in Cooperation. She took part in the UN Expert Meeting in Nairobi in 2015 on Cooperatives. She worked on development projects for Genève Tiers Monde and is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Co-author with Bruno Roelants of the book Capital and the Debt Trap: Learning from Cooperatives in the Global Crisis, 2013, Palgrave MacMillan. Other publications include The Political Economy of Regionalism – Business Actors in Mercosur in the Petrochemical and Steel Industrial Sectors in 2006 (Maastricht: Shaker Media, 2001). She contributed to, among others, The Political Economy of Regions and Regionalisms (Shaw, T, Boas, M, and Marchand, M. Ed, Palgrave, 2005) and Die ökonomische Dimension des Friedens: Soziale Solidarische Ökonomie (The economic dimension of peace: social and solidarity economie) (After a conference organized by Müller-Plantenberg, Clarita
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Papers by Claudia Sanchez-Bajo
We have been through a global crisis for the last six years with dramatic consequences. In the face of the crisis, cooperatives have shown not only potential but have actually demonstrated a higher degree of resilience in terms of jobs and activity. This UNRISD think piece gives details on how cooperative enterprises show resilience during the crisis and how they implement management practices based on solidarity, efficiency and innovation, based on four case studies and grounded research."
We have been through a global crisis for the last six years with dramatic consequences. In the face of the crisis, cooperatives have shown not only potential but have actually demonstrated a higher degree of resilience in terms of jobs and activity. This UNRISD think piece gives details on how cooperative enterprises show resilience during the crisis and how they implement management practices based on solidarity, efficiency and innovation, based on four case studies and grounded research."
"Die Absicht dieser Publikation „Solidarische Ökonomie als Motor regionaler Ökonomie“ ist es, Erfahrungen und Wissen mitzuteilen, einen Zusammenhang zwischen Theorie und Praxis sowie zwischen der Universität und ihrem gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Umfeld herzustellen." ISBN: 978-3-89958-687-9 (e-book) / 978-3-89958-686-2 (print)
'This elegant and deeply-informed inquiry weaves together several themes, each significant in itself, even more so as their relations are developed: the deep and persistent crises of capitalism, in the current phase highly financialized, and the fundamental issue of decision-making in social and economic institutions, with special attention to the elaborate growth of cooperatives of many varieties, the forms they have taken, the problems they face, and their great promise in overcoming economic crises, social malaise, and democratic dysfunction.' - Professor Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
'Capital and the Debt Trap combines a searing critique of the unstable debt- and-profit driven system that came close to final collapse in the Great Crisis with a fine portrait of the modern cooperative alternative that exists today in Mexico, Canada, France and Spain. Are these perhaps the small creatures that will survive and flourish after the great dinosaurs are gone? Let's hope so.' - James K. Galbraith, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and University of Texas at Austin
'This book is simply a masterpiece on cooperativism for the xxi century. It outstandingly demonstrates why cooperatives are more resilient to the crisis and avoid falling into the dept trap and its implacable cohort of inhuman effects. A decisive contribution not only to economic democracy but also to Democracy as a political system.' - Yves Cabannes, University College London
'This is a timely and important book which both analyses current economic turmoil and shows how the crisis may foment new and more co-operative forms of enterprise. Anyone interested in advancing the cause of participatory ownership as one means of guarding against recurrent crises should read this book.' George Irvin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
'This book presents a thoughtful and exciting consideration of the roles cooperatives can play and should be expected to play today . . . It deserves to be widely read and discussed within and across the boundaries that have long divided cooperative proponents and the general public.' Ian MacPherson, University of Victoria, Canada
'This book is a major step forward in understanding the working of co-operative economies. Its appearance could hardly have been more timely. At a point when the global financial system and the models of economic governance have been thrown into question, it shows how it is that co-operative financial systems are more crisis resistant than contemporary private banking, and how finance can be structured to service long term local and industrial growth rather than subject it to the imperative of short term profitability. More generally, the authors describe an architecture of co-operative governance that has not only been innovative and resilient but is particularly well suited to any post crisis world that is reshaped round multi stakeholder engagement.' - Robin Murray, LSE Global Governance and author of Co-operation in the Age of Google.
'This study on the current global crisis of capitalism is a surprising and fascinating analysis of the transformation that the current dominant world mode of production has gone through. The great merit of the book is to indicate the path to this change with great accuracy and richness of data. That is, the economy needs to return to the realm of the stakeholders. It is difficult to emphasize the appropriateness and importance of this work.' Paul Singer, University of São Paulo and Secretary of State for the Solidarity Economy of Brazil.
We have been falsely made to believe that competition is the way nature and society work. However, greed and competition are dis-values imposed by corporate rule. Both nature and society work on the principles of co-operation. In Capital and the Debt Trap - Learning from Cooperatives in the Global Crisis Bruno Roelants and Claudia Sanchez Bajo show us how an economy based on co-operation can address the deep crisis we face.' - Vandana Shiva, Navdanya/Research Foundation for Science Technology & Ecology, New Delhi.
The dissertation approaches the subject of regionalism through a historically grounded research strategy. From the meso-level and a sectoral focus, the evidence collected from interviews of persons from industrial sectors as well as governments is examined; the case study being Mercosur and two industrial sectors, petrochemicals and steel. Due to the period under study (with a main emphasis from 1990 to 1995 and a follow-up until the beginning of 1999), the issues of globalization and world economic restructuring needed to be examined as well, in order to observe any relation with the theme under investigation.
The subject is not only current in a period when globalization and regionalism have been considered as established tendencies in the world. It is also crucial for less industrialized countries searching for development strategies and forms of international insertion in the post-cold war era. This dissertation is meant to explore the ongoing transformation of the world political economy. A main objective of the study is to trace the private regional co-operative strategies in economic sectors which developed as part of, and in response to, the public/official, regional economic integration arrangement (RIA). Private regional co-operative strategies are defined as the functional and structural institutional processes and arrangements that forge linkages between the national economic sectors. Public and official RIAs are defined by the preference of nation-states to establish a new socio-economic, legal and political entity that may increase both the bargaining and negotiating power in relation to third parties. Both private regional co-operative strategies and public RIAs are part of what is currently termed ‘regionalism’, here understood as the voluntary disposition of a grouping of countries to associate their resources, knowledge and capacities, developing links (private and public), common rules and practices into institutionalised arrangements.
Therefore, this study does not aim to measure regional integration nor regionalism in Mercosur. Rather, the aim is first to disclose and understand better the process that leads to the creation and definition of market and regional regulation, and, thence, to grasp Mercosur’s regionalism as an institutional market construction. A second aim is to reveal and comprehend the process that advances the possibility of a differentiated social and institutional field covering the region, which could explain what has made Mercosur sustainable so far. Mercosur region was strewn with a history of ISI policies, and business actors in the South were not expected to support strongly the RIA attempt. Furthermore, in the Mercosur region, the sustainability or difficulties of the RIA process has been explained by two factors: the political will of the national presidents and the dynamism of individual firms. The research thus had to be broadened: how have firms interacted with the governments? Has such interaction been based only on individual initiatives? Has it had any influence on, or any role in the Mercosur arrangement?
To this effect, the choice to concentrate on two similar sectors with important economies of scale, economically prominent and politically sensitive in the countries concerned (at the time of the thesis), was done due to their likely reaction to, and influence, regional integration policies. Given the lack of general theory and scarce analysis of the sub-national level and cross-national co-operation (as examined in Chapter 1), a sectoral focus is considered as a suitable starting ground for this research. Besides, the meso-level perspective is intended to reveal agendas and bargains (in Susan Strange’s words). The reasons for the selected approach and focus are expounded in Chapter 2.
The study reaches several conclusions as regards Mercosur’s regionalism during the period researched, and in particular over its sustainability and the role of business actors in the process.
First, regionalism is a regulatory process by which regional patterns of relations may be gradually institutionalised. These patterns would then tend to be co-ordinated in a regular fashion, embodying particular values and normative rules, and possibly formalised into new structures. Through a sectoral and meso-level vantage point, Mercosur’s regionalism is seen as a process based on certain values, conceptualised under the name of “open regionalism” and crystallised on the grounds of a coalition of interests (state and business). Such vantage point guided the understanding of regionalism: i.e., as a regulatory and policy-making process, through which regional patterns of relations enter a stage of institutionalisation in order to achieve sustainability.
Second, Mercosur’s success and sustainability has rested both on a coalition of interests as well as of actors’ participation in the process. In addition, although the general portrait of Mercosur is one of trade success and low degree of institutionalisation, a sectoral focus at the meso-level, based on a grounded qualitative analysis, has provided a qualified and more accountable view. The evidence showed that the sustainability of the Mercosur case has rested to a significant degree on the involvement and participation of business actors in various forms and degrees.
Third, as some interviewees asserted in 1995, the core of Mercosur’s regionalism was not about trade. At the end of the century, this understanding has been reaffirmed by academia. As discussed in chapter 1, the 1990s regionalism is ‘new’ because its core issues are not related to trade.
Third, the sustainability of regionalism appeared as constructed on a political-economic basis. On the one side, sectoral restructuring was done at the regional level through the enlargement of business scales and a sharper definition of business scope, with some holdings becoming core firms within each sector. Regionalism has been instrumental both to states and business in the 1990s context of globalisation of economic restructuring and of an emerging type of world-wide oligopolistic competition. This regional restructuring was embedded in the 1990s’ globalisation. During the research, the focus of Mercosur’s regionalism was to ease flows that were increasingly internalised by holdings and big economic groups, in terms of production, distribution and services, as well as information and management. On the other side, it involved a necessary correlation through regional norms and mechanisms to ensure the certainty of constant regular flows within Mercosur, be they capital, goods or services. Generalisations based on these two sectors, which have many features of their own, should be avoided until other economic sectors are studied. What is important to stress, is that any changes in systems of production need to be accompanied by appropriate co-ordinating institutions to suit the needs of emerging core firms or groups.
Thence, and fourth, during the period under study, Mercosur’s regionalism reflected a mixed-partnership in policy-making between state-officials and business-actors, within broader political regimes described as ‘delegative’ democracies by O’Donnell. The emerging regional policy networks have appeared sustainable, as long as their co-ordinating capability is not threatened to an absolute degree by e.g., external financial shocks. Contrary to the idea that the regional integration process has taken place under no supra-national authority combined with a loss of state co-ordination through the unravelling of ‘regulation’, a delegation from the state to business actors to define regional regulation concerning their industrial sectors could be observed. This included issues such as the CET, competition rules, harmonisation of technical norms, mechanisms to solve conflicts, etc., and tended to emerge through a negotiated convergence at the sectoral level. In this regard, states retained an important role i.e. in regard to the enforcement of the rules agreed. While states’ competition for investment influenced a debate on harmonisation of taxation, environment, and labour policies, which dealt with systemic costs to industry, business actors engaged in the building of sectoral regulation and governance through the supply of supranational institutions (norms, agreements, mechanisms of decision-making and conflict-solution) that could enforce common norms at the regional level.
Theoretical and policy/making implications and future directions for the study of regionalism in the new century are expounded in Chapter 10, which ends with brief commentaries on two issues rising through the analysis and writing of the thesis: a) the market as institution, and b) business scales and scope as underlining forces of the ‘globalisation’ of a capitalist net-economy.