Negotiating (under)development? Expanding bargaining power within globalised production networks

Global production networks keep expanding and being contested through different multi-actor power imbued processes. When actors (firms, states, collectives) engage in negotiations, they exert bargaining power to reach their strategic objectives. This ultimately shapes uneven developmental outcomes, something long acknowledged by the Global Production Network (GPN) framework and other cognate approaches. However, bargaining power remains relatively underexplored, which is why this article builds upon the existing literature on GPN and Global Value Chains (GVC) to further deepen its conceptualization.

By incorporating conceptual elements from the Power Debate, Bargaining Models and expanding recent contributions within the GPN and GVC literatures, the article proposes the conceptual definition of bargaining power (BP) as actors' deliberate, experimental and repeated mobilization of their strategic resources through different modes, in particular sets of relational dynamic spaces named bargains, to achieve their strategic goals while facing internal and external constraints. Likewise, BP can operate through different dimensions of the social realm, which is why three ideal types are defined: episodic, making other actors do something they would not have done otherwise; non-decisional, limiting the scope of decisions made by controlling the political agenda; and ideological, changing actors’ perceptions so they consider the current bargaining structures and outcomes to be natural. Thus, the article provides a broader conceptual way to empirically assess how exertion of BP, through different modes and dimensions, dynamically influence uneven developmental outcomes.