Global Value Chains in Global Political Networks: Tool for Development or Neoliberal Device?

The global value chain (GVC) approach has become an increasingly relevant tool not only for the analysis of the current strategies of firms in global economic networks, but also for the economic development policies promoted by supranational institutions. The paper argues that this supranational institutionalization of such an approach has been contributing to legitimate a subordinated and exclusive pattern of integration to networks governed by the transnational fraction of capital rather than constituting a tool for enabling the strategies of developing countries and their actors. This is made possible through the transformation of the GVC into a neoliberal device for strategies implemented by global political networks as well as through the uncritical assimilation of a group of limitations in the GVC theoretical and methodological corpus, when those global political networks incorporate that theoretical approach. The paper concludes by suggesting the necessity of a new approach capable of overcoming the limitations of the GVC inspired policy prescriptions as a condition for forging global alternatives to neoliberal fast policies dominating the Global South.