Progressive development economics in an era of geopolitics, affordability crisis and climate change
Workshop: Progressive development economics in an era of geopolitics, affordability crisis and climate change
Celebrating the academic legacy of Cornelia Staritz
Date: June 25-26
Location: Alois Wagner Saal, C3 - Centrum für Internationale Entwicklung, Sensengasse 3, 1090 Vienna
Registration: studienassistenz.ie@univie.ac.at
This workshop celebrates the academic legacy of Cornelia Staritz (1980-2025). It engages with Cornelia’s major conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions in the field of (heterodox) development economics. Throughout the past 25 years, Cornelia explored global power structures and agency in an ever-changing global political economy. As part of her prolific collaborations with institutions, scholars, and activists in Vienna and beyond, Cornelia sought to trace and explain uneven and combined development trajectories in the global economy, analyzing power relations and distributional struggles between firms, workers, and governments within and across different countries.
Her work combined theories in political economy, economic sociology and economic geography and methods ranging from in-depth fieldwork across more than 15 countries and quantitative data on trade flows, prices, and financial markets, and she connected conceptual thinking about the major macro processes of our time, such as globalized trade and financial markets, with fine-grained analyses of firms and workers and lived realities across different places. Lastly, Cornelia’s work connected academic insights to broader activist, societal and policy debates about (progressive) economic policy strategies.
Such an approach is more timely than ever in order to capture, navigate and respond to the complexities of our time: As the global financial, economic, and political order is becoming more complex and potentially more fragmented, international cooperation seems to be unable to combat conflicts, poverty and inequality, climate crisis and resource extractivism. Geopolitical tensions and rivalries are unfolding in global trade and financial systems, and economic and political coercion is becoming the norm to advance geo-strategic aims. While the role of state action is advancing in geo-economic governance, we are observing a simultaneous (neoliberal) restructuring of national economies and welfare states, budget, and aid cuts. Further, price shocks and inflation are fueling distributional inequalities, and eroding affordable access to basic needs and related infrastructures (e.g., housing, energy, food) both in the global North and global South.
By engaging with Cornelia’s work and contributions, this workshop seeks to trace the causes, mechanisms, and outcomes of the current shifts in the global financial, economic, and political system, and open the space for thinking about progressive alternatives and pathways for sustainable global development. In doing so, the workshop pursues three aims:
Engaging with Cornelia’s work and legacy in the spheres of global finance, production, and consumption/resource use
Creating an interdisciplinary encounter of different concepts, methods and empirical foci that engage with current power structures and agency
Translating these insights into the pressing contemporary questions and progressive strategies, and concrete policy initiatives.
The workshop begins with a memorial on Cornelia’s work and academic legacy, followed by three panels that cover Cornelia’s main clusters of work:
(a) Consumption: Climate crisis, extractivism and Provisioning systems.
(b) Production: Global value chains, industrial policy, and labor struggles
(c) Finance: Financialization and global inequality