J R Díez
Biographic Data
| ID | 675912 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J R Díez |
| GIVEN NAMES | J R |
| FAMILY NAME | Díez |
| SIGNATURE | DÍEZ J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cologne |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2065-1380 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 177 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
State capital in the energy transition
State-owned actors increasingly operate in global production networks (GPNs), yet host-state agency in strategic coupling remains underexamined. This paper develops an analytical framework to explain how strategic coupling unfolds between host states and foreign state-owned companies by integrating three dynamics: host states’ bargaining conditions via enabling, managing and embedding mechanisms, state-capital hybrids’ alignment strategies, and g…
Unlocking regional integration in South America? Cross-border cooperation challenges in the Bioceanic Road Corridor
Roads to development? A comparison of development corridors vs regional roads in the Zambezi Region, Namibia
Despite the increasing popularity of development corridors, their effectiveness in promoting regional development compared to regional roads remains uncertain. This study utilised satellite imagery to compare land use transformation within a 10km corridor effect zone along the Walvis Bay - Ndola - Lubumbashi Development Corridor (WBNLDC) and regional roads in Namibia's Zambezi Region. Overall, the Zambezi Region experienced a strong increase in b…
Constrained opportunities for path development
This paper examines the emergence and growth potential of Southern regional value chains (RVCs) through the Trinity of Change Agency framework, focusing on the horticulture RVC in Namibia’s Zambezi region. The findings highlight that regional actors are crucial yet constrained by system-level structures, such as centralised governance and limited resources, impeding industry growth. This underscores the need for decentralised governance to empowe…
Community enterprises for fair partnerships in non-timber forest product value chains? The case of San communities in northern Namibia
San NTFP harvesters in Bwabwata and Okongo struggle with value capture and bargaining power in trade. • San harvesters in Okongo lack organisational support for effective market entry. • Direct partnerships with lead firms could boost San harvester income but required legal and organisational structures may clash with traditions. • Culturally sensitive support can enhance the success of NTFP commercialisation. This paper investigates why the harv…
Nation-state influence on tourism path creation in Southern Africa
Coloniality of power and the imaginaries of tourism in Victoria Falls
Examines how historical and global racial dynamics affect participation and value capture within the tourism industry in Victoria Falls. • Integrates recent Global Value Chain (GVC) research with theories of coloniality to provide a nuanced analysis. • Proposes a framework for examining tourism value chains in regions with a post-colonial context. • Suggests pathways for decolonising and transforming tourism value chains to promote equity and inc…
The impact of commodified non-timber forest products on the livelihoods of San in Northern Namibia
In Namibia, the commercialisation of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) is often promoted as a means to improve rural livelihoods, especially for vulnerable communities. This paper analysed how NTFP value chains are integrated into and contribute to the livelihoods of Khwe and !Xun San harvesters. Accordingly, the working conditions, employment and upgrading opportunities of the globally traded Devil's Claw were compared to those of regionally tr…
Beyond offshoring
Trade in services has grown more rapidly than trade in manufactured goods in recent decades. Countries from the Global South are chiefly responsible for this shift. The research note draws attention to service investment that originates in Southern economies and is directed at markets of the same (sub)continent. Such dynamics have been neglected by academic debates focussed on global value chains and offshored, largely generic services. The autho…
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Valuing Nature in Global Production Networks
Southern African ecosystems are threatened by biodiversity loss, but it remains highly controversial whether nature conservation can be successfully achieved by commodifying ecosystems through tourism or by withdrawing habitats from their integration into globalized production. This article contributes to the debate by applying the global production network (GPN) approach to analyze institutional dynamics and actors involved in the commodificatio…
Understanding regional value chain evolution in peripheral areas through governance interactions – An institutional layering approach
Navigating through the storm
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global production networks and challenged the resilience of regional economies to external shocks. The tourism sector was severely affected by the travel bans imposed, as were regions characterised by tourism development, such as Zambezi in northern Namibia. Nonetheless, with the support of the national government, conservancies, as local governance institutions, partly maintained the distribution of value from…
An argument for place-based policies
This article outlines the importance of place-based policies derived from knowledge on local realities. Through an analysis of maize policies and their impact on the Zambezi region, Namibia, we illustrate the constraining limitations of insufficiently place-based policies. We highlight the problems of current top-down policies of production promotion, value chain integration, and sector protection which barely integrate region-specific knowledge.…
How much remains? Local value capture from tourism in Zambezi, Namibia
High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bottom-up nature conservation activities. These conservancies are granted rights for the use of natura…
Flood risk reduction and climate change adaptation of manufacturing firms
Flooding places continuous stress on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) particularly in developing and transition economies that depend on their firms’ performance, but may have not fully developed flood protection infrastructure. Yet, detailed knowledge about whether and how firms take adaptation action against flood hazards, including potential adaptation barriers, is surprisingly thin. We respond to this gap by offering an empirical an…
Development visions, livelihood realities – how conservation shapes agricultural value chains in the Zambezi region, Namibia
In the Zambezi region, seemingly unrelated political visions propagate two development paths: nature conservation to promote tourism and Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), and agricultural intensification. This study examines the unintended interrelations between these top-down visions by linking upgrading possibilities in agricultural value chains (AVC) with livelihood strategies of farmers from a bottom-up perspective. The res…
New perspectives on value chains in sub-Saharan Africa
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions to global value chains (GVCs) around the world.1 Trade wars were already posing challenges to current GVC arrangements and encouraging efforts to
Are Micro-, Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises Willing to Contribute to Collective Flood Risk Reduction? Scenario-Based Field Experiments from Jakarta and Semarang, Indonesia
In developing countries, micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) often cannot substantially reduce their exposure to floods on their own. As state authorities also have difficulty in providing sufficient flood protection, experts argue that collective adaptation initiated by firms can compensate for these shortcomings. However, private sector engagement in this field remains rare and is mostly dominated by large firms. Our article ex…
A typology of household livelihood changes in rural coastal areas of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta—Capturing the heterogeneity and complexity of the social‐ecological context
Over the last decades, the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) has experienced drastic political, socio‐economic, and ecological changes. On a conceptual level, numerous studies started to emphasize that livelihood shifts are driven by not only climate but also socio‐economic and institutional changes. Nevertheless, on an analytical and operational level, research taking up both aspects of social and ecological changes in analysing the dynamics of live…
Territorialising Conservation
Community-based Conservation seeks to strike a balance between nature conservation and economic growth by establishing spatial and institutional settings that maintain and even regain biodiversity while simultaneously allowing for sustainable land use. The implementation of community-based conservation blueprints on communal, often agronomically marginal lands, is in many southern and eastern African countries encouraged by the national governmen…
Regional value chains as new pathways to development
There is growing scepticism about global value chains because of their association with an unequal global trading system. Regionally coordinated and integrated production in Asia appears to have served as a better mechanism for promoting economic prosperity than direct integration into global markets. This is founded upon regional cooperation on investment, trade and value chains. This research note distinguishes different forms of these chains, …
Rural Aspirations
In this editorial introduction to the Special Issue “Rural aspirations—Livelihood decisions and rural development trajectories”, we outline current views on aspirations and their relevance for development research, projects and approaches. Using several examples from Africa, we outline how the combination of the different theoretical perspectives, case studies and regional backgrounds provides deeper insights about the role of aspirations in shap…
Diversity in brokerage
The article invites readers to rethink cities in economic networks against the backdrop of the many ways in which ‘gateway cities’, serving as brokers, interlink their respective hinterlands globally. It adds logistics, industrial processing and knowledge transmission to the more established gateway dimensions of corporate control and related service provision. This open heuristic is applied to Buenos Aires (Argentina), Cape Town (South Africa) a…
Do Tar Roads Bring Tourism? Growth Corridor Policy and Tourism Development in the Zambezi region, Namibia
There are high aspirations to foster growth in Namibia's Zambezi region via the development of tourism. The Zambezi region is a core element of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a mosaic of areas with varying degrees of protection, which is designed to combine nature conservation and rural development. These conservation areas serve as a resource base for wildlife tourism, and growth corridor policy aims to integrate the…
An intermediate step to resource peripheries
How much remains? Local value capture from tourism in Zambezi, Namibia
High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bottom-up nature conservation activities. These conservancies are granted rights for the use of natura…
Filtering strategic coupling
The Global Production Network (GPN) approach has not yet considered the importance of territorial intermediaries for strategic coupling. This article demonstrates how the prospects of strategic coupling for the case of Vietnam and Indonesia with the oil and gas GPN are affected by the gateway role of Singapore. Based on interviews, the analysis reveals how Singapore influences regional economic development along the GPN through different filterin…
Determinants and Consequences of Internal Return Migration in Thailand and Vietnam
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Revisiting gateway cities
Gateway cities have received much attention from urban geographers. In spite of outstanding contributions being made, we think that the concept needs to be revisited with regard to regional development implications. Bringing together research on global production networks (GPNs) and world cities, this article shows that gateway cities are critical for development in networks, generating impulses for peripheral locations by engaging them in proces…
The Impact of Academic Mobility on the Creation of Localized Intangible Assets
Schiller D. and Revilla Diez J. The impact of academic mobility on the creation of localized intangible assets, Regional Studies. Researchers are carriers of significant amounts of knowledge. International academic mobility is thus an important mechanism for inducing interregional knowledge flows. This paper analyses mobility patterns of star scientists, the rationale behind their mobility decisions, and interrelations between academic mobility a…
Catching the Local Buzz by Embedding? Empirical Insights on the Regional Embeddedness of Multinational Enterprises in Germany and the UK
n What determines the regional embeddedness of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and how do these globally operating firms harness external knowledge which is considered to be ?out there? in Regional Innovation Systems (RIS)? Despite the increasing importance of this matter, both from a research and management perspective, there is still an insufficient understanding of the regional embeddedness of MNEs. \nBy integrating insights from studies on i…
Do Tar Roads Bring Tourism? Growth Corridor Policy and Tourism Development in the Zambezi region, Namibia
There are high aspirations to foster growth in Namibia's Zambezi region via the development of tourism. The Zambezi region is a core element of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a mosaic of areas with varying degrees of protection, which is designed to combine nature conservation and rural development. These conservation areas serve as a resource base for wildlife tourism, and growth corridor policy aims to integrate the…
Self-Employment and Its Influence on the Vulnerability to Poverty of Households in Rural Vietnam-A Panel Data Analysis
The following paper analyses whether becoming self-employed can help to reduce the vulnerability to poverty of rural households. We use data collected during four survey waves in three rural provinces in Vietnam to calculate region-specific logistic panel regressions. The results show that becoming self-employed increases the likelihood of poor households escaping poverty, but only if they are located in a regional economic environment characteri…
Nation-state influence on tourism path creation in Southern Africa
Scaling Innovation in South East Asia
Diez J. R. and Kiese M. (2006) Scaling innovation in South East Asia: empirical evidence from Singapore, Penang (Malaysia) and Bangkok, Regional Studies 40, 1–19. Our survey of 1600 manufacturing firms in Singapore, Penang (Malaysia) and Bangkok shows that the breadth and efficiency of innovative activities still lag considerably behind those found in 11 European regions. Cooperations are virtually indispensable for corporate innovation processes…
Navigating through the storm
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global production networks and challenged the resilience of regional economies to external shocks. The tourism sector was severely affected by the travel bans imposed, as were regions characterised by tourism development, such as Zambezi in northern Namibia. Nonetheless, with the support of the national government, conservancies, as local governance institutions, partly maintained the distribution of value from…
Rural Aspirations
In this editorial introduction to the Special Issue “Rural aspirations—Livelihood decisions and rural development trajectories”, we outline current views on aspirations and their relevance for development research, projects and approaches. Using several examples from Africa, we outline how the combination of the different theoretical perspectives, case studies and regional backgrounds provides deeper insights about the role of aspirations in shap…
The Janus‐faced Economy
The influence of the institutional framework on governance modes is well covered in economic geography literature but lacks empirical evidence. The main focus of this work is to explain the governance of customer and producer relations of Hong Kong‐based electronics firms by institutional factors. Hong Kong firms are able to deal simultaneously with both the Chinese transitional setting and global markets, thus leading them to be described as Jan…
Valuing Nature in Global Production Networks
Southern African ecosystems are threatened by biodiversity loss, but it remains highly controversial whether nature conservation can be successfully achieved by commodifying ecosystems through tourism or by withdrawing habitats from their integration into globalized production. This article contributes to the debate by applying the global production network (GPN) approach to analyze institutional dynamics and actors involved in the commodificatio…
An argument for place-based policies
This article outlines the importance of place-based policies derived from knowledge on local realities. Through an analysis of maize policies and their impact on the Zambezi region, Namibia, we illustrate the constraining limitations of insufficiently place-based policies. We highlight the problems of current top-down policies of production promotion, value chain integration, and sector protection which barely integrate region-specific knowledge.…
Diversity in brokerage
The article invites readers to rethink cities in economic networks against the backdrop of the many ways in which ‘gateway cities’, serving as brokers, interlink their respective hinterlands globally. It adds logistics, industrial processing and knowledge transmission to the more established gateway dimensions of corporate control and related service provision. This open heuristic is applied to Buenos Aires (Argentina), Cape Town (South Africa) a…
A magic formula for economic development? Global market integration and spatial polarization in extractive industries
The World Bank, World Trade Organization and others promote integration into global markets as a certain path towards economic development. Some researchers share this optimism, arguing that development is the record of how one thing leads to another, once peripheral locations have plugged into global networks. Comparing resource peripheries in South America, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa with regard to the upstream oil and gas sector, we…
One country, two systems
Regional value chains as new pathways to development
There is growing scepticism about global value chains because of their association with an unequal global trading system. Regionally coordinated and integrated production in Asia appears to have served as a better mechanism for promoting economic prosperity than direct integration into global markets. This is founded upon regional cooperation on investment, trade and value chains. This research note distinguishes different forms of these chains, …
Firms as drivers of integrative adaptive regional development in the context of environmental hazards in developing countries and emerging economies – A conceptual framework
Many industrial sites in developing countries and emerging economies face increasing exposure to environmental hazards, e.g. in coastal locations, while being situated within the territory of state authorities which lack in capacity to provide adaptation solutions. It is therefore relevant to ask, whether and how firms engage in adaptation, both individually and collectively, in order to reduce business disruptions, enhance their competitiveness …
Expo 2000 revisited
The EXPO 2000 in Hannover was not only a short-term stimulus package for the region. The world fair also has longer-term effects due to massive investments in infrastructure. It strengthens the competitive position of firms, but also improves the living conditions for the local population. The envisaged creation of a new cluster in the field of information and communication technologies did not succeed yet. However, perhaps the most important imp…
Local embeddedness of knowledge spillover agents
Vietnam
Regionale Innovationspotentiale in Südostasien
Aufbauend auf den Erfahrungen des European Regional Innovation Survey (ERIS) versucht der vorliegende Beitrag erstmals, das regionale Innovationspotential sowie die Kooperationsbeziehungen zwischen den Innovationsakteuren in ausgewählte Regionen Südostasiens empirisch zu erfassen und vergleichend zu bewerten. Repräsentative Befragungen in Singapur. Penang (Malaysia) und Thailand ergaben verwertbare Informationen zum Innovations- und Kooperationsv…
Technological Capabilities and Innovation in Southeast Asia
An essential part of the catching-up process by firms in late industrialising countries is the development of technological capabilities. It can be assumed that these capabilities correlate with firms’ innovation activities (including cooperation with external partners). At the same time, it can be assumed that the quality of the national or regional innovation system influences the development of firms’ technological capabilities. Consequently, …
Scaling Innovation in South East Asia
Diez J. R. and Kiese M. (2006) Scaling innovation in South East Asia: empirical evidence from Singapore, Penang (Malaysia) and Bangkok, Regional Studies 40, 1–19. Our survey of 1600 manufacturing firms in Singapore, Penang (Malaysia) and Bangkok shows that the breadth and efficiency of innovative activities still lag considerably behind those found in 11 European regions. Cooperations are virtually indispensable for corporate innovation processes…
The Janus‐faced Economy
The influence of the institutional framework on governance modes is well covered in economic geography literature but lacks empirical evidence. The main focus of this work is to explain the governance of customer and producer relations of Hong Kong‐based electronics firms by institutional factors. Hong Kong firms are able to deal simultaneously with both the Chinese transitional setting and global markets, thus leading them to be described as Jan…
Local embeddedness of knowledge spillover agents
Catching the Local Buzz by Embedding? Empirical Insights on the Regional Embeddedness of Multinational Enterprises in Germany and the UK
n What determines the regional embeddedness of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and how do these globally operating firms harness external knowledge which is considered to be ?out there? in Regional Innovation Systems (RIS)? Despite the increasing importance of this matter, both from a research and management perspective, there is still an insufficient understanding of the regional embeddedness of MNEs. \nBy integrating insights from studies on i…
The Impact of Academic Mobility on the Creation of Localized Intangible Assets
Schiller D. and Revilla Diez J. The impact of academic mobility on the creation of localized intangible assets, Regional Studies. Researchers are carriers of significant amounts of knowledge. International academic mobility is thus an important mechanism for inducing interregional knowledge flows. This paper analyses mobility patterns of star scientists, the rationale behind their mobility decisions, and interrelations between academic mobility a…
Expo 2000 revisited
The EXPO 2000 in Hannover was not only a short-term stimulus package for the region. The world fair also has longer-term effects due to massive investments in infrastructure. It strengthens the competitive position of firms, but also improves the living conditions for the local population. The envisaged creation of a new cluster in the field of information and communication technologies did not succeed yet. However, perhaps the most important imp…
Determinants and Consequences of Internal Return Migration in Thailand and Vietnam
One country, two systems
Obtaining non‐farm wage employment in rural Vietnam
This paper analyses how rural households engage in different segments of non‐farm wage labour markets using panel data from three Vietnamese provinces that also include perceived reasons for obtaining employment. We show that it is important to appreciate the heterogeneous nature of rural non‐farm wage employment from a livelihood perspective. Different jobs vary in terms of seasonality, earning potential, social insurances, location and entrance…
Determinants of Networking Practices in the Chinese Transition Context
The underlying spatial forces of firm networking practices are understudied in the literature of economic geography. This paper aims to reveal patterns and mechanisms of networking practices and relates them to China's transitional context based on empirical data from a firm survey in the Pearl River Delta. It addresses the localisation effect as the primary factor in explaining the selection of networking partners. The results of this paper sugg…
Self-Employment and Its Influence on the Vulnerability to Poverty of Households in Rural Vietnam-A Panel Data Analysis
The following paper analyses whether becoming self-employed can help to reduce the vulnerability to poverty of rural households. We use data collected during four survey waves in three rural provinces in Vietnam to calculate region-specific logistic panel regressions. The results show that becoming self-employed increases the likelihood of poor households escaping poverty, but only if they are located in a regional economic environment characteri…
Explaining micro entrepreneurship in rural Vietnam—a multilevel analysis
Firms as drivers of integrative adaptive regional development in the context of environmental hazards in developing countries and emerging economies – A conceptual framework
Many industrial sites in developing countries and emerging economies face increasing exposure to environmental hazards, e.g. in coastal locations, while being situated within the territory of state authorities which lack in capacity to provide adaptation solutions. It is therefore relevant to ask, whether and how firms engage in adaptation, both individually and collectively, in order to reduce business disruptions, enhance their competitiveness …
Filtering strategic coupling
The Global Production Network (GPN) approach has not yet considered the importance of territorial intermediaries for strategic coupling. This article demonstrates how the prospects of strategic coupling for the case of Vietnam and Indonesia with the oil and gas GPN are affected by the gateway role of Singapore. Based on interviews, the analysis reveals how Singapore influences regional economic development along the GPN through different filterin…
An intermediate step to resource peripheries
Exposure of manufacturing firms to future sea level rise in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is facing notably high levels in current and future flooding. Simultaneously, the ongoing process of rapid industrialization is characterized by the strong emergence of manufacturing firms within the urban area. As manufacturing firms are at the frontline regarding damage caused by flooding, which is often neglected in risk analyses, we argue that the assessment of firms’ exposure to flooding is essential for implementing …
Revisiting gateway cities
Gateway cities have received much attention from urban geographers. In spite of outstanding contributions being made, we think that the concept needs to be revisited with regard to regional development implications. Bringing together research on global production networks (GPNs) and world cities, this article shows that gateway cities are critical for development in networks, generating impulses for peripheral locations by engaging them in proces…
Building adaptive capacity to external risks through collective action – Social learning mechanisms of smallholders in rural Vietnam
A magic formula for economic development? Global market integration and spatial polarization in extractive industries
The World Bank, World Trade Organization and others promote integration into global markets as a certain path towards economic development. Some researchers share this optimism, arguing that development is the record of how one thing leads to another, once peripheral locations have plugged into global networks. Comparing resource peripheries in South America, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa with regard to the upstream oil and gas sector, we…
Flood risk reduction and climate change adaptation of manufacturing firms
Flooding places continuous stress on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) particularly in developing and transition economies that depend on their firms’ performance, but may have not fully developed flood protection infrastructure. Yet, detailed knowledge about whether and how firms take adaptation action against flood hazards, including potential adaptation barriers, is surprisingly thin. We respond to this gap by offering an empirical an…
Development visions, livelihood realities – how conservation shapes agricultural value chains in the Zambezi region, Namibia
In the Zambezi region, seemingly unrelated political visions propagate two development paths: nature conservation to promote tourism and Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), and agricultural intensification. This study examines the unintended interrelations between these top-down visions by linking upgrading possibilities in agricultural value chains (AVC) with livelihood strategies of farmers from a bottom-up perspective. The res…
New perspectives on value chains in sub-Saharan Africa
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions to global value chains (GVCs) around the world.1 Trade wars were already posing challenges to current GVC arrangements and encouraging efforts to
Business (34 works) · Economics (33 works) · Geography (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Economic geography (20 works) · Economy (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Economic growth (11 works) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact (11 works)