Nick Robins

Producing, providing, trading: manufacturing industry and sustainable cities

This paper describes the innovations required from companies, local authorities and national governments to make manufacturing industry contribute to sustainable development in cities. It argues that the urban dimension has often been overlooked in discussions on industry and sustainable development, with most attention focusing on the roles of the individual firm and/or national policy in achieving change. The paper then presents a series of examples to demonstrate how industry will need to become responsible not only for the social and environmental performance of its own production activities but also for the sourcing of raw material inputs “upstream” and for the emissions and wastes that its products generate “downstream”.

Seizing the Future: The South, Sustainable Development and International Trade

The failure at Seattle to agree the mandate for a new round of trade negotiations represents a dual crisis, not only for the trade community, but also for those supporting a shift to sustainable development. At the root of the crisis lies the North-South faultline, with an embedded sense of inequity keeping developing countries forever wary of the industrialized countries, not least on linkages between trade and the environment. But Seattle also showed that the Souths current non-strategy towards trade and environment-opposing any formal linkage within the WTO, for example-is flawed. As a result, the South is now seen as the global scapegoat for inaction on trade and environment, and has shut itself out of opportunities to shape the direction of the debate. Furthermore, trade and environmental factors are being progressively linked in the marketplace-not because of the WTO, but in spite of it. The challenge for the South is to take a more proactive approach, generating a positive agenda for change based on issues of sustainable livelihoods, environmental justice and sustainable development more broadly. One starting point is to test current policy positions against the alternative visions of the future-for example, through scenario planning-and to develop a robust ‘no regrets’ programme for engagement. The South has the most to gain from a world structured around the norms of sustainable development, and, as a result, it has the primary responsibility for reorienting the goals of trade away from the limited agenda of ‘free trade’, towards the more inclusive programme of ‘sustainable trade’. Whether this reorientation takes place, and whether the South takes a hand in shaping this process, will be one of the central questions for the years ahead.

Loot: in search of the East India Company, the world's first transnational corporation

This article charts the growth of the world’s first transnational corporation, the East India Company, and the resonance this has for today’s globalization agenda. Starting as a speculative company to import spices, the East India grew to rule onefifth of the world’s population. The paper also discusses the implications, for India and Britain, of its profit-driven development achieved through trade, taxes and conquest. It also describes how the Company’s wealth allowed it to manipulate and even bring down governments.