Governance, Labour and Uneven Development: The Political Economy of the Port Sector in South and South-East Asia

In understanding how changes in global capitalism might affect local communities, the transformation of ports provides an important point of examination of the economic, political and social impacts on a number of spatial scales: global, regional, national and local. The port sector has a significant role in the continual expansion, crisis and renewal of global capitalism, not least because the majority of capitalist expansion into hitherto peripheral parts of the globe continues to involve sea-borne traffic. The two most significant trends in the past 30 or so years in this sense have been containerization, the process where all goods (whether it is electronics, garments or foodstuffs) are trans-ported in standard sized containers (Cudahy 2006), and the globalization of maritime trade, where ports that were previously served by different operators have become integrated into a network dominated by just a few corporations (McCalla et al. 2004). Both these processes have both been major drivers of global economic change because they have facilitated time-space compression (Agnew 2001; Harvey 1989), which has had dramatic impacts on the growth of export processing zones, just-in-time manufacturing and inter-port competition. While ports clearly have a significant role in the global economy, and their reform is central to many economic growth strategies, less certain are the political conditions associated with the structural transformation of any particular port sector so that it operates in a way that is most desired by global capital and, importantly, is socially equitable and achievable.