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My book, Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2021), uses the development of renewable energy industries to examine the persistent and consequential divergence of national patterns of industrial specialization and innovation. As renewable energy sectors grew from cottage industries into mature global sectors, China, Germany, and the United States each developed distinct constellations of firms with starkly different technical capabilities. Empirically, the persistent divergence of national industrial specializations in highly globalized industries defies the aspirations of policymakers, who justified public investments in renewable energy with the promise of domestic industries that would invent, commercialize, and produce wind and solar technologies largely within national borders. Theoretically, these outcomes challenge expectations that globalization facilitates the convergence of national political economies.
The book argues that globalization itself has reinforced such distinct national patterns of industrial specialization. I employ the concept of collaborative advantage to capture the connection between changes in the global economy, firms’ competitive strategies, and their engagement in domestic political economies. I show that because of new opportunities for collaboration in the global economy, firms can participate in a division of labor that allows them to specialize. This economic manifestation of collaborative advantage captures the process through which firms identify and act on opportunities to compete in global industries. Second, and in turn, these new possibilities for specialization allow firms to repurpose existing institutions for application in new industries. Such institutions retained value in wind and solar industries because they no longer had to support the full range of activities required to invent and commercialize new technologies within national borders. The political manifestation of collaborative advantage drives the persistence of legacy institutions within the domestic economy and causes their iterative reorientation toward new, global industrial sectors. Collaborative Advantage breaks with conventional wisdom to show that it is because of globalization that firms were able to sustain divergent industrial practices and domestic institutions long thought to be in peril in the new global economy. It challenges the notion that globalization is primarily about competition, highlighting instead the central role of collaboration in determining firm strategies, the preservation national institutional differences, and enabling rapid decarbonization. The book showcases the continued importance of historical legacies for understanding the position of nations in the global economy yet offers a firm-based mechanism to explain institutional endurance and adaptation. Environmental politics often tends to be separated from the rest of the political science discipline. Collaborative Advantage, by making a novel argument about the nature and consequences of globalization, seeks to bridge that gap and to demonstrate that research on climate politics can contribute to broader debates in political economy. Empirically, at a time when global relationships with China are deteriorating rapidly, the book is a reminder that globalization helps combat the climate crisis and that economic decoupling from China would be detrimental for progress on emissions reductions. The book won the 2023 ISA Award for Best Book in International Political Economy, and the 2022 APSA Award for Best Book on Science, Technology, and Policy. An article based on this research won the 2017 Gordon White Prize for most original article published in The China Quarterly. Data from this project also contributed to a 2019 publication on the role of China in global clean energy sectors in Science (with John Helveston) and a 2022 publication in Science on economic decoupling from China and its implications for economic and national security risk (with Michael Davidson, Valerie Karplus, Alex Wang, and Joanna Lewis). I used data from the book project to testify in front of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and have briefed business associations, philanthropic foundations, and international organizations on my findings. |
JONAS NAHM
Jonas Nahm | Assistant Professor of Energy, Resources, and Environment | Johns Hopkins SAIS
1619 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC | jnahm @ jhu.edu
1619 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC | jnahm @ jhu.edu