Matt Bishop

Matthew is active within the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) where he is a Fellow and co-leader of its research programme on Development and the Governance of a Globalising Political Economy, and regularly writes commentaries for its influential blog. He is also a Fellow of the Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID). His primary area of research interest is the political economy of development, with a particular focus on small states in general, and the Caribbean specifically.

His current research is organised around four broad themes:

Rethinking development beyond the crisis.
This began with a working paper published in 2016 entitled Rethinking the political economy of development beyond the “Rise of the BRICS” which does two things: it reflects on the consequences of China’s rise (and that of other ‘emerging’ countries) for conceptions of development, and lays out an embryonic research agenda for studying it in a post-crisis world.

This is my major project over the next few years and feeds into my work with SPERI in general, and Tony Payne in particular, as co-leaders of the institute’s research programme on Development and the Governance of a Globalising Political Economy. We plan to write a book on rethinking development conceptually, and I will use this as an intellectual springboard for a much larger individual project assessing global patterns of development beyond the crisis.

The political economy of drug policy in the Americas
This strand of research began with funding from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 2015-16 and sought to assess the political economy of cannabis legalisation in the US, the consequences for US domestic/foreign policy and the global governance regime for drugs, as well as the developmental implications for small Caribbean producer countries.

I am writing this up into a number of academic papers, and some of my emerging ideas are in blog form (here, here and here) and a SPERI Global Brief about the UN conference (UNGASS) on drugs that took place in 2016. I intend to expand this research by looking at cannabis policy reform in South America and Canada too, ultimately writing a book on the subject that is presently loosely entitled Pathways from Prohibition: Governing Ganja in the Americas.

China’s ‘rise’ and global governance
I am currently working on two collaborative papers: one, authored with Andy Knight (University of Alberta), addresses the question of US-China ‘hegemonic transitions’ in the Caribbean; another, with Xiaotong Zhang (Wuhan University), asks whether China is a ‘reluctant leader’ of the WTO. The latter is part of a journal special issue that I am editing with Peg Murray-Evans (University of York) on how ‘rising powers are reshaping global economic governance’. In the longer-term, Zhang and I are planning funding bids to Chinese and UK research councils to undertake work with other colleagues in and beyond Sheffield to study China’s developmental expansion.

Existential threats and Caribbean development
This strand of research brings together my longstanding interest in the political economy of development in the Caribbean, and links to a wider concern with the patterns of insecurity facing many small island states. In the first instance, I am working on an Edited book that addresses different elements of the multi-faceted development challenge facing the region. I am also part of a team of researchers (see below) undertaking an ESRC/AHRC-funded project looking at urban violence in Trinidad.