Scott Martin

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Service

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Bio
Courses

Scott B. Martin (Ph.D., Columbia University) has taught regularly in the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs program since 2005 as well as in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University since 1998. He has held visiting appointments at Yale, Princeton, and Sarah Lawrence College, and currently is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice. He regularly served as a freelance research contributor to Latin American reports of the Economist Intelligence Unit for over a decade. His areas of research and teaching specialization are comparative and transnational labor politics, comparative social policy, corporate social responsibility in transnational corporations, politics/policy of socio-economic development, and Latin American political economy. He is co-author of Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil: Limits of Global Diffusion in Latin America (Palgrave, 2021), exploring the nationally contingent patterns of conflict and cooperation between unions and regulators on one hand and the U.S. supermarket giant, on the other (with João Paulo Veiga and Katiuscia Galhera). He co-edited and contributed to El Estado de Bienestar ante la Globalización: El Caso de Norteamérica (El Colegio de México, 2012, with Ilán Bizberg); Competitiveness and Development: Local Actors and Institutions (São Paulo, SENAC, 2001); and The New Politics of Inequality: Rethinking Participation and Representation (Oxford, 1997). Current research focusses on labor relations at Amazon warehouses in Brazil and Mexico, community-labor-environmental alliances surrounding Amazon facilities in New York City and New Jersey, and artificial intelligence regulation and governance in Latin America. He is co-editing a research volume entitled “Contesting the Contours of Global Amazon?” bringing together scholarship on that company’s social impact and employment relations from across four continents. His research has been supported by grants from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, a Faculty Fellowship from the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and (currently) the Faculty Research Fund at The New School, as well as the Centennial Center of the American Political Science Association.

Courses

Spring 2024

PADM-GP.2214.: Constructing National Development Strategies

In this course, students examine the challenges and opportunities of national development. Following Lant Pritchett, we define national development as the lockstep improvement in (i) economic productivity, (ii) political representation, (iii) public sector’s administrative capacity, and (iv) respect for minority rights. In contrast to targeted or piece-meal policy interventions that strive to improve conditions in one sector or alleviate the poverty of a chosen group, the pursuit of national development promises sustained gains to the entire nation. And yet, national development is difficult to achieve, and advances in one dimension are often accompanied by setbacks in others.

The course is comprised of three modules. During the first module, we discuss the main differences between national development and poverty alleviation. We also conduct a series of data-driven, inductive exercises to help students understand how national development has been pursued over time and around the globe. Through this effort, we identify some of the most important models of development that have existed, and how their different parts fit together.

During the second module, we discuss six recent books (or soon-to-be published manuscripts) that present leading-edge analysis on some of the main themes covered during the first module, at a rate of one book per week. Each of these books examines one critical topic –public health, primary education, rule of law, public sector capacity, human capital, and business competitiveness and labor standards – and is rooted in the experience of one key country or region –China, India, Brazil, Egypt, US, Germany and France. After reading each book, we discuss and critique its main premises, data & methods, conclusion, and policy implications. We also discuss how the insights it generates might change our own views on the challenges and opportunities of national development.

During the third module, students present and discuss their own papers or research proposals on themes that intersect with the topics discussed in the course.

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