Legal geographies and strategic coupling: an analysis of the medicinal cannabis industry in Colombia

Global production networks (GPNs) research often treats law as a static institutional backdrop, yet it plays a fundamental role in GPNs’ developmental outcomes. In this paper we bring GPN 1.0 into conversation with legal geography to study law, actors, firms, and regional assets as mutually constitutive; highlighting how their interactions co-produce the economic spaces where strategic coupling and regional development are forged. We thus analyse the emergence and development of Colombia’s medicinal cannabis, legalised in 2016. Our analysis shows how the dynamics between law, strategic coupling, power imbalance and the state produced a geographically uneven industrial development and produced social exclusion.