CGM Insights

America’s Rust Belt is often defined by deindustrialization, particularly the collapse of steel, but manufacturing remains alive and is shifting toward the bioeconomy. In Hazelwood—a once steel-centered Pittsburgh neighborhood—the BioForge Manufacturing Center, backed by the University of Pittsburgh and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, embodies this transition. In the near term, encouraging small-scale entrepreneurship, including Black-owned businesses, and construction jobs through innovative worker-training programs can drive inclusive growth. Over the long term, BioForge and the broader tech focus of Hazelwood Green Industrial Park offer both opportunities and challenges to ensure that residents benefit from emerging tech jobs.

This policy brief summarizes research on the introduction of local self-government in the 19th-century Russian Empire—a context marked by authoritarian rule, economic underdevelopment, and weak institutions. De- spite these constraints, the study finds that municipal representative institutions significantly improved local fiscal capacity and public service provision. The findings contribute to broader debates on decentralization by demonstrating that self-governance can yield tangible benefits even in adverse settings.

In this article, we hence shed light on how these conflicting notions may be resolved and explore the potential of blockchain technology for dissolving the issue of trust in the sharing economy. By means of a dual literature review we find that 1) the conceptualization of trust differs substantially between the contexts of blockchain and the sharing economy, 2) blockchain technology is to some degree suitable to replace trust in platform providers, and that 3) trust-free systems are hardly transferable to sharing economy interactions and will crucially depend on the development of trusted interfaces for blockchain-based sharing economy ecosystems.

Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, often celebrated, and is now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features—its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation—are by now well known. In this article, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely the coupling of the budgeting meetings with the exercise of power.