Peter Evans is Co-Chair (with Elizabeth Deakin, Department of City & Regional Planning) of the Global Metropolitan Studies program and a professor in the Department of Sociology.

Evans' teaching and research have focused on the comparative political economy of national development in the Global South (a.k.a. “developing countries). He is trying to understand how changes in the way in which the global political economy itself is organized and controlled might better promote the well-being of ordinary citizens (especially in the Global South). This interest is reflected in his ongoing research on the global labor movement, as in his recent article with Mark Anner (“Bridging the Double-divide”) and in the general essay on “Counter-Hegemonic Globalization: Transnational Social Movements in the Contemporary Global Political Economy,” which is a chapter in the 2005 edition of the Handbook of Political Sociology.

Beginning with research on how Brazil’s industrialization was shaped by conflicts and collaboration between global corporations and the Brazilian state to create “dependent development,”Evans' earlier work on the comparative political economy of national development focused particularly on the role of the state in industrialization. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton University Press, 1995), which looked at Korea and India as well as Brazil, is a good example. Thinking about how ties between the state and industrial elites shaped industrial transformation made Evans curious about relations between public institutions and less privileged social communities. In 1996, he organized a collection of articles called State-Society Synergy to explore these relations. Thinking that urban environmental issues created possibilities for “state-society synergy,” he collected some examples in an edited volume called, Livable Cities: Urban Struggles for Livelihood and Sustainability (University of California Press, 2002). This, in turn, led to exploring the possibility that local and transnational social movements might be able to work with public institutions at the global level to counteract the negative features of “neo-liberal globalization,” which is how Evans came to start doing the work in which he is presently engaged: “counter-hegemonic globalization.”

In addition to his own research and teaching, Evans works with fellow sociologists on a variety of projects that reflect his substantive concerns. For example, his interest in Latin America led him to become involved (together with Laura Enriquez) in the Andrew Mellon Fellowship Program in Latin American Sociology, which has been a source of support for Berkeley graduate students doing research in Latin America for more than a decade. Evans is also involved, along with another Berkeley Sociology colleague (Ann Swidler), in the “Successful Societies Program” of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, where researchers are trying to probe the roots of collective social capacities conducive to well-being, equality and inclusion. Evans also is pursuing interests in environmental issues, together with Nancy Peluso (Environmental Sciences and Policy Management) and Michael Watts (Department of Geography), in a collaborative project on “Green Governance” in Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria. Together with other sociologists working on labor issues, he has been involved in the American Sociological Association’s section on Labor and Labor Movements, serving as chair of the section during 2005-2006.