Market instruments and the neoliberalisation of land management in rural Australia

Increasing penetration by the market into the governing of agri-environments, and the use of market-oriented approaches in an attempt to produce more sustainable outcomes, is a characteristic feature of what scholars have called the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’. While accepting that neoliberal forms of governing tend to extend market relations into new domains, a number of scholars have argued that they may at the same time create spaces of resistance, open up progressive political possibilities, or incorporate alternative rationalities of governing. This literature has so far focused primarily on the policy and/or programme level with limited connection made to the growing body of research that explores landholder responses to specific market instruments. We address this gap by focusing on a market instrument – Wimmera Habitat Tender – in the State of Victoria, Australia, which aims to provide incentives for farmers in managing native vegetation. This case study explores how a specific tender-based market instrument seeks to construct natural resource managers as neoliberal subjects, as well as the complex ways in which farmers contest or resist the neoliberal governing of their agri-environmental practices. Through our analysis we contend that closer scrutiny of how the techniques underpinning market-based environmental instruments are taken up or resisted contributes to a more robust understanding of the environmental possibilities created by market instruments, as well as the challenges involved in attempts to neoliberalise nature.     

Privatizing farm worker justice: Regulating labor through voluntary certification and labeling

This paper assesses the possibilities and limits of efforts to incorporate social accountability into California agricultural production through voluntary certification and labeling, in the context neoliberal governance. We argue that, in its contradictory role as market mechanism, regulatory form, and social cause, certification both resists neoliberalization of the agro-food system and reinscribes neoliberal thinking. Unlike more traditional forms of social justice organizing, which have historically sought to alter power relations between labor, capital, and the state, the very notion that production conditions can be regulated through voluntary, third-party monitoring and labeling embraces several key neoliberal principles: the primacy of the market as a mechanism for addressing environmental and social ills, the privatization of regulatory functions previously reserved for the public sphere, and the assertion of the individual rights and responsibilities of citizen–consumers. Interviews with certification actors lead us to conclude that the strategic embrace of certification is driven by contradictory motivations within the movement for social accountability in agriculture, which can only be understood in relation to the confluence of a broader neoliberal political–economic order with California’s particular arrangements of farm labor politics and agro-food activism. Specifically, agro-food consolidation, rollback of protective labor regulation, the evisceration of the farm worker movement, and the conservative agrarianism of the sustainable agriculture movement intersect to circumscribe the realm of possibility and create conditions that undermine farm worker representation in the governance of agricultural labor practices.     

Poisoning the well: neoliberalism and the contamination of municipal water in Walkerton, Ontario

In May of 2000, thousands of residents of the town of Walkerton, Ontario became ill from drinking municipal water contaminated by Escherichia coli and Campylobacter jejuni bacteria. Seven people died, while many suffered debilitating injuries. A highly unusual and risk prone local hydrological regime, coupled with manure spreading on farms near municipal wells, and lax oversight by municipal water utility officials, were quickly blamed by Ontario government figures, including then premier Mike Harris. However, the scandal surrounding Walkerton's tragedy and a subsequent public inquiry into the incident also implicated neoliberal reforms of environmental governance introduced by Harris's government subsequent to its election in 1995. This paper examines the Walkerton incident as an important example of a “normal accident” of neoliberalism, one that can be expected from neoliberal environmental regulatory reforms arising from systematic irresponsibility in environmental governance. This irresponsibility is promulgated by an overarching hostility to any regulatory interference with free markets, as well as specific regulatory gaps that produce environmental risks. The paper also serves as a case study of the extent to which neoliberalism is constituted by environmental governance reform, and conversely, how environmental governance reform is reconfigured as part of the emergent neoliberal mode of social regulation.     

Standardizing sustainable development? The Forest Stewardship Council’s plantation policy review process as neoliberal environmental governance

Trans-nationally-scaled, multi-stakeholder, non-governmental product certification systems are emerging as important elements of neoliberal environmental governance. However, analysts question the extent to which they represent effective alternatives to the damaging impacts of neoliberalized, global production. They call for work examining the environmental politics arising in these new arenas of regulation, where social movements advocating environmental conservation and social justice interact with business interests in debates over how to use neoliberal tools to govern global commodity chains. This article examines The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) process to revise tree plantation certification standards. First, it considers the political process surrounding standard-setting and argues that tensions between rigor, legitimacy, and acceptability restrain the political struggles over standards within voluntary, multi-stakeholder environmental governance organizations. It proffers findings at odds with the expectation that mainstreaming diminishes the rigor of social and environmental standards. Second, it speculates on the implications of this form of neoliberal environmental governance for promoting more sustainable productions of nature. The review process failed to adequately consider the role of plantation certification in strategies for natural forest conservation. Neither did it adequately consider vital questions of the appropriate scale and location of production, the community actors best suited to deliver both forest conservation and poverty alleviation, or the need to encourage reduced consumption. The reliance on a neoliberal framework and values limits the scope of action. These contradictions suggest that FSC certification is an important part of what needs to be a broader movement questioning current practices of environmentally damaging production and complicit, complacent, consumption.     

From polygons to politics: Everyday practice and environmental governance in Veracruz,Mexico

This article argues that everyday practices can matter as much as organized social movements or outright resistance in environmental governance outcomes. While governance has become an important analytical category for understanding the institutional and epistemological systems through which resources are accessed and managed, existing characterizations of environmental governance are based on organized social movements and/or institutional re-scalings. This research reveals how state strategies to govern resources and reorder space were thwarted by the everyday practices of both farmers and state actors. Using a case study from a historic coffee-producing region in Veracruz, Mexico, this article presents ethnographic data to demonstrate how government attempts to control the environment are bound together in mutually constitutive processes of transformation with the actual places, peoples, and practices that make up the landscape.     

Anglo-Saxon and German approaches to neoliberalism and environmental policy: The case of financing renewable energy

‘Renewable electricity certificate’ trading systems that have been established to promote renewable energy in the UK are a form of neoliberal environmental governance introduced to assimilate environmental objectives with neoliberal hegemony. However, in this case, neoliberal ideological objectives have not been translated into practice since the British Renewable Obligation is not performing as efficiently as its proponents hoped. By contrast, so-called ‘Renewable Energy Feed-in Tariff’ (REFIT) systems which involve the fixing of tariffs for renewable energy by governmental intervention, are regarded as producing more efficient outcomes. The use of the REFIT system in Germany is associated with an institutional tradition that places emphasis on giving competitive opportunities to new market entrants in order to break up concentrations of market power by incumbents.     

Why are there cattle in the conservation area? Social barriers to biofuel governance in Brazil

Amid a rapid expansion of global investments in biofuels there has been an equally rapid proliferation of concerns about the inadequacies of current governance schemes to mitigate the environmental impacts of growing agroenergy production. Managing the land use practices of small producers in a way that ensures their activities are financially and environmentally sustainable is a particularly pressing issue that has been overlooked in research on biofuel governance. I illuminate these challenges through an ethnographic study on the multiple breakdowns of environmental governance in the Southern Goiás region of Brazil, a major expansion region for sugarcane ethanol production. I focus on one of the most pressing compliance issues among small and medium size sugarcane farmers; their persistent use of federally mandated conservation areas for cattle production. I find that while these transgressions are often perceived by administrators and officials as being the result of a lack of “environmental awareness” among rural farmers, they are better understood as a safety net to protect landowners against perceived risks of sugarcane production. These violations are further enabled by continuing ambiguity in the enforcement structure for conservation legislation in the region. Recalibrating regulatory systems to better address these issues of accountability and risk is a critical step toward improving environmental governance of global biofuel commodity chains.     

Abandoned bodies and spaces of sacrifice: Pesticide drift activism and the contestation of neoliberal environmental politics in California

Recent research suggests that many key strands of California’s agrofood activism appear to accommodate, rather than confront, the neoliberalization of environmental governance, and that such accommodations might problematically constrain the transformative potential of activists’ work. In this paper, I examine the case of pesticide drift activism in California, which, as an exception to this trend, provides a provocative and useful case study for interrogating the influence of neoliberalization on social/environmental activism. I argue that California’s pesticide drift activism can be understood as a reaction to the spaces of sacrifice created and exacerbated by the failure of unionization-based pesticide reform efforts, a promising but compromised regulatory apparatus, longstanding farmworker powerlessness, neoliberal regulatory rollback, and neoliberalized pesticide politics – a mosaic of factors that have worked together to produce a regulatory structure that has always been better at registering pesticides than at reducing pollution. I show that pesticide drift activists’ reliance on confrontational practice, collective action, and strategic alliances have been crucial to the movement’s success with bringing visibility to this issue and with gaining traction in the political arena. Thus, at the same time that neoliberalization can exacerbate physical spaces of sacrifice, this case study illustrates that it can also, unexpectedly perhaps, generate new, non-neoliberal political spaces for social change.     

Keeping the stress off the sheep? Agricultural intensification, neoliberalism, and ‘good’ farming in New Zealand

Under neoliberal schemes like audit systems, consumer demands born of concerns about food safety, the environment and animal welfare are theoretically poised to influence agricultural production systems (Campbell and Le Heron, 2007). Whether such influences might reverse or redirect the trend toward environmentally-damaging rampant productivism of the 20th century hinges in part on the subjective positions of farmers and the ways in which they inform how farmers respond to policy and market signals.In this paper we argue the need for a genuine engagement with both the complexities of farmer subjectivity and the interactions amongst farmer subjectivity and agro-ecologies, and animal bodies in particular. This paper presents a case study of sheep farmers on the South Island that reveals contestation and transitions in traditional markers of “good farming”, particularly animal health. We observe how such transitions arise from reconfigurations of the relationships between agro-ecological, political and social histories. In this paper’s formulation, neither state subsidies nor neoliberalism in agriculture is primary cause or ultimate effect of the transformation of agricultural practice. Rather, changes in the political economy expose contradictions in farmer subjectivities, the resolution of which may block or reinforce trends suggested by the political economy. We suggest that contested ideas about animal health within the social field of pastoral farming in New Zealand makes it possible that New Zealand’s sheep growers may take the high road of best environmental practice via highly audited environmental standards of production demanded by elite consumer markets, or that they may remain in the intensifying trajectory of continuing to drive the sheep’s body to its maximum possible intensity of production. The mixed legacy of neoliberal reform is that it has simultaneously enabled both of these contradictory trajectories in New Zealand pastoralism.     

Agricultural multifunctionality, environmental sustainability and the WTO: Resistance or accommodation to the neoliberal project for agriculture?

The liberalisation of agricultural markets is one of the most contested issues in international politics. Debates surrounding it counter-pose the moral imperative to dismantle protectionist agricultural subsidies in order to combat rural poverty in the South with fears for the livelihoods of marginal farmers and the environmental integrity of the countryside in the developed North. A largely European concern with defending the ‘multifunctionality’ of agriculture is dismissed by critics as a protectionist excuse for continued farm support. In this paper we seek to assess how far support for multifunctionality can be construed as a form of resistance to the neoliberal project for agriculture. The paper begins with an analysis of the European negotiating stance in the Doha round and the subsequent evolution of debates surrounding multifunctionality in an international setting. Having identified the European Union as one of the key sites of articulation concerning the implications of trade liberalisation for a multifunctional agriculture, the paper goes on to argue that multifunctionality within the framework of European rural policy emerges as a much more elusive and susceptible concept, informed by radically different interpretations of the vulnerability of family farmers to greater market exposure and the extent to which agricultural restructuring should be regarded as an issue of wider public concern. This maps onto a technically complex debate about how best to procure environmental public goods in a period of rapid agricultural change. The paper concludes that with these differences still very much in play, questions concerning the compatibility of multifunctionality with market liberalisation remain deeply unresolved at an important moment in the internationalisation of rural policy governance.     

Preempting to nothing: neoliberalism and the fight to de/re-regulate agricultural biotechnology

On August 31th, 2006 the California Senate shelved SB1056, a bill which would have granted the State jurisdiction over the regulation of seed and nursery stock. Ostensibly proposed to ensure “a level playing field” for agricultural and food producers, SB1056 is one of a host of legislation drafted across the United States to preempt county and municipal bans on genetically engineered crops. In California, the heated struggle around “preemption” exemplifies the interweaving of neoliberal ideology with industry attempts to prevent an unfavorable regulatory environment, but more importantly the contingencies and vulnerabilities of this strategy. After reviewing SB1056’s history, this paper examines how a diverse opposition movement capitalized on the friction between the neoliberal arguments mobilized by supporters and dominant Californian political philosophies. The paper then highlights the ultimate effect of SB1056 through a critical exploration of current state and federal regulation and the entrenched interests of the California government. I argue that more than simply opening new spaces for accumulation, SB1056 would have muted opposition voices and transferred power to institutions financially committed to the technology’s commercialization.     

Re-mapping regulatory space: The new governance of Australian dairying

Despite questions currently raised about the future of neoliberalism, it remains embedded within Australian agricultural policy and practice. This paper explores the strengths and limitations of mechanisms contributing to neoliberalism’s survival through a close examination of the restructuring of Australian agricultural production and governance processes under the influence of both globalising impulses and adherence to neoliberal strategies. We trace the changes in governance flowing from the dismantling of regulatory structures in the Australian dairy industry, and the creation of new forms of governance that have both facilitated this transition and dealt with its adverse, often unintended, consequences. The changing governance of Australian dairying is analysed through the lens of three arenas of governance: state, industry and place. Drought has played an important part in re-spacialising dairying and re-shaping the balance between farmers and industry, demonstrating the contingency at play in emerging governance structures. This study of processes of change within the highly export-oriented dairy sector of Australia focuses attention on resistance and on some of the messy actualities of the interplay between state, place and industry - and nature - in neoliberal agri-food governance.     

Easing conservation? Conservation easements, public accountability and neoliberalism

This paper examines the use of conservation easements, with a focus on California. Conservation easements are now the dominant tool used for private land conservation in the United States. Easements are in many ways a paradigmatic neoliberal environmental policy tool. They privatize and re-scale a great deal of land conservation decision-making authority; they are market-based; they provide financial incentives for participation rather than punishment for non-compliance; and they commodify new property rights. However, these neoliberalisms are incorporated in uneven, and sometimes contradictory, ways that emphasize the gulf between neoliberal ideologies and “actually existing neoliberalisms.” Most critically, as a result of extensive public funding and management, conservation easements are not nearly as private (and thus not as neatly neoliberal) as they sometimes seem. Conservation easements are often heralded as a “win–win” land conservation strategy. I argue that the extent to which conservation easements may be construed as win–win solutions depends a great deal on who is included in the calculation of winners and losers. I contend that using and governing easements as if they are private elides complex questions about larger public costs and benefits. This obscures the large number of people and institutions (both state and private) that will likely need to be involved in governing conservation easements in the long term.     

Globally engaged farmers as transnational actors: Navigating the landscape of agri-food globalization

Farmers are not commonly included in studies of transnational actors, but with the globalization of agricultural markets, and the neoliberal reform of national agricultural sectors, an increasing number of family farm-entrepreneurs have become engaged in transnational activities. Drawing on interviews with ‘globally-engaged’ farmers in Australia – a country in which expansion into transnational activities has been encouraged by the radical deregulation of domestic markets – this paper explores the transnational mobilities of farmers who have sought to capitalize on the advantages of globalization by directly trading with international partners, establishing international business contacts, and learning international best practice in farm efficiency and environmental performance. In particular, the paper examines the varying spatialities and forms of mobility executed by farmers and observes how different patterns of mobility are executed in response to the particular exigencies of their respective industries as well as the ongoing imperatives of maintaining a farm business. By analyzing the farmers’ own narratives of these different spatialities, the paper develops a more critical and reflexive perspective on globalization and its impact on rural producers, with travel becoming both an opportunity to be enjoyed and a compulsion to be endured by those forced to operate in a climate where state-based support structures are absent.     

Contested claims over space and identity between fishers and the oil industry in Mexico

This essay examines neoliberal forms of resource governance and emerging struggles over control of sea space between coastal fishers, the para-statal oil industry and government authorities in the State of Tabasco, Mexico. The analysis focuses on the changing mechanisms of resource governance and networking related to contested claims over rights to offshore space. The study is based on material collected during ethnographic field research in Tabasco in 2011–2014. By linking a post-Foucauldian approach to governmentality with a Deleuzian perspective on networks, our research examines resource governance as a socio-political arena, constructed in negotiation between multiple governmental, private and civil society actors, including heterogeneous groups from local populations. The study demonstrates how hybrid techniques of resource governance lead to fishers’ socio-spatial displacement, marginalization in the fields of political representation and subjection to ideas of aquaculture entrepreneurship. The ensemble of private regulation and governmental control provides a venue for drawing fishers into clientelist practices of governing while it diffuses questions of responsibility. These modes of governance fragment the fishers’ efforts to mobilize politically, making them rely on less visible networks of contestation shaped by heterogeneous fishing groups, with varying access to resources and political representation. Recent transformations in environmental legislation and the fishers’ mobile tactics of networking may offer opportunities for them to reclaim their resource rights.     

Contesting racialization in a neoliberal city: cross-cultural collective formation as a strategy among alternative social planning organizations in Toronto

Many cities in the twenty-first century are increasingly culturally diverse and neoliberal due to processes of political, economic, and cultural globalization. While the need to examine the disjuncture between neoliberal ideology and practice remains paramount (Brenner and Theodore in Antipode 34(3):349–379, 2002), the implications of neoliberal policy on the actual experiences and activities of diverse groups in the city require further study (Hackworth in The neoliberal city: governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2007). This article contributes to urban studies engaging discourses about the practical rather than purely ideological aspects of neoliberalism, and discourses about the experiences of racialization in North American cities. Through a case study of social planning practices in contemporary Toronto, the author shows how neoliberal policies have shaped social planning in Toronto since 1998, and how several cross-cultural organizations representing Chinese, continental-African, Latino-Hispanic and South Asian communities were compelled to develop a collective to jointly contest the racialization of their communities. The cross-cultural collective’s work forces a reconsideration of what constitutes mainstream Toronto and offers an alternative approach to the dominant social planning in the city; however, it is not sufficient to replace the pervasive neoliberal hegemony as long as it remains caught up within its structures.     

Afforestation of European landscapes: How do different farmer types respond to EU agri-environmental schemes?

This paper investigates how different types of farmers manage the landscape with primary emphasis on farmland afforestation, planned landscape changes, and the extent to which EU agri-environmental schemes take farm type specific characteristics into account in information strategies. The empirical data concern landscape practices of more than 2,000 landowners in 16 European areas in eight countries who were surveyed using quantitative questionnaires. Supplementary in-depth interviews were conducted for two case areas in Denmark to further investigate the role of the policy information environment. The analysis is based on a categorization of the farmers into hobby, part-time, full-time and retired farmers. This study shows that hobby farmers constitute a high proportion of landowners and manage a large part of the rural landscape. At the same time, hobby farmers are relatively more interested in landscape changes and differ from other landowners by considering farmland afforestation more often than full-time landowners, for example. Yet, 40% of the hobby farmers who are considering farmland afforestation are not familiar with the agri-environmental scheme for farmland afforestation. One reason may be their low membership rate in traditional information networks such as farmers’ or foresters’ associations, as revealed by the in-depth analysis of the cases in Denmark. Thus, it is proposed that policy impact may be improved if farmer type specific differences are explicitly taken into account in the scheme logistics for EU agri-environmental schemes.     

Neoliberalising subjects: The legacy of New Labour’s construction of social exclusion in local governance

Analysis of ‘neoliberalism’ in recent geographical work has usefully drawn attention to the manner in which certain political-economic ideas resonate with a diverse range of state projects, policy objects and socio-political imaginaries. Positioning neoliberalism as a multifaceted political phenomenon, scholars have explored its local manifestations: the embodiments of an express commitment to market exchange in specific geo-historical contexts. Key to this process, it is argued here, is the attempt to instil a series of values and social practices in policy subjects. This process can have lasting effects by virtue of being embedded in practices of governance at the local level, a dimension that has been given less attention in existing research. Using the implementation of the New Deals for the Unemployed and New Deal for Communities in Bristol as an illustrative case, this paper investigates this potentiality by positioning New Labour’s construction of social exclusion as a mechanism of neoliberalisation and exploring the legacy of the neoliberal values espoused in and through its social exclusion policies.     

From feeding the locals to selling the locale: Adapting local sustainable food projects in Niagara to neocommunitarianism and neoliberalism

This paper traces attempts to foster local, sustainable food projects in Niagara, Canada as part of community economic development (CED) projects during two distinct periods of provincial governance. In the first period (1990-1995), social democratic government support for local sustainable food projects through CED can be understood as neocommunitarian in nature. During this time there was a concerted attempt to link local people with access to local food and also to support a relationship between local food projects and agri-tourism. I argue that this neocommunitarian policy was an accommodation to a wider and more global neoliberal hegemony and was underlain by a romanticism of petty commodity production and a tenuous link to social and ecological sustainability. In the second period of governance (beginning in 1995) the progressive conservative government led by Mike Harris pursued particularly virulent, revanchist forms of neoliberal governance. With many of their state supports slashed, Niagara NGOs and activists turned, and were pushed, to more market-led, elitist forms of local food projects and agri-tourism. In these latter food projects, the practices of ecological and social sustainability were significantly hollowed out and their local and light green nature was harnessed as accumulation strategies. The paper is based on interviews conducted in the year 2003 with people involved in various urban and rural food projects (including community gardening, community supported agriculture, local/seasonal cuisine, organic/ecological farming and food box programs).