Probing the (in)compatibilities of social theory and policy relevance in Piers Blaikie’s political ecology

One of Piers Blaikie’s most important contributions to the development of political ecology is his critique of land and resource conservation policy in the global South. In this paper I trace the development of Blaikie’s ideas about the policy relevance of political ecology, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by the introduction of poststructural social theory into the field. I begin by revisiting Blaikie’s earlier critiques of environment and development policy. This will provide the departure point to explore how his thinking on the relationship of theory and policy and of academic and development practices has evolved in subsequent writings. I have invented two personas, “early Blaikie” and “late Blaikie”, to facilitate this task. Second, I want to probe some of the challenges that late Blaikie presents for doing political ecology research, to some extent by pitting early Blaikie against late Blaikie and letting them hash it out. Third, I turn to my own and others’ research and consultation experiences as a way to examine the possibilities for reconciling theoretically driven critiques with policy relevant research.     

How to speak for aquifers and people at the same time: Environmental justice and counter-network formation at a hazardous waste site

A common source of conflict at hazardous waste sites in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program is the accuracy of scientific investigations and representations produced to inform cleanup decisions. Liable firms often produce these technical representations themselves, and communities surrounding sites frequently argue that such “voluntary” investigations are compromised by conflicts of interest. In order to challenge the representations of powerful firms, locally situated actors often develop trans-local connections with expertise and equipment concentrated at distant centers of calculation. Although some interpret the spatial politics of such connecting in terms of “jumping scales,” another important spatial dimension of this network construction is differential positioning. In a conflict over groundwater models at the St. Regis Superfund Site in Minnesota, the counter-network that emerged to challenge the owner’s representations of the site positioned some actors as “outsiders” and others as “insiders.” This differential positioning enabled the counter-network to balance the need to demonstrate the reliability and impartiality of its claims with the requirement to maintain its accountability to local public interests. I argue that these requirements result from the prevalent view of the science-policy interface, which assumes a rigid separation between science and politics. Nonetheless, the conflict over groundwater at St. Regis reveals how at the science-policy interface, speaking for things and speaking for people are thoroughly entangled.     

Natural disasters as the end of the insurance industry? Scalar competitive strategies, Alternative Risk Transfers, and the economic crisis

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has piqued interest in the insurance industry, and this scrutiny has led to assumptions that the industry has become unstable and unprofitable with the increased incidence of disasters in highly-insured regions of the world. This paper challenges that assumption by arguing that the insurance industry has responded by spreading risk through scaled and networked recovery schemes. We found that because of competitive strategies of risk-spreading and displacement arrangements, the industry has actually profited as a whole. Regional insurance companies have always relied on the higher financial scales of the reinsurance industry in Munich, Zurich, and London. But with claims reaching into the billions of dollars, the reinsurance industry itself has raised premiums, spread risk farther afield, and jumped scale by spreading risk to futures markets called Alternative Risk Transfers (ARTs). However, the recession beginning in 2008 has called into question the viability of using futures markets as insurance. It is shown through a media analysis of four major business publications (The Economist, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal) how the industry responded to the costs of the 2004, 2005, and 2006 hurricane seasons. Because geography is rather new to this literature, this paper also offers a broad review of the insurance industry.     

Neo-liberal ruptures: Local political entities and neighbourhood networks in El Alto, Bolivia

In October 2003, hundreds of thousands of Bolivians took to the streets demanding the resignation of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. After 20 years of neo-liberal policies - and the failures to improve the living conditions of the majority - the proposal to export natural gas via Chile was taken by the population as yet another step to sustain an unjust political order. Facing a direct challenge by the population the Sánchez de Lozada administration responded with indiscriminate military force. The result was 63 dead and over 300 wounded, which deepened and extended the social rage and eventually forced the resignation of the President. The neo-liberal project - promoted and defended by Sánchez de Lozada - collapsed. The city of El Alto was the epicentre of the challenges to the legitimacy of this political order. This article focuses on the role of local political entities and neighbourhood networks from El Alto in articulating political spaces that challenged the legitimacy of the institutional infrastructure and led to the October 2003 ruptures in the neo-liberal project. Furthermore, I make the case that the particular histories and memories (of “relocalized” miners and indigenous/peasants) that converged in and defined this city were pivotal in the organization of a “political subsoil” that surged to the surface during the October 2003 events.     

Should political ecology be Marxist? A case for Gramsci’s historical materialism

This paper investigates some aspects of political ecology’s relation to Marxism, specifically its ties to Marxism’s “historical materialism”. I argue Gramsci is an essential feature in the reinvigoration of that relation, and that political ecology should be Marxist, if by Marxist we mean Gramscian. I focus on the concept of hegemony, arguing that Gramsci’s historical materialism, in contrast to the Engelsian tradition within which most materialism is snared, allows us to take account of both moments in Gramsci’s hegemony, the “economic” and the “ethicopolitical”.     

Education for development, CD for Peace: Producing the “globally competitive” child

This paper is set against the backdrop of an increasingly pervasive discursive coupling of peace with development, and of extremism with underdevelopment. An evolving knowledge economy discourse casts education as both a key determinant of economic development, and as a crucial tool in the battle for “hearts and minds” in a global war against terrorism and extremism. Education for development, and education as anti-extremism are the twin goals of the Filipino CD for Peace - a contribution to the UN-backed International Power Users of ICT (Information Communication Technology) Symposium. In this paper, I examine the ways in which this youth Symposium feeds into and mobilizes powerful logics around the links between education and development/counterterrorism. My argument is that education for development, and one of its articulations, the CD for Peace, are undergirded by and reproduce neoliberal development logics in several overlapping respects. I illustrate the ways in which the language of connection and collaboration reproduces a distinct rationality related both to the transformative potential of (private investment in) ICT and to the production of particular kinds of subjectivities: youth as connected, informed, economically valuable global citizens beyond the reach of extremists. The Power Users project works to (re)construct teenagers as “gurus”; conflict (and poverty, and terrorism) becomes solvable through education and ICT. I show how knowledge economy discourse powerfully constructs youth as learning subjects who come to imagine their own roles and identities in specifically neoliberal ways: not only as learners, but also as advocates for this nexus of technology, education, development and peace.     

Producing nature and making the state: Ordenamiento territorial in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia

In this paper, we explore how ordenamiento territorial, a territorial zoning policy in the 1991 Colombian Constitution remakes nature and helps constitute the state in the “economically backward” but “biodiversity rich” Pacific lowlands region. We draw on Gramscian insights on hegemony and the importance of conjunctures to trace how changes in the new Constitution and global biogeopolitics reconfigure nature and state power through the mandates of sustainable development, economic growth, and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. Finally, we contribute to the literature on political ecology by showing how the political power of the state, nature, and capital are interwoven materially and symbolically in complex and contradictory ways.     

Environmental degradation narratives in Madagascar: From colonial hegemonies to humanist revisionism

It is recurrently argued that political ecologists, by overlooking biophysical realities, misinterpret ecological interactions and underestimate environmental degradation. This article investigates the relevance of these critiques in the case of the Malagasy highlands. It is based on an analysis of three environmental narratives: a narrative developed by European colonists at the beginning of the century; a “modern” narrative developed since the 1980s by combining data from paleobotanists, archeologists and paleontologists; and a narrative developed more recently by political ecologists. I will show that biophysical realities were actually investigated by political ecologists in Madagascar, but that their interpretation differed from those of mainstream ecologists as a result of a different way of defining, characterizing and valuing the environment. With the aim of favoring a more comprehensive understanding of environmental degradation in Madagascar, I will propose to clarify the epistemological framework of political ecology, and to bring an objective nature back into its scope of enquiry. Far from weakening political ecology, this exercise will render the discipline more resistant to the counterattacks it has received, and more powerful for building a future that will answer to both social and environmental challenges.     

Knowledge makes the money go round: Conflicts of interest and corporate finance in London’s financial district

This paper argues that the conflicts of interest cases brought against Wall Street investment banks in the early 2000s were neither geographically nor institutionally isolated events. Rather, by combining recent work on financial knowledges in both economic geography and the social studies of finance with the growing interest in topological spatial imaginaries, I explore how London’s corporate finance industry was unable to distance itself from both the conflicts of interest allegations and the ensuing regulatory changes of the ‘Global Settlement’ in the US. Analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews conducted in London in the early 2000s is used to explore how a range of individual interests, institutional demands and structural changes within London’s financial district affected analysts’ ability to produce ‘objective’ research. As well as pointing to the problematic nature of certain aspects of knowledge rich ‘communities of practice’ [Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge], I explore how the resulting contingent and situated nature of research practice is at odds with a weakly defined notion of ‘objective’ research that underpins the Financial Services Authority’s regulatory response.     

The rise and transformation of the Brazilian landless movement into a counter-hegemonic political actor: A Gramscian analysis

The Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) is widely acknowledged as one of the most organized, dynamic, and influential social movements in Latin America. The MST has increasingly inserted the struggle for land within larger political contestations for broad social change, leading conservatives and leftists alike to describe it as a “first class actor” in Brazilian politics. What explains the move from corporatist struggles for land to broader counter-hegemonic contestations; put differently, how did the MST come to acquire ‘global ambition’? Much of the literature on the MST analyzes its external actions but without explaining what drives these actions. This paper utilizes a Gramscian political ecology approach to comprehend the MST’s political actions and its rise and transformation into a counter-hegemonic political actor. Specifically, I evaluate the development of the MST’s organizational praxis from corporatist struggles for land in the late 1970s to ‘global ambition’ and changing nature-society relations by the early 2000’s. Such an approach brings to light the role of organization building, political education, alliance building, and subaltern agency in propelling the MST’s political mobilizations. In so doing, this paper contributes to the literature on the MST and collective action. This paper also engages with a ‘politics of scale’ since the conquest of geographic scale is critical to understanding the MST’s national growth and political actions. This paper concludes by arguing that the rise and transformation of the MST into a vibrant counter-hegemonic actor in Brazilian politics was a gradual process that matured as it territorialized into a national movement.     

State visions, landscape, and disease: Discovering malaria in Argentina, 1890-1920

Recently, geographers and other scholars have reappraised the state’s spatial properties, roles, and strategies. According to these interpretations, modern states seek to control their subjects and coordinate economic development through various “rational” and “scientific” strategies that involve the standardization, transformation, and bureaucratization of space, territory, and landscape. Through this process social relations are increasingly configured through state discourses and institutions. The role of public health institutions in the development of state spatialities has been relatively underappreciated. This paper explores the establishment and early action of a malaria control campaign in Northwest Argentina, in the early twentieth century. I make three arguments: first, in creating a malaria control program, the Argentine state did not merely respond to a given “social fact” but rather was the key participant in constructing the “malaria problem”. Second, in response to this problem the Argentine state created a new technical-administrative territory, “the malarious zone”, which encompassed several provinces and defined the federal government’s jurisdiction for public health action. Finally, state actors came to understand the malaria problem, and potential solutions to it, through specific “rational” practices of the modern state: surveying, mapping, measurement, and statistical compilation. In its early years, the malaria campaign did not so much control the disease itself, as much as establish control over the “malaria question”, making it indisputably a state project.     

Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production

In this paper, I present a theoretical argument that fossil fuel represents a historically specific and internally necessary aspect of the capitalist mode of production. Despite sustained attention to distributional conflicts between international capital and energy rich nation-states, few historical-materialists have paid attention to the relations between fossil fuel and capital accumulation in industrial capitalist societies. In opposition to ecological economic notions of fixed thermodynamic “laws”, I first propose a dialectical conception of energy as embedded in dynamic social processes and power relations. Second, I review the historical importance of the energy shift from solar or biological sources of energy (muscles, wind, and water) to fossilized sources of energy (coal, oil, and gas). I then demonstrate how attention to fossil fuel energy forces a reexamination of the core insights of ecological Marxism and the political economy of nature. In the core argument of the paper, I reconsider the shift from biological to fossil energy as internal to the generalization and extension of capitalist social relations from two basic vantage points - (1) capitalist production based on wage labor; (2) the spatial conditions of capitalist circulation. I conclude by asking whether it is accurate to conceptualize capitalism as a “fossil fuel mode of production” and highlight the political urgency of a historical materialist perspective that takes seriously the importance of energy to the reproduction of capitalist social relations.     

Contested diamond certification: Reconfiguring global and national interests in Zimbabwe’s Marange fields

This study examines the political uses of “conflict diamond” discourse in global debates about commodity certification and socially responsible mining in Zimbabwe. Engaging critical literature on “conflict-free” corporate branding initiatives, the study focuses on representations of conflict in Marange, in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands. In 2006, a diamond rush in Marange drew in tens of thousands of artisanal miners from across Zimbabwe as well as foreigners, and the government initiated military crackdowns in 2008. In a highly contested vote in 2009, the international government delegates who comprised the voting members in the Kimberley Process Certification System (KPCS) ruled that conflict in Marange did not meet the KPCS definitions of “conflict diamond.” The study examines discourses of key stakeholders in the multinational diamond industry, human rights organizations, policymakers as well as artisanal miners in Zimbabwe between 2006 and 2014. The article argues that advocacies against diamond certification as well as advocacies favouring certification both tended to overlook the interests of artisanal miners, focusing narrowly on certain forms of conflict while associating artisanal mining with illicitness. The Marange case illustrates how conventional discourses on “conflict diamonds” not only obscure the complex nature of conflicts in contemporary capitalist accumulation processes; they also risk contributing to new forms of structural violence. This analysis highlights the need to pay careful attention to how global commodity certification discourses inter-relate with political agendas at multiple scales. The study draws attention to dilemmas for geographers when portraying the interests of marginalized groups in – and affected by – the diamond mining sector.     

Factory daughters and Chinese modernity: a case from Dongguan

This article investigates how a group of Hong-Kong Chinese managers of the offshore facilities of a US-based corporation extend their firm’s base in southern China while simultaneously establishing themselves as a new kind of “Chinese” manager. These new managers set out to accomplish what their colleagues in other corporate sites have not been able to do: control the turnover rate of a female labor force, described as sexually tumultuous and hormonally problematic. To control the labor turnover rate, these managers create a strategy for keeping workers “just long enough” before they lose their dexterity and attentiveness as a result of repetitive work. Their strategy relies on a discourse of in loco parentis to justify invasive policies for monitoring workers’ bodily functions and basic mobility inside and outside of the factory. To make this argument, the article combines a Marxian critique of value with post-structuralist theories of discursive subjectivity. The objective is to demonstrate how the negotiation of social identity within the capitalist firm proceeds through the representation of binary cultural and sex differences that reinforce the dichotomies of laborer and manager. However, these binaries unfold in unpredictable and uneven ways that can prove problematic for the capitalist endeavor. The material for this article comes from an ethnographic study of this company’s operations in southern China and in northern Mexico.     

Thinking inside the neoliberal box: The micro-politics of agro-food philanthropy

This paper examines a philanthropy-led initiative which has as its objective to jump start the transition to a more sustainable and just food system in California. The first major project funded was a “vivid picture” of California’s food system twenty-five years in the future. The outcome of the project is a report that is glossed with the tropes of neoliberalism in all of its key organizing frameworks, analytics, cognitive maps, and idioms and argues for “opportunities-based approaches” as the engine of change. Yet, as described in the paper, this outcome was initially under-determined, and, in fact, the funders had originally intended to leverage their resources for large scale transformation. By examining four moments in the development of the Vivid Picture project, the grantee selection, the modeling exercise, the stakeholder meetings, and the qualitative interviews, this paper will show how existing techniques of neoliberal governance such as modeling, audit, best-practices, and stakeholder participation, as well as current norms of philanthropy, shaped what is thinkable and hence actable. It will also show how “stakeholders” played a constitutive role in producing the outcomes of the project, in part because their input reflected already-developed notions of the possible within the current climate of neoliberalism. In the end it will argue that the failure of the Vivid Picture to look beyond the neoliberal present is itself evidence of the proliferation of neoliberal governmentalities. Still, the entire process galvanized many of the movement actors who were left out of the funding process and, in that way, produced political openings.     

Singaporeans in China: transnational women elites and the negotiation of gendered identities

The burgeoning literature on transnationalism involving skilled migrants--based largely on the view from the developed world--have generally paid little heed to “elite” women and the reproductive sphere. We argue that women play many roles in elite transnational migration streams and must be given full consideration as part of the “transnational elite.” Attention is given to the way women--both “tied” and “lead” migrants--negotiate gendered identities as they participate in Singapore's regionalisation process, a state-driven initiative to extend the national economy by leveraging on growth in the region. Empirical material for the paper is mainly based on in-depth interviews with married women who were part of a larger project involving interviews with 150 Singaporeans who had lived, or were living, in China. In examining the movements through transnational space between Singapore and China, it is clear that patriarchal norms continue to shape women's understandings of their own identities vis--vis men's. Singapore women who move as accompanying spouses (the majority) find themselves giving up careers to focus on their domestic role in China (in the absence of access to “suitable” paid domestic service), and are not so much “deskilled” but “re-domesticated”. The exceptional few women who ventured into China as entrepreneurs experienced considerable strain holding together geographically separate spheres of productive and reproductive work across the transnational terrain. Both sets of “stories” alert us to the need to include “elite” women--whether accompanying spouses or independent entrepreneurs--in our understanding of “transnational elites.” This will contribute to the urgent task of ensuring that both productive and reproductive work are valorized in equal measure in conceptualizing transnationalism.     

Agricultural trade liberalization, multifunctionality, and sugar in the south Florida landscape

This paper explores the applicability of the concept of “multifunctionality” to the south Florida sugar-producing region. Multifunctionality is being promoted in the European Union in response to neoliberal trade pressures in agriculture. It is seen as a way to address social and ecological concerns such as farm abandonment and biodiversity loss through domestic agricultural policies that conform to the GATT/World Trade Organization. I have two objectives in this paper. First, I seek to investigate multifunctionality as one response to neoliberal pressures for agricultural reform. In doing this, I identify two types of multifunctionality, a “weak” and a “strong” version. Second, I want to explore the possibility for multifunctionality to serve as a vehicle for resistance to GATT/WTO in other regions. I do this through a study of arguably the most maligned agricultural zone in the world, the sugar-producing region of south Florida. The specific geographic focus is the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), the federally designated, 700,000-acre zone south of Lake Okeechobee that is home to the Florida “Sugar Bowl.”     

Sustainability schizophrenia or “actually existing sustainabilities?” toward a broader understanding of the politics and promise of local sustainability in the US

As an approach to development, many see capitalism as reaching across an enormous range of scholarly domains and political interests. For some time geographers and others have begun to conceptualize capitalism as less of a system of intrinsic economic logic and more a collection of social and discursive relationships. By bringing capitalism into the “discursive world” these commentators and others have provided the theoretical ground for an exploration of alternative economic forms, especially those that are more socially and ecologically just. This paper makes an argument for putting sustainable development through the same theoretical scrutiny. Drawing on examples from the US we recruit the concept of “actually existing sustainabilities” from Altvater’s concept “actually existing socialisms” as an entry point to this conversation. Our purpose is to show that the potential for sustainability in the US exists in current local policies and practices if we rethink how we frame it.     

Modeling of smectite illitization in burial diagenesis environments

The kinetics of smectite illitization in shale samples from eight wells have been modeled using the equation −dS/dt = kK^0.25S⁵ [Cuadros, J., Linares J., 1996. Experimental kinetic study of the smectite-to-illite transformation. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta60, 439-453], where S is the proportion of smectite layers in illite-smectite (I-S), t is time, k is the rate constant and K is the concentration of potassium. The I-S compositions and the physical parameters were obtained from the literature. Potassium concentration is the only unknown parameter and it was chosen to fit the experimental data. I propose that this variable is termed “effective K concentration,” as it is affected not by the actual K concentration alone but also by those of other cations that compete with K for the smectite interlayer sites, especially Ca, by ion mobility in the sediments and possibly by other variables. The kinetic equation allows an accurate fit to the experimental data in all the wells, reproducing both the illitization onset and the patterns of the plots of % smectite vs. depth. The relative changes of the values of “effective K concentration” compare well with K/Ca equivalent ratios in the whole rock. Three of the modeled wells, located in near proximity, produced similar “effective K concentration” patterns. These results support the validity of the equation used in the models. They also suggest that this equation can be used to assess K concentrations in sediments and K mobility within basins.     

Placing splintering urbanism: Introduction

This paper introduces a collection of case studies aimed at “Placing Splintering Urbanism”, in reference to the thesis developed by Graham and Marvin [Graham, S., Marvin, S., 2001. Splintering Urbanism. Networked Infractructures, Technoloical Moblilities and the Urban condition. Routledge, London]. Whilst acknowledging the value of the thesis as an analytical framework in opening the way to innovative understandings of contemporary urban dynamics, the paper argues that, taken together, the articles in this themed issue seriously challenge the “splintering urbanism” thesis theoretically, empirically and methodologically. They question in particular the postulated universality of the “modern infrastructural ideal” and of “unbundling” and “bypass” processes — all of which are key elements in Graham and Marvin’s argument — as well as the assertion that reforms in infrastructure sectors should generally result in more discriminatory, socially regressive patterns of provision of essential services and more splintered urban spaces. Based on these fundamental critiques, the paper concludes that one cannot speak of “splintering urbanism in general” — i.e., as a global trend — in any meaningful analytical way.