Neoliberalism and the making of food politics in California

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.     

Neoliberalism and environmental justice in the United States environmental protection agency: Translating policy into managerial practice in hazardous waste remediation

In response to the failings of the aggressive neoliberalism of the Reagan era, the Clinton administration sought new ways to promote and deepen the neoliberal project. One of its strategies was to develop “neocommunitarian” programs to support political empowerment and economic self-sufficiency in marginalized communities. Its environmental justice policy became an important vehicle for delivering these programs. This paper examines ways in which one regional office of the US Environmental Protection Agency translated the Clinton administration's environmental justice policy into practical guidelines for its managers. It investigates how these guidelines affected the work of personnel in the EPA's program to clean up hazardous waste sites. It asks how the Clinton administration's approach to environmental justice--emphasizing data analysis, managed public participation, and economic opportunity--helped both to deepen the neoliberal project and to transform the geography of risk and remediation. Although the EPA was unable to “normalize” the environmental justice community--to make it a standardized target for the Clinton administration's empowerment programs--its environmental justice policy both contributed to subtle changes in the distribution of hazardous waste risk and made the delivery of neocommunitarian programs an important part of the work of remedial personnel.     

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.     

Virtual moralities: The mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields

Fairtrade was founded to alleviate poverty and economic injustice through a market-based form of solidarity exchange. Yet with the increasing participation of transnational food corporations in Fairtrade sourcing, new questions are emerging on the extent to which the model offers an alternative to the inimical tendencies of neoliberalism. Drawing on a qualitative research project of Kenyan Fairtrade tea, this paper examines how the process of corporate mainstreaming influences the structure and outcomes of Fairtrade, and specifically the challenges it poses for the realization of Fairtrade’s development aspirations. It argues firstly that whilst tea producers have experienced tangible benefits from Fairtrade’s social premium, these development ‘gifts’ have been conferred through processes marked less by collaboration and consent than by patronage and exclusion. These contradictions are often glossed by the symbolic force of Fairtrade’s key tenets - empowerment, participation, and justice - which simultaneously serve to neutralize critique and mystify the functions that Fairtrade performs for the political economy of development and neoliberalism. Second, building on recent critiques of corporate social responsibility, the paper explores how certain neoliberal rationalities are emboldened through Fairtrade, as a process of mainstreaming installs new metrics of governance (standards, certification, participation) that are at once moral and technocratic, voluntary and coercive, and inclusionary and marginalizing. The paper concludes that these technologies have divested exchange of mutuality, as the totemic features of neoliberal regulation - standards, procedures and protocols - increasingly render north south partnerships ever more virtual and depoliticized.     

Anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City

In recent years, governments at different scales in both North and South have been experimenting with alternative methods of alleviating poverty, and redesigning social welfare regimes. While these changes are not entirely congruent across regimes in North and South, there are interesting points of overlap and intersection. The article lays out three broad alternatives to “roll-back” neoliberalism: intrusive liberalism; inclusive liberalism, and a renewed version of social citizenship. It then lays out how these alternatives have played out in anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City, two sites where creative strategies contesting neoliberalism have been pursued. While both cities occupy a critical place within their respective political economies, they are not usually compared because of their very different positions in the North American division of labour. Yet, as we argue, they face similar challenges in the form of poverty reduction strategies at the national scale that are based on neoliberal principles that do little to meet the needs of their inhabitants. In response, both cities have provided a site for mobilising resources behind alternative anti-poverty policies, inspired by the principles of social citizenship.     

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.”     

Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS

The oceans are not only being transformed through privatization as management moves towards market mechanisms, the oceans are also being “zoned”, with zoning increasingly proposed as the ideal conduit for weighting different uses of the ocean. This is concomitant with a move towards ecosystem-based management that also partakes in a policy environment imbued with the commodification of nature, in which environmental services are ranked and valued according to neoliberal percepts. Crucial to these projects are the utilization of GIS technologies. This paper considers these zones of preservation and sites of conflict through an ethnographic case study of the scallop fisheries of New England, examining conflicts between harvesters, different projects to map the fishery, and ongoing efforts to reseed scallop beds. The paper explores how participants themselves articulate the changing practices of fishing and farming, redefining boundaries of nature and culture. While reseeding projects, for example, arguably participate in the market logic of neoliberalism, at the same time they may resist and redefine the terms, as communities see themselves sowing the seeds of their own sustainability and changing the terms of what counts, literally, as nature.     

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.     

Experiencing agricultural failure: Internal migration, tourism and local perceptions of regional change in the Yucatan

In response to a growing body of literature encouraging geographers to present textured, regional case studies that demonstrate how neoliberalism functions at diverse scales, this article presents a nuanced account of neoliberalism in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The study seeks to illustrate how neoliberal reforms to agriculture and ongoing neoliberal tourism development in the Yucatecan state of Quintana Roo intersect to create a unique regional context for migration between the state’s rural areas and Mexico’s largest planned tourism development zone in Cancun. The research presented is based on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews that took place in 2003 with rural residents and regional migrants working in Cancun. Through the employment of an experiential definition of neoliberalism, grounded in the lived experiences and perceptions of study participants, the article suggests that rural-urban tourist pole migration is the result of a complex negotiation of the region’s neoliberal landscape. The article argues that rural residents’ and migrants’ perceptions of the failure of agriculture as a livelihood is shaped relative to the perceived success of the tourism industry and better livelihood opportunities in Cancun. These widespread perceptions of agricultural failure in the Yucatan peninsula are constructed not solely in response to local conditions but rather in response to the overall regional outcome of neoliberal economic restructuring initiatives which have negatively affected traditional agriculture in the rural sphere while privileging tourism development in the urban sphere centered in Cancun.     

Grounding the virtual: The material effects of electronic grocery shopping

This paper addresses the materiality of computer-mediated retailing. The paper uncovers the “hidden geography” of e-commerce, considering how the seemingly simple act of doorstep food delivery is explicated in urban form, and in transportation and communication infrastructures. The paper categorises electronic grocery shopping (EGS) enterprises into three types: “bricks and clicks”, “pure-play” and the “infomediary”, and examines how each type of operation has been materialised in the urban landscape, and the infrastructure upon which each draws. The paper then considers the strategies EGS operations have used to offset the “killer costs” of logistics for electronic commerce. The paper concludes by considering how electronic grocery shopping is embedded within broader trends in consumer behaviour, and how these trends are manifested in the materiality of urban life. The paper argues that online grocers are in the vanguard of ventures habituating customers to the remote ordering and delayed delivery of products to the home. Through controlling this “last mile”, online retailers hope to extend the product offer to higher-margin and more problematic products, which are in themselves unprofitable to distribute direct to the customer, but which can be profitably combined with a grocery shop.     

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.     

Neoliberalism and privatisation in South Africa

Perhaps the defining characteristic of development as a global discourse is its neoliberal character. Even recently liberated nations such as South Africa have not escaped its reach. In South Africa, there has been a movement from a development policy with a socialist resonance – the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) – to one decidedly neoliberal in form and substance – the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy. The articulation of neoliberalism through development policy is being facilitated through a series of measures among which are fiscal austerity, export oriented production and the privatisation of public sector services. While the GEAR policy, as a macroeconomic framework, is being contested by labour unions it is privatisation which is facing widespread opposition among communities. My intention is twofold, firstly, to investigate how neoliberalism as a global hegemonic discourse has succeeded in capturing, colonising and repackaging the development imaginary of the African National Congress (ANC). Secondly, I wish to examine how privatisation as a sub-discourse of neoliberalism is being articulated in the historically black township of Chatsworth, in Durban. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The neoliberalization of Contemporary Christian Music’s new Social Gospel

This paper explores how Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) forges neoliberal subjectivities. CCM, popular music featuring evangelical Christian lyrics, is one of the most widely consumed forms of commercial entertainment for America’s 70–80 million white evangelical Christians. I argue that by synthesizing evangelical individualism and an insular community ethos, the everyday practices of CCM help constitute particularly neoliberal senses of self and power relations with others. These ostensibly apolitical subjectivities sustain neoliberal ventures such as the reinvention of the Social Gospel through Christian non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As well as demonstrating the role of religious and musical practices in cultivating neoliberal subjectivities, CCM helps illuminate neoliberalism’s fractures, dynamism, and multiplicities.     

After a decade of critique: neoliberal environmentalism,discourse analysis and the promotion of climate-protecting behaviour in the workplace

In a 2004 special issue of Geoforum, McCarthy and Prudham argued that the connections between neoliberalism and the environment had been underexplored in critical scholarship. In an attempt to address this gap, the special issue reflected on a number of different case studies and set the stage for a decade of analysis and critique. This paper aims to contribute to the increasing body of literature by presenting a detailed theoretical analysis of neoliberal environmentalism and its role in modern society. Specifically, the paper focuses on one particular environmental issue – climate change – and uses it to categorise six discourses that either conform to the principles of neoliberalism (reformist) or reject neoliberal ideas (revolutionary). Drawing on interviews with designated ‘climate champions’ (individuals who are given responsibility for promoting climate protecting behaviour) in large corporations, the paper then demonstrates how this kind of typological framework might be applied to the analysis of neoliberal environmentalism in the ‘real world’. The paper finds that neoliberalism played a very influential role in the promotion of climate protecting behaviour in the workplace. However, there was also some limited evidence of resistance in the form of revolutionary discourses and ideas. Going forwards, the typological framework may provide a valuable analytical tool to assess the dominance and resistance of neoliberal environmentalism in the modern world.     

Imaginative geographies of gender and HIV/AIDS: moving beyond neoliberalism

This paper examines how neoliberal development discourse contributes to the production and maintenance of problematic gendered hierarchies and spaces. By interrogating the basic assumptions undergirding this discourse, this paper explores how neoliberalism produces spaces which normalise certain identities—especially those associated with individualism and economic rationality, and makes errant values such as communalism and altruism. Drawing on perspectives from feminist geographies, we argue that by normalising and privileging certain masculine identities, neoliberalism reinscribes and legitimizes gendered power relations that are counterproductive to addressing HIV/AIDS. The ‘ideal’ person fighting HIV/AIDS in the neoliberal framework is rational, competitive and self-interested, but these characteristics are complicit in worsening HIV prevalence and mobilize problematic gender roles and identities. Given the pervasiveness of this ideology in Malawi, we propose ways in which families, communities and institutions can challenge and reshape gender identities and potential solutions to HIV within this context.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Neoliberalism and water reforms in western India: Commercialization, self-sufficiency, and regulatory bodies

This paper deals with the changes brought about by the ‘reforms’ in water currently under way in many parts of the world. Three particular reforms in the state of Maharashtra in western India are discussed - the commercialization of a parastatal body, the concept of self-sufficiency as it plays out in the context of urban local bodies, and the working of the regulatory body in water. The analysis of these reforms shows how, in common with neoliberal projects elsewhere, changes in institutional practices are resulting in changes in subjectivities, foreclosing alternatives, and leading to attempts to ‘depoliticize’ the water arena. At the same time, there are differences between the regulatory experience of Maharashtra and regulation in other locales, which offers insights into how neoliberalism works in a context where water reforms have emerged relatively late.     

Neoliberalism and natural resource management: Agri-environmental standards and the governing of farming practices

Private standards and certification schemes are widely acknowledged as playing an increasingly important role in agri-environmental governance. While much of the existing research concludes that these mechanisms consolidate the global extension of neoliberalism – enhancing the power of corporate actors to the detriment of smaller producers – we argue that this overlooks the complex ways in which standards are used by governments and farmers in the governing of farming practices. Focusing specifically on a process standard – Environmental Management Systems (EMS) – promoted by the Australian government as a way of verifying the ‘clean and green’ status of agricultural exports, we examine how one regional group of producers has sought to use EMS standards in practice. Our analysis of a case study in the state of Victoria appears to confirm that EMS was a successful instrument for the extension of neoliberal governance, reinforcing the production of neoliberal subjectivities and practices amongst farmer participants and enabling the government to compensate for gaps in environmental provision. However, it would be a mistake to interpret the development of this EMS scheme as an example of naïve farmers manipulated by the state. In practice, farmers used the opportunities provided by government funding to undertake actions which expressed their own agri-environmental values and practices. Establishment of an EMS and associated eco-label enabled producers to demonstrate and extend their capacity to act as good environmental stewards. Our research highlights how the local application of environmental standards negotiates and shapes, rather than simply contributes to, neoliberal rule.