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.     

Dispossessing irrigators: Water grabbing,supply-side growth and farmer resistance in India

This paper examines, first, the conditions under which irrigating farmers are being alienated from their water through a state-led process of dispossession, and then, second, details the dialectical process of farmers’ resistance to these efforts. The paper advances recent scholarship on water grabbing and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ by drawing on a case from northwestern India to explore the connections between non-agrarian economic growth, irrigated agriculture and farmer livelihoods. Specifically, it examines an urban water infrastructure development project that aims to provide water to Jaipur, the Indian state of Rajasthan’s capital city, through the appropriation of an existing rural dam/reservoir complex built for irrigation and redirecting it to domestic, commercial and industrial uses. Drawing on an examination of policy documents and interviews with farmers and state planners, this paper argues that these transfers must be understood as a supply-side solution to support economic growth, where the lack of stable water supplies is a barrier to capital accumulation. The paper contributes to critical scholarship by showing that the processes underpinning water’s reallocation are specific acts of ongoing ‘dispossession’ through extra-economic means under advanced neoliberal capitalism, which alienates water away from peasant producers towards new centers of capital accumulation, dialectically creating peasant resistance to these efforts.     

Looking North and South: Ideals and realities of inclusive environmental governance

This paper addresses the dynamics of real processes of inclusive environmental governance by looking at the decision-maker/expert/lay person interplay. Specifically, we present a comparative ethnographic study that leads to a critical examination of Marteen Hajer’s concept of technological citizenship and its role in normative models of so-called inclusive environmental governance. First, we present the Bionatur project of MST (Movimento Sem Terra/Landless People’s Movement), the largest rural movement in Latin America. The project explicitly attempts to include lay/traditional knowledge into the processes of defining and protecting a regulatory space for “Creole seeds”. Second, we describe the formally open and inclusive environmental management of polluted sediments during harbour dredging in Norway. In both cases the actors are confronted with difficult problems bound by contradictory constraints of the institutional and cultural contexts. In complex relationships, trust, dependency, responsibility and opposition, encompass the decision-maker/expert/lay interplay. Embedded in these contexts, it is not always clear that non-experts want full autonomy and responsibility. In complex relationships, trust, dependency, responsibility and opposition, encompass the decision-maker/expert/lay person interplay. The results suggest that ideals, if instantiated, are reshaped within concrete contexts of action. Participatory ideals such as “technological citizenship”, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability need not be relativised, but they would better be expressed as regulative norms for practice rather than ideals from which an acontextual model or structure may be deduced.     

Ch’ixi landscapes: Indigeneity and capitalism in the Bolivian Chaco

Contemporary debates around the ontological turn have pitted efforts to take indigenous ontologies seriously against demands to make visible the forms of dispossession and environmental suffering that characterize the (post)colonial and capitalist present. Meanwhile, a growing array of governmental projects seeks to identify and protect indigenous ontologies in the face of capitalist development processes, including through forms of collective tenure. How can we make sense of such initiatives, and what kind of territories do they encounter and produce? This paper engages this question ethnographically through an examination of everyday life in a legally recognized Native Community Land in the Bolivian Chaco. Drawing on Bolivian Aymara scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s notion of ch’ixi, I argue that indigenous territories are neither ontologically separate from, nor entirely subsumed by, capitalist development processes. Rather, they are subject to multiple land values, ontologies, and investments. A contested indigenous land titling process, capitalist labor relations, hydrocarbon compensation money, and efforts to maintain relations with spirit beings are all interwoven in the fabric of Guaraní everyday life. Such ch’ixi landscapes emerge at the confluence of capitalist efforts at rendering territories investable, governmental efforts at managing dispossession, and Guaraní efforts to maintain life and exercise territorial sovereignty amidst contradictory processes of (post)colonial governmentality.     

From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus

This largely programmatic paper offers a new way of thinking through the incorporation of farmland into financial markets. Building on the notion of “operations of capital”, it sketches analytical entry points for scrutinizing the inner workings of agri-finance capital formation. The concept of operations can make two useful contributions to the existing discussion. First, it helps provide a more nuanced historicization of the entanglement between finance and farmland. Finance has a long history of penetrating agriculture and the new quality of the contemporary coupling of finance and farmland only becomes fully visible when adopting a more nuanced historical perspective. Rather than imagining the history of capitalism as one where industrial capitalism gives way to financialized capitalism, the concept of operations sensitizes us for the situated modes, processes and practices of financial economization that have reworked economy, society and nature at specific historical conjunctures.Second, it allows us to move beyond simply treating “financialization” as explanans. Shifting attention to the situated practical activities of global finance, it eventually helps us explore central categories of financial economization (“capital”, “resources”, “property” and “value”) as practical accomplishments rather than taking them for granted. Only then can we come to terms with how finance works through farmland in different geographical settings. Empirical material from an ongoing research project will support my arguments.     

Contesting the market-based nature of Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services programs: Four sites of articulation and hybridization

Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs pay rural landholders for hydrological services, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and improvement of agroforestry systems. The intention of the programs’ initial funders and designers was to create a PES program that would introduce market efficiency into environmental policy and “green” the market by creating and recognizing the economic value of healthy ecosystems. This article traces the complex processes through which this ideal type conceptualization of market-efficient environmental policy was subverted and the practice altered to more closely fit national interests, rural realities and alternative conceptions of the ‘value’ of socio-nature. This article examines how the market-based notions of the programs’ designers were hybridized at four distinct sites of articulation: (1) the federal politics of poverty alleviation in Mexico; (2) rural social movements with distinct conceptualizations of ‘conservation’ and ‘development’; (3) the institutional and cultural context of the ecosystem services being commodified; and (4) the socio-natural knowledges and grounded practices of rural Mexico. This analysis is based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted with program participants, intermediary organizations, and designers. The article draws on a growing critical literature on market-based mechanisms and minutely examines the process through which the Mexican national PES program was altered at multiple scales and in multiple forms, from the rhetoric of political speeches to the specific elements of the policy’s design and from the theoretical tinkering of neoclassical economists to the quotidian practices of rural environmental managers.     

Legitimization through patronage? Strategies for political control beyond ethno-regional claims in Darjeeling,India

This paper asks how contending political leaders legitimize their authority in a competitive authoritarian regime. It contends that ‘legitimization through patronage’ is an important means of convincing the public of the rightfulness of a leader’s authority when ‘ideology-based normative legitimacy’ is declining and the formal electoral route is not available. Drawing on an understanding of legitimacy that accounts for leaders’ strategies and public receptions, the paper seeks to explore the moral norms and values on the basis of which followers evaluate leaders’ performance. Drawing on anthropological studies of patronage in South Asia not only helps to transcend an exclusively instrumental understanding of patronage by stressing its moral dimension but also complements comparative politics’ focus on the national level by studying the everyday processes through which political leaders’ legitimacy is locally constructed and contested in patronage relations. Evidence from Darjeeling in northern West Bengal/India (where the State’s preferential treatment of a regional party claiming leadership of a movement for regional autonomy has contributed to the establishment of a dominant party regime) highlights patronage’s potential as a legitimating strategy – but it also reveals its practical limits. While the establishment of resource monopolies over developmental funding helped leaders of the ruling party to “feed” their support networks and foster reputations as selfless “social workers”, differing bases for the evaluation of leaders, the growing expectations of followers, and dependence on external patronage resources limited the long-term success of patronage as a legitimating strategy. This, in turn, enabled the State to curtail demands for autonomy by controlling regional elite construction.     

Natures of risk: Capital,rule, and production of difference

This purpose of this paper is to propose starting points for a critically informed understanding of the role of risk in contemporary environmental practice, and to flesh out some preliminary implications of the work risk does as a logic though which environment is managed. Taking cues from scholarship interrogating the production of capitalist natures (e.g., Smith, 1984/2008; Braun, 2000, Heynan et al., 2007). I ask what it means in environmental terms to put risk at the intersection of capital and rule--to conceive of it as something that to paraphrase Dillon (2008, p. 319) makes the combination of capital and rule possible, and to interpret risk as something which (as Martin (2007b, p. 67) has suggested) undertakes to create the very conditions that make new wealth possible. I argue that in order to understand the intersection of capital and rule in environmental terms, risk must be understood as an epistemic framework and political ontology consistent with the advent of capitalist political economy--not as an occasion of danger or geographical condition of insecurity. Using difference as a starting point to attempt to think through connections between risk and accumulation I suggest that risk is a knowledge practice instrumental to accumulation and the politics of rule that secure it, which obscures the functioning of difference and processes of differentiation.     

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.     

Urban and rural groundwater use in Zhengzhou, China: challenges in joint management

Groundwater plays an important role in the total water supply of much of China, particularly in the north. It has contributed substantially to both agricultural growth and urban and industrial expansion. However, overexploitation and poor management have contributed to infamous groundwater depletion problems and less publicized groundwater quality deterioration. One of the key challenges for China will be how to make groundwater use sustainable while still meeting increased food needs as well as the industrial and domestic demands of a rapidly urbanizing society. Zhengzhou City, one of China’s test cities for building a “water saving society” highlights both the difficulties and potential solutions to northern China’s joint rural and urban groundwater challenges. Based on secondary data and a primary survey of groundwater management in the region, this report provides an overview of Zhengzhou’s groundwater development and use as well as the ongoing institutional and policy reform processes within the water sector. The results highlight how a deepening of ongoing reforms, which simultaneously consider groundwater as an integral rural and urban issue and a fundamental economic and social asset, may improve groundwater outcomes, not only in Zhengzhou but in China, as the country’s economy and demography continue to change.     

Assessment of agricultural groundwater users in Iran: a cultural environmental bias

Many environmental problems are rooted in human behavior. This study aimed to explore the causal effect of cultural environmental bias on ‘sustainable behavior’ among agricultural groundwater users in Fars province, Iran, according to Klockner’s comprehensive model. A survey-based research project was conducted to gathering data on the paradigm of environmental psychology. The sample included agricultural groundwater users (n = 296) who were selected at random within a structured sampling regime involving study areas that represent three (higher, medium and lower) bounds of the agricultural-groundwater-vulnerability spectrum. Results showed that the “environment as ductile (EnAD)” variable was a strong determinant of sustainable behavior as it related to groundwater use, and that EnAE had the highest causal effect on the behavior of agricultural groundwater users. The adjusted model explained 41% variance of “groundwater sustainable behavior”. Based on the results, the groundwater sustainable behaviors of agricultural groundwater users were found to be affected by personal and subjective norm variables and that they are influenced by casual effects of the “environment as ductile (EnAD)” variable. The conclusions reflect the Fars agricultural groundwater users’ attitude or worldview on groundwater as an unrecoverable resource; thus, it is necessary that scientific disciplines like hydrogeology and psycho-sociology be considered together in a comprehensive approach for every groundwater study.     

Political-industrial ecology: Integrative,complementary, and critical approaches

“Political-industrial ecology” has been proposed as an emerging subfield of nature-society geography. In mapping out the landscape of this subfield, this paper develops a typology of three approaches to connecting politics and industrial ecology: (1) Integrative research that incorporates social, political, policy, institutional, and/or spatial considerations into industrial ecology analyses (“politics in industrial ecology”); (2) Complementary research that couples findings or frameworks from industrial ecology with social and political research (“politics and industrial ecology”); and (3) Critical research that examine how values, norms, groups, political relations, or institutions shape the production, interpretation, and usage of industrial ecology knowledge (“politics of industrial ecology”). This broad framing of political-industrial ecology invites contributions from many social sciences, including political ecology, political geography, political economy, sociology, public policy, management, environmental history, and science and technology studies.     

Capital accumulation and regional development in France

The paper examines the interlinked development of social process and spatial form in the analysis of the changing patterns of production and employment in France. A major hypothesis is that specific phases of capital accumulation are associated with the use and production of specific forms of spatial diferentiation, and that recent changes in the location of employment in France are connected with the transition from one stage of capitalist development to another. Thus the changing spatial pattern of agricultural employment is seen as part of the decay of petty commodity production and the intergration of family farming into a new capitalist agriculture. Similarly, spatial change in manufacturing employment is also a component of industrial restructuring, and the associated development of new infrastrucural and labour requirements. The French state is one element of these processes and the article concludes with a case study of the relationships between capital accumulation and regional policy.     

Making the countryside more like the countryside? Rural planning and metropolitan visions in post-quake Chengdu

In 2008, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck southwest China less than 100 km north of Chengdu, the booming capital of Sichuan Province. The city government undertook a massive reconstruction project in its rural hinterlands that was guided by existing policies to develop rural areas through coordinated urban and rural planning. Planners sought to avoid replicating urban settlements in rural areas by developing recognizably “pastoral” villages, an approach that is being widely echoed in the relatively new discipline of rural spatial planning in China. This paper argues that such design concessions evade the key feature of the new villages: the concentration of rural residents. The Chengdu government, though this symbolic and actual de-peopling of rural landscapes, has recast rural space as an environmental amenity and an abstract stock of arable land. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and policy and media documents, the paper analyzes the metropolitan plans that provided the framework for rural reconstruction in post-quake Chengdu, and connects these to a model village site in Chengdu’s rural periphery. The case illustrates the need to understand site-level village planning in the context of regional political economies of land, and highlights the new role that metropolitan governments are playing in rural development strategies.     

关闭煤矿工业广场再开发策略研究

随着我国煤炭去产能政策的有力实施,一批资源枯竭及产能落后矿井陆续关停废弃,传统的独立工矿区因此沉寂,服务于煤炭生产和职工生活的工业广场面临功能丧失、土地闲置等问题。挖掘关闭煤矿工业广场的价值并赋予其新功能,是盘活存量资源、激发独立工矿区活力的关键。以山西省晋城市关闭煤矿凤凰山矿为例,研究该矿与晋城市的发展演变及其相互作用;分析关闭煤矿工业广场空间构成要素,采用层次分析法(AHP)进行价值评估,判明主要空间要素的价值特征与更新挑战;进而探索关闭煤矿工业广场的再开发城市设计策略。分析认为,山地矿业风貌与绿色生态本底是凤凰山矿的核心价值表征,应将风貌存续与生态保育作为再开发重点。关闭煤矿需确立“矿退城进”的更新目标,主动与城市产业对接,由“封闭的工业广场”转变为“开放的城市街区”。在此基础上,提出景观引导下的秩序控制、功能空间的整合与重置、交通体系的外通与内融、矿业文脉特色的延续与塑造、既有建筑的再循环改造5个方面的城市设计策略。研究表明,通过基础设施景观化改造,可在提升矿区环境质量的同时创造城市特色;借鉴城市设计思维可为关闭煤矿保护性再开发策略的制定提供帮助,在此类资源型地区的城市更新中具有应用前景。      

Welcome to the Gig Economy: neoliberal industrial relations and the case of Uber

The competitive pressures of neoliberal economies have compelled employers to devolve responsibilities to contractors and subcontractors. The rise information technology platforms have significantly accelerated this trend over past decade. “Sharing economy” companies have such widespread adoption of neoliberalism’s industrial relations that a new moniker—“the Gig Economy”—has taken root. Although shareholders and consumers have benefited, middle-class jobs have been squeezed in the process. This paper uses Uber as a case study to discuss how Sharing Economy entities are merely the latest iteration of companies to enact the neoliberal playbook, including (a) (mis)classifying workers, (b) engaging in regime shopping, and (c) employing the most economically vulnerable, rather than giving rise to a new world of work altogether. The result is a crowding out of middle-class employment by precarious ‘gigs’ that lack legal protections and benefits.     

Oxygen level,primary productivity,and water turbulence during the OAE2 interval of Zagros Basin (SW Iran): Benthic foraminiferal variations in the carbonate microfacies

Cenomanian/Turonian boundary (upper Sarvak Formation) benthic foraminiferal assemblages were analyzed to reconstruct oxygen level, primary productivity, and water turbulence in the Izeh Zone, Zagros Basin. The interplay between environmental perturbations during the Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 (OAE2) and regional tectonic activities in the Zagros Basin resulted in formation of various benthic foraminiferal assemblages in the study section. The OAE2 interval at the region of study starts with extinction of rotaliporids at the onset of δ¹³C positive excursion (peak “a”), which is associated with population of infaunal benthic foraminifera (especially Bolivina alata). The following interval at the onset of Whiteinella archaeocretacea Biozone is characterized by the total absence of benthic taxa and dominance of planoheterohelicids (“Heterohelix shift”) in the black shale strata, indicating expansion of oxygen minimum zone and unhospitable conditions for both benthic and planktic foraminifera. The upper part of OAE2 interval (including δ¹³C peaks “b” and “c”) coincides with harbinger of Neo-Tethys closure in the Arabian Plate, causing a compressional tectonic regime, and creation of uplifted terrains in the basin. The relative sea level started to locally fall in this succession, which was accompanied by a better ventilation of seafloor, lower TOC contents, and reappearance of benthic foraminifera.     

Environmental management and open-air experiments in Brazilian Amazonia

In this article, I ethnographically examine “the biggest experiment in tropical conservation history,” an environmental management approach designed in Brazilian Amazonia. I focus on research conducted by scientists who support this approach using the results of their work at an open-air experiment. Drawing on this ethnographic study I critically revisit Bruno Latour’s deservedly influential ethnography of an open-air laboratory in Brazilian Amazonia. I also engage with his claim that open-air experiments constitute spaces in which scientists can avoid seeing the world as “Nature”—a gigantic collection of inert objects that experts sense they have to bring into order on their own. Latour shows that while working in their Amazonian open-air laboratory scientists perceived the forest as a network comprising human and non-human entities bearing creative capacities. He suggests that such experimentation enables humans to envision environmental management strategies based on human/non-human collaborations. In the open air, experts could thereby transcend the pervasive fatalism that plagues environmental policy circles and rekindle a more optimistic and enthusiastic stance toward environmental management. I argue that Latour’s is a visionary ethnography that anticipates contemporary trends in environmental management approaches. However, I also argue that his celebratory conclusions regarding open-air experimentation are misguided. I show that, while working in the open air, the scientists situated their work within capitalist experiments wherein humans and non-humans creatively collaborate in the construction of new, less inhabitable worlds.     

Parents,permission, and possibility: Young women,college, and imagined futures in Gujarat,India

This article advances critical geographies of youth through examining the spatiality implicit in the imagined futures of young women in rural India. Geographers and other scholars of youth have begun to pay more attention to the interplay between young people’s past, present, and imagined futures. Within this emerging body of scholarship the role of the family and peer group in influencing young people’s orientations toward the future remain underexamined. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, my research focuses on a first generation of college-going young women from socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds in India’s westernmost state of Gujarat. I draw on the “possible selves” theoretical construct in order to deploy a flexible conceptual framework that links imagined post-educational trajectories with motivation to act in the present. In tracing the physical movement of these young women as they navigate and complete college, my analysis highlights the ways in which particular kinds of spaces and spatial arrangements facilitate and limit intra- and inter-generational contact, and the extent to which this affects young women’s conceptions of the future. I conclude by considering the wider implications of my research for ongoing debates surrounding youth transitions, relational geographies of age, and education in the Global South.