Altered landscapes, altered livelihoods: The shifting experience of informal waste collecting during Hanoi’s urban transition

A growing body of literature is concerned with urbanization processes in contemporary Vietnam and how the country’s globalizing cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are increasingly becoming spaces of consumption. However, much less is known about how these changing spaces accommodate labour, and in turn support livelihoods. Using published empirical data on Hanoi’s informal waste collectors from 1992 [DiGregorio, M., 1994. Urban Harvest: Recycling as a Peasant Industry in Northern Vietnam. East–West Center, Hawaii, pp. 1–212] and my own data, including a survey of 575 waste collectors and 44 interviews, collected on Hanoi’s informal waste collectors in 2006, I explore the experiences of informal waste collectors (waste pickers and itinerant junk buyers) in Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi. I argue that Vietnam’s globalizing economy and urban transition have been a catalyst for the growth of the informal waste collector population in Hanoi as well as a partial player in the gendering of this group and the work they undertake.     

The Commonwealth, ‘development’ and post-colonial responsibility

One important (though often neglected) part of the ‘development business’ committed to principles of partnership is the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 54 independent countries, almost all of which were formerly under British rule. This paper focuses on the Commonwealth’s contemporary sense of ‘responsibility’ for shaping African development through ‘partnership’ and by promoting ‘good governance’ and examines the particular example of Mozambique, which joined the Commonwealth in 1995. In exploring exactly what membership of this post-colonial ‘family’ has meant for Mozambique the paper explores the neocolonial paternalism and sense of trusteeship that the Commonwealth has articulated in its often very apolitical vision of African development which seems to lock the continent into a permanent stage of tutelage and to repetitively reduce Africa to a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. More generally, the paper also examines the wider context of the Commonwealth’s involvement in Africa by looking at the connections it has made to British industry, British charities and the British Department for International Development (DFID). The paper concludes with an assessment of the ‘showcase’ potential of Mozambique and its importance to Commonwealth and DFID narrations of an African ‘success’ story of peace, stability and growth since the end of the country’s devastating civil war in 1992.     

Oil ‘futures’: Shell’s Scenarios and the social constitution of the global oil market

This article explores the relationship between the oil industry’s representation of operating conditions in key sites of extraction and the constitution of oil futures markets. An analysis of Shell Oil’s recent Scenarios publications, the ‘Trilemma Scenarios to 2025’ and subsequent ‘Scramble and Blueprints Scenarios to 2050’, provides insight into both the (global) social construction of oil prices and the oil industry’s reaction to social resistance in its operating environment - whether in the form of movements for resource sovereignty or climate change activism. Examining the implications of these two Scenario publications for key sites of Shell investment, the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Canadian Tar Sands, the article demonstrates that understanding the discursive implications of ‘peak oil’ for the petroleum industry requires contextualizing discussions of ‘scarcity’ within business agents role in shaping oil futures markets, and private industry’s interest in the ongoing development of unconventional fossil fuel sources. While the role of deregulated futures trading receives little attention in the Shell Scenarios, speculative trading - and thus perception concerning supply among business agents - is central to shaping global oil prices and thus the social conditions of the oil market.     

Failure and strategic projects: Australia’s Asia-Pacific vision

This paper uses Australia’s 1980s shift to a new accumulation strategy of ‘international competitiveness’ to examine the role of failure in shaping state strategic projects. The paper argues that the Australian strategy’s gradual shift from an interventionist to a market-led orientation played out in competing representations of failure. Whether particular policies were perceived as failures depended not only on their material effects, but also on the ways in which failure was defined and on the values underpinning those definitions. As representations of failure establish the boundaries between the incremental adaptations that stabilise an accumulation strategy and the more radical failures characteristic of crisis, they illuminate how processes of discursive selectivity ‘fix’ state projects’ temporal, scalar and spatial dimensions.     

‘We do not want to leave our land’: Pacific ambassadors at the United Nations resist the category of ‘climate refugees’

The issue of the social geographical dimensions of climate change is timely and important. This paper sets out to explore one example of this: how people living in the Pacific who are most at risk of being made landless by climate change are portrayed in policy discourse, and how high-level international representatives of Pacific nations have responded to these portrayals. At the heart of this is contention over the portrayal of Pacific Island peoples as ‘climate refugees’. This paper analyses a number of documents since the 1980s, largely from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that deploy the identity construct of ‘climate refugees’. Fieldwork undertaken at the United Nations in New York in 2004 also enabled seven interviews with national ambassadors representing Pacific small island states. Interviews revealed how Pacific ambassadors have responded to the category of ‘climate refugees’, and positioned themselves in the discursive field surrounding the climate change debate. A poststructuralist framework, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of discourse and subject categories provided a means to critically scrutinise and better understand how people from Pacific countries are imagined in the wider, global geopolitical arena, but crucially, how leaders from these nations also construct themselves in relation to climate change and its associated impacts.     

Labouring geography: Negotiating scales, strategies and future directions

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.     

Governing minorities and development in Xishuangbanna, China: Akha and Dai rubber farmers as entrepreneurs

In Xishuangbanna, southern Yunnan, Akha and Dai farmers, regarded in China as “backward”, passive recipients of state-led development, have been “getting rich” on rubber and expanding rubber cultivation into neighbouring Laos. State cash crop campaigns to raise minority farmers’ incomes inadvertently turned minority farmers into dynamic entrepreneurs. This paper builds on Vinay Gidwani’s use of development as a “regime of value” to raise social and economic value to analyze these unexpected results. Local state agents believe they are the agents of development, bringing modest social and economic improvements to minority farmers of obdurate backwardness. Minority farmers see themselves as improving their own incomes and “quality”, a term in China for social value, in an era when they are responsible for their own development. National development discourse encourages citizens to raise population quality by becoming entrepreneurial, a message heard by minority rubber farmers as well as urban elites. Through creative, post-Fordist production models and agile deployment of land, labour, and capital, minority farmers have achieved incomes that exceed those of workers on state rubber farms, large plantations whose Fordist production models are losing out in the uneven transition from a planned economy to a more capitalist market assemblage. Akha and Dai rubber farmers, the “backward” minorities on China’s periphery, have unexpectedly become the forerunners of flexible production arrangements that are prevailing in the arena opened up by China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization.     

Negotiated space: Tourists, pilgrims, and the Bahá’í terraced gardens in Haifa

This paper explores the inherent contradiction and conceptual conflict that arises when sacred sites are marketed as secular for the purpose of promoting tourism. The question of conflict is further frustrated within the context of Israel’s contested religious landscape and Israeli policy. Using a Lefebvrian framework, the historical development of the Bahai Gardens in Haifa, Israel, the tourism board’s promotion of the site as Haifa’s primary tourist designation, and the distinct spatial practices that have been used by both constituencies are investigated. Further, the authors posit that the Bahai Gardens are multi-dimensional spaces characterized by two different socio-spatial processes and practices that co-exist—the tourist’s and the pilgrim’s. These practices transform the holy site into a secular shared community asset. The paper concludes with a discussion of the socio-spatial implications of the case and its broader implications concerning the globalization of tourism and the efficacy of developing “layered” Lefebvrian triad to try and avoid conflict.     

Globalising failures

In this introduction and special issue we examine the ideas of ‘globalisation’ and ‘failure’ as concept metaphors that encapsulate contemporary processes of social, economic and political transformation. Through an emphasis on situated understandings, this collection explores the implications and consequences of attributions of failure in specific contexts. A focus on ‘failure’ opens up key trajectories of globalising processes and “actually existing neoliberalisms” [Brenner, N., Theodore, N., 2002. Cities and the geographies of ‘‘actually existing neoliberalism”. Antipode 34 (3), 349-379] to critical scrutiny, revealing a plurality of interpretations and contributing to a critical interrogation of globalisation discourse.     

The consolations of ‘neoliberalism’

Recent work on neoliberalism has sought to reconcile a Marxist understanding of hegemony with poststructuralist ideas of discourse and governmentality derived from Foucault. This paper argues that this convergence cannot resolve the limitations of Marxist theories of contemporary socio-economic change, and nor do they do justice to the degree to which Foucault’s work might be thought of as a supplement to liberal political thought. The turn to Foucault highlights the difficulty that theories of hegemony have in accounting for the suturing together of top-down programmes with the activities of everyday life. However, the prevalent interpretation of governmentality only compounds this problem, by supposing that the implied subject-effects of programmes of rule are either automatically realised, or more or less successfully ‘contested’ and ‘resisted’. Theories of hegemony and of governmentality both assume that subject-formation works through a circular process of recognition and subjection. Both approaches therefore treat ‘the social’ as a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental rationalities. This means that neither approach can acknowledge the proactive role that long-term rhythms of socio-cultural change can play in reshaping formal practices of politics, policy, and administration. The instrumental use of notions of governmentality to sustain theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization supports a two-dimensional understanding of political power—which is understood in terms of relations of imposition and resistance—and of geographical space—which is understood in terms of the diffusion and contingent combination of hegemonic projects. Theories of neoliberalism provide a consoling image of how the world works, and in their simplistic reiteration of the idea that liberalism privileges the market and individual self-interest, they provide little assistance in thinking about how best to balance equally compelling imperatives to respect pluralistic difference and enable effective collective action.     

The contested spaces of Cuban development: Post-socialism, post-colonialism and the geography of transition

The experience of the (post)socialist South has been marginal to the study of transition, despite the many similarities between processes of transition and development. This paper tries to better understand this overlap by exploring some empirical and conceptual connections between processes of development and processes of transition in Cuba. In doing so it makes two sets of arguments. The first set of arguments concerns the nature of ‘transition’ itself. I use the ‘contested spaces’ of the Cuban (socialist) biotech sector, and specifically its attempts to attract foreign (capitalist) investment as a case study. As a high profile industry, biotechnology functioned in Cuba as a political space within which questions of transition and development could be reconfigured by blurring the boundaries between them. In turn, this has enabled the Cuban State to legitimise responses to transition that would otherwise have appeared contradictory. The second set of arguments try to explain how this was possible. I argue that the slippage between nationalist and socialist visions of development allowed biotechnology (as a specifically developmentalist project) to be variously understood as, for example, a post-colonial socialist, or anti-colonial nationalist project in ways that suited the needs of transition at any one time. Such recombinations in many ways account for the non-linear and reversible nature of transition in Cuba. I speculate as to whether Bruno Latour’s work on the way capitalist societies understand themselves to be ‘modern’, helps explain how, in (post)socialist countries, processees of transition can be shaped through different historical constructions of modernisation and development.     

FDI policy and political spaces for labour: The disarticulation of the Bolivian petroleros

Recent literature asserts that labour movements worldwide have been disempowered as a result of the various processes and discourses linked to economic globalisation. But there is a need to explore more carefully the mechanisms by which these processes and discourses affect resources for and constraints on effective union organisation. The purpose of this paper is to understand the construction of political spaces for organised labour and how these have been influenced by one such discourse: the policy discourse on foreign direct investments (FDI). It analyses the relationship between this policy discourse and political spaces for Bolivian petrolero unions through a case study of the period from 1984 to 2006. The policy discourse shifted the function of the state, fragmented symbols of collective identity, introduced flexible contracts, decentralised negotiations, rewarded individual achievement, and fostered competition rather than cooperation between employees. The shift towards an internationally integrated, FDI-driven economy shapes political spaces that allow collective action to be restructured from the workplace-based demands of unions to demands for democratic and indigenous rights of NGOs and other non-labour civil society organisations.     

The limits to good governance and the state of exception: A case study of North Sea fisheries

This paper explores a series of maxims, widely known in policy and academic circles as the ‘principles of good governance’, which state that policymaking in the European Union (EU) should be participatory, conducted as close to citizens as practicable, transparent, accountable, effective and coherent. These maxims were introduced into EU fisheries management as part of a radical reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in 2002. This reform was instituted in response to criticisms of a prevailing management regime alleged to be inefficient, undemocratic, and potentially responsible for an environmental crisis: the exhaustion of key fish stocks. The research for this work has found that there are limits to the actual achievement of good governance in EU fisheries. In practice governance innovations are very often contradictory and rife with tensions. I reason that such problems result not merely from policy implementation failures; they constitute a more endemic feature of the CFP reforms. We can begin to understand these limits to good governance principles by looking to Agamben’s permanent state of exception thesis. Agamben’s theory helps to show how these contradictions and tensions occur under new governance regimes, because the relationship between democratic norms (like good governance) and political power is no longer clear. I argue that this blurring has been exploited by groups seeking influence in these new regimes. They do this through citing a supposed need for emergency measures to mitigate crisis. Although this research broadly supports the state of exception thesis, my analysis leads me to question some aspects of its application in contemporary governance spaces.     

At the base of Hubbert’s Peak: Grounding the debate on petroleum scarcity

M. King Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of a ‘peak’ in US oil production has spurred a durable and divisive debate on the exhaustion of the petroleum resource. Pitting physical against economic explanations of resource scarcity, the peak oil debate has seemingly sunk into the well-worn grooves of a long history of scarcity debates. Yet, as this paper argues, this ‘stale dichotomy’ can partly be attributed to a severance from the contexts and ideas that informed Hubbert’s mathematical calculations. Specifically, this paper examines the broader influences on the peak oil model: Hubbert’s career in the newly formed field of geophysics; his personal concern with the relationship between energy and population growth; and his ties to Technocracy, Inc., a social movement originating in the US that aimed to replace political and business control with a group of specialist engineers and technicians. The paper further emphasizes the importance of institutional and political interests to the arguments launched against Hubbert, and in motivating change in this opposition over time. Last, it makes the case that the contemporary de-contextualization of Hubbert’s model has contributed towards a narrow focus of discussions within the oil industry and in certain governments on predicting the timing of a global peak, without addressing the wider questions implied by Hubbert’s model.     

‘You can get away with loads because there’s no one here’: Discourses of regulation and non-regulation in English rural spaces

Using qualitative data from a research project investigating contemporary rural identities in England this paper examines the apparently contradictory discursive claims that are made on rural spaces. It looks in particular at the ways in which these are narrated - through the notions of rural space as a site of safety, orderliness and community on the one hand and as a site of freedom, anti-order and non-regulation on the other. While the former is a familiar, entrenched and critiqued representation of rurality, the latter narrative has a more marginal and ambivalent place in the dominant rural imaginary. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of panopticism and heterotopia the paper demonstrates the ways in which the rural is a highly labile concept and emphasises its continual ‘unfinishedness’. However, alongside this, the paper suggests that the tensions and contradictions of the orderly and anti-orderly discourses are underpinned by a particular coherency that is driven by senses of community, belonging and self-regulation. While these do not resolve the contradictions of the discursive claims the potency of such drivers are sufficient to produce a particular inclusive spatiality which is able to accommodate and incorporate the different discursive positions and the practices that are associated with each.     

Enacting separate social worlds: ‘International’ and ‘local’ students in public space in central Melbourne

In creating separate and distinct spaces and forms of socialising for themselves, ‘international’ and ‘local’ university students in central Melbourne are influenced by three key, spatially-linked processes. The first is institutional - it includes the allocation of international students to a certain type of housing which differs from that chosen by local students, and the practice of universities, student clubs and local churches to gather international and local students into separate groupings. The second is locational. It is the process by which international students find themselves living principally in and around the edge of the central city, an entertainment district with rowdy characteristics that these students often find distasteful. Local students, in contrast, locate in the inner suburbs for the most part, at a distance from the city centre hotspot. The third process sees socialising habits that are enacted in and by virtue of the public places in which they occur. This self-enacting socialisation further separates local students from international students. All three processes demonstrate how certain characteristics of the built environment can be invested with particular meanings and become complicit in shaping racialised social interactions.     

Globalising initiatives for gender equality and poverty reduction: Exploring ‘failure’ with reference to education and work among urban youth in The Gambia and Ghana

This paper focuses on what observers have perceived to be a failure of development leading to a ‘crisis of youth’ as increasing numbers of young people find it more difficult to gain education, access to health, a job and meet standard of living aspirations. For some, a possible escape is offered by migration to Europe, the United States or Australia, often illegally. For those remaining behind, however, international development agencies offer a ‘globalisation of solutions’ to employment, gender inequality and poverty through the millennium development goals and the programmes to attain them. In this paper we do not take the failures of development at face value but look at local contexts to present a more complex picture of the relation between education, work and social life. Based on fieldwork conducted in urban areas of The Gambia and Ghana, we argue that rather than education as a catch-all solution we need to give more attention to the costs incurred by and for young people in pursuing education and training, to the operation of and actual opportunities in labour markets, and to patterns of gender socialisation which give women limited scope to exercise agency. This paper explores key gender dimensions of work and education among low-income urban youth noting that despite on-going efforts to increase young women’s enrolment in schools and access to employment, gender inequalities have been far from eradicated. Our field interviews reveal how social expectations that women should perform the bulk of reproductive labour in their youth as well as in adulthood and constraints placed on young women’s personal freedom in respect of their social relationships reduce time dedicated to education and establish fewer contacts relevant to securing paid employment. The result is for men to end up with more educational qualifications, more skills, and higher-paying jobs, even if unemployment among young people in general remains a major problem.     

John Dewey’s metaphysical ground-map and its implications for geographical inquiry

John Dewey was the most significant and influential thinker associated with the American philosophy commonly known as pragmatism. Drawing on Dewey’s writings as well as the work of Deweyan scholars, I endeavor to explain Dewey’s unique contribution to philosophical discourse and how his overlooked scholarship can inform geographical inquiry. After an introduction, I provide a background understanding of Dewey and his context as well as the use of his philosophy in geography and sociology. I then turn to an exposition of Dewey’s metaphysics which are the heart of his philosophy. My discussion breaks his metaphysics into four parts: nature and continuity, contingency and change, situated sociality, and transaction. The subsequent section argues for Dewey’s distinction and value by arguing a particular implication of Dewey’s work for geography—a reconceptualization of place—and more general propositions about what a Dewey-informed geography would, at minimum, entail. A brief conclusion summarizes the Deweyan vision in the context of geographical inquiry.