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”.     

Making autonomous geographies: Argentina’s popular uprising and the ‘Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados’ (Unemployed Workers Movement)

This paper addresses the idea of autonomy—the desire for freedom, self-organisation and mutual aid. Through challenging economic neoliberalism, state repression, a powerful transnational elite, and the commodification of nature and resources, many communities, especially in the global south, are trying to manage their own affairs. Using the example of the Movement of Unemployed Workers (El Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados) in Argentina, I explore the idea of autonomous geographies and how they are made and remade at three overlapping levels: the territorial, through the emergence of networked autonomous neighbourhoods which are selectively open and closed to translocal links; the material, through the development of a solidarity economy where immediate needs are met and work is redefined, and; the social, where collective action and daily practice helps constitute more collective, autonomous forms of social interactions. In their desire to manage connections with the outside world while at the same time inspire autonomous place projects elsewhere, the MTDs represent both a ‘militant localism’ and ‘militant pluriversalism’. Moreover, while such experiments in making and embedding ‘autonomous geographies’ face limits and have few widespread examples on which to draw, it is through constant questioning and collective struggle at the everyday level that autonomy is made real.     

Enacting things through numbers: Taking nature into account/ing

In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the ‘critical limits’ of nature under the impact of acidification was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not ‘Nature’ as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the effect of this process was to produce ‘a nature as a whole’, in a process of unification. This I argue can only be understood relationally: ‘Nature’ is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour’s work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look first at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.     

The nonillusory effects of neoliberalisation: Linking geographies of poverty, inequality, and violence

This paper steps into recent debates concerning the (f)utility of neoliberalism as an ‘actually existing’ concept by reminding the reader that without a Marxian political economy approach, one that specifically includes neoliberalisation as part of its theoretical edifice, we run the risk of obfuscating the reality of capitalism’s festering poverty, rising inequality, and ongoing geographies of violence as something unknowable and ‘out there’. By failing to acknowledge such nonillusory effects of neoliberalisation and refusing the explanatory power neoliberalism holds in relating similar constellations of experiences across space as a potential basis for emancipation, we precipitously ensure the prospect of a violent future.     

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.     

The feeling of participation: Everyday spaces and urban change

Initiatives around ‘public participation’ and ‘community involvement’ have become increasingly central to UK government policy programmes, particularly within interventions aimed at disadvantaged neighbourhoods. These initiatives have been the subject of extensive critical comment, essentially focusing on the ways in which power is often maintained by state agencies, whatever the surrounding rhetoric. This article attempts to consider what more productive forms of participation might feel like, through drawing on fieldwork with two small community groups on housing estates in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, to look at how and why they were able to generate successful participation in their activities. The importance of the small-scale interactions and feelings that made up their spaces of participation is explored. These can be characterised through ideas such as ‘feeling comfortable’, ‘feeling at home’, ‘helping out’ and ‘keeping going’, and involve everyday sociability and informal forms of volunteering. If government is serious about supporting political participation in such contexts it needs to consider how official projects might learn from these kinds of spaces.     

Market triumphalism and the CBNRM ‘crises’ at the South African section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Transfrontier conservation has taken Southern Africa by storm, where the modus operandi remains simple and intuitive: by dissolving boundaries, local benefits grow as conservation and development spread regionally. However, in the case of South Africa’s section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, political and economic change redirects benefits to support ‘modern’ economies at the expense of rural livelihoods through community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Neo-liberal agendas promoted by government and the transfrontier park derail efforts at decentralizing CBNRM initiatives beyond markets and state control. This paper argues that ‘hybrid neoliberal’ CBNRM has arisen in private and public sector delivery of devolved conservation and poverty relief projects as ‘tertiary production’ for regional development. As a result, ‘CBNRM’ projects related to and independent of transfrontier conservation support private sector interests rather than the resource base of rural livelihoods. Concluding sections assert that CBNRM can counter this neoliberal trend by supporting the land-based economy of local users living near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.     

Development for a postneoliberal era? Sumak kawsay,living well and the limits to decolonisation in Ecuador

Latin American development is being rapidly transformed, with popularly elected governments embarking on reversals of neoliberalism informed by autochthonous notions of human wellbeing. Through a detailed examination of the origins and application of one development model, this article examines the constraints on and limits to postneoliberal development in terms of state-civil society relations and as a form of postcolonial governmentality. Interpreting Ecuadorian sumak kawsay (living well in English) in relation to embedded political cultures, specific opportunity structures, and the dynamic between contentious and electoral politics highlights the extent of room for manoeuvre in rethinking development. As a form of governmentality and pastoral power, Ecuadorian ‘postneoliberalism’ incorporates a constitutional commitment to social rights, collective citizens and the rights of nature. The paper also reveals the difficulty of making a definitive break from neoliberalism, which remains pervasive in practice, conceptualisations and state formations. Moreover, although various forms of anti-colonial ‘border thinking’ were proposed by social movement’s contentious politics, the paper argues that sumak kawsay works to sustain postcolonial conditions of development.     

Greening western China: A critical view

The dominant narrative in a growing literature about China’s environment conceptualizes a series of recent large-scale ecological construction projects, particularly in western China, as evidence of a teleological graduation into eco-rational modernity, in which environmental improvement and economic growth are intertwined in a virtuous, mutually reinforcing circle. Such ecological modernization narratives take for granted both a crisis of ecological degradation, and the premise that the “greening” of the state will have environmental improvement as its primary outcome. The article reviews recent research on ecological construction projects to protect forests and grasslands in China’s west, which have been identified as major components of China’s ecological modernization goals. It demonstrates the limitations of an ecological modernization framework for analyzing these projects, and argues instead for a critical political ecology analysis, which examines the distributive effects of these projects and employs an analytic of governmentality. Ecological construction is more productively understood as a set of discursive practices that authorize differential interventions through processes of internal territorialization, rework the relationship between different categories of citizens and the state, and produce subjects, whose desires may or may not align with those desired by state institutions.     

(Re)producing gender cultures: Theorizing gender in investment banking recruitment

Recent work within human geography and the social sciences more generally has attempted to explore and theorise the unfavourable gender relations within organizations which continue to produce a disadvantageous position for women. This paper argues that there is a need to implement a more spatially aware epistemology in the production of such theory. It develops a theoretical approach to organizational gender relations centred around the concept of ‘gender culture’, arguing that to understand gender in the workplace more effectively, it needs to be theorized through the daily social practices which occur in specific organizations. This argument is explored through a case study of the way in which investment banks in the City of London reproduce masculine ‘gender cultures’ through the recruitment process. Building on the recent work of McDowell (Capital culture: gender at work in the city. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), the research presented considers the way in which the ‘pre-organizational gender culture’ of investment banking recruits contributes to the reproduction of masculine gender cultures in those organizations. It also explores how the recruitment process itself—in the shape of interviews, assessment techniques and selection criteria—is also imbued with masculine cultural attributes, and thus aids the reproduction of hegemonic masculinities within the investment banking workplace.     

Quo vadis neoliberalism? The remaking of global capitalist governance after the Washington Consensus

The Washington Consensus, through which neoliberal global capitalist governance gained hegemony over the third world, entered a crisis in the late 1990s. Triggered by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and by contestations of neoliberal governance from global civil society, two remakings of global capitalist governance can be identified: A ‘post-Washington consensus’ whose relation to neoliberalism is complex; and a ‘new development economics’ that advocates Keynesian principles. Irrespective of the trajectory of this emergent phase of re-regulation, particularly after the 2008 global finance crisis, these remakings can be conceptualized as supplements reinforcing an imaginary of capitalism as the solution to, rather than progenitor of, uneven development. Through discourses of capitalist development as a sequential trajectory to be followed by all countries, as flattening the world to enable catch-up by backward countries, and as incorporating socio-spatial difference via its commodification, this socio-spatial imaginary functions to legitimate expertise located in the first world, and global capitalist governance, irrespective of serial policy failures.     

Neoliberal development through technical assistance: Constructing communities of entrepreneurial subjects in Oaxaca, Mexico

Technical assistance (TA) has a long and varied history as a development practice. It initially emerged as a set of ‘hard’ programs, tools, and technologies delivered to developing countries by imported First World experts, typically in the agricultural and resource sectors. Later, in response to critical and antidevelopment theories, TA morphed into its ‘soft’ version, attempting to empower marginalized people in the Global South by delivering the know-how - often collaboratively generated - sufficient to produce forms of development ‘from below’. In spite of this shift in the politics and practices of TA, it remains susceptible to neoliberal styles of development that have proceeded apace with withdrawal of state institutions in the funding and operation of social and economic development programs, and with the concomitant rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).In this paper, we follow the operation of one TA program operated by an intermediary NGO in Oaxaca, Mexico. We find that the program intersects with neoliberalization in two prominent ways, relying on a form of governmentality that codifies and prescribes: (a) the social spaces of action and need, and (b) learning subjects deficient in entrepreneurial initiative and know-how. We conclude by commenting on the political economic conditions that continue to underwrite TA as a development practice in spite of a decade or more of criticism directed at it and we consider the possibilities for its subversion.     

The political ecology of hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada: Masculinities, work and the production of the forestscape

This article attempts to empirically demonstrate how the struggle for bourgeois hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada, was fought for through the production of new natures. Bringing together Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony with marxist understandings of political ecology, I examine how the legitimacy of particular groups’ dominance over subordinate groups and the survival of specific social relations was built and contested through the (re)making of the material-symbolic landscape. However, I also take seriously Stuart Hall’s argument that we must take note of the multi-dimensional character of hegemony by paying attention to the entanglement of class, gender and ecological relations during the 1930s. In order to demonstrate these arguments I examine the economic, social, moral and ecological crisis that rippled across the socionatural fabric of B.C. during the depression years. I detail how the federal and provincial states responded to the interlaced crises of class, gender and ecological relations through launching a series of public works programs and training programs. These projects were intended to modernize the forestry industry and remake unemployed men in body and soul. In doing so, I demonstrate how ideologies regarding nature come to be both enrolled in the struggle for hegemony and materialized in the making of the forestscape. By weaving theoretical insights through the socionatural history of British Columbia, I demonstrate how a gramscian sensibility pushes us to take seriously the relationality of socionatural processes and the embededdness of concepts in material histories.     

Internal colonisation, hegemony and coercion: Investigating migration to Southern Lazio, Italy, in the 1930s

This paper investigates the Italian fascist regime’s use of internal colonisation as part of a wider ruralisation policy aimed at promoting population growth, curbing rural-urban migration, staunching emigration, and halting the spread of industrial urbanisation. By focusing on the case study of the Pontine Marshes, the paper demonstrates how, through targeted selection procedures aimed at displacing defined social and political undesirables, migrants were chosen and effectively coerced into migrating to the “fascist” landscape of the marshes. The area, reclaimed and developed in the 1930s, was celebrated as a sign of the regime’s engineering and social success. The paper utilises Antonio Gramsci’s thought on hegemony, and argues that the overt use of coercion hints at the fact that fascism, although ideologically totalitarian and hegemonic, was contested. Although statisticians, demographers and state bureaucrats were organised and institutionalised in the construction of hegemony based on consent, fascism based itself more in coercion than in passive consent in the case of internal colonisation.     

Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world.     

Splintered networks: The colonial and contemporary waters of Jakarta

This paper queries the relevance of the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis to postcolonial cities of the South, and responds to calls for the production of a decentered theory of urbanization through a case study of Jakarta. Drawing on archival and interview data, the paper demonstrates that Jakarta has, since its inception, been characterized by a high degree of differentiation of access to water supply, and of fragmentation of water supply networks. We document the origins of this fragmentation in the colonial era, and trace the legacy of the colonial constructions within the postcolonial city. Moreover, we demonstrate that the introduction of private sector management (in 1988) has not significantly disrupted, and certainly not caused, this pattern. In short, we provide evidence to support our claim that Jakarta’s water supply system is ‘splintered’ rather than ‘splintering’, and demonstrate that this phenomenon was not caused by the rise (or fall) of the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’. In order to explain this sustained fragmentation of infrastructure and access, the paper develops a conceptual framework of postcolonial governmentality that emphasizes the interrelationship between materiality, governmentality, identity, and urbanization, in particular through demonstrating how contested and evolving process of social differentiation are linked to the differentiation of water supply infrastructures and of urban spaces. Although we are wary of any simplistic comparisons between the colonial past and present, we argue that the optic of postcolonial governmentality provides a powerful lens for dissecting the power relations that continue to structure access to water supply and urban space in cities in the South.     

Intervening in the environment of the everyday

This paper seeks to explore the radical democratic potential in urban artistic interventions. It does so through bringing Gramsci’s concept of nature together with his ‘cultural writings’ and broader debates around avant-garde artistic practice. Empirically, I focus on the work of City Mine(d), a Brussels-based interventionist collective, and Siraj Izhar, a London-based artist-activist. Within Gramsci’s writings, I argue, socio-natural relationships emerge through sensuous activity or work. Making a somewhat more ambitious claim, I suggest that Gramsci’s concept of nature rests on what geographers have come to understand as the production of nature. Whilst attention has only recently turned to this implicit political ecology, much greater attention has been focussed on Gramsci’s cultural insights. For Gramsci, cultural struggles are an integral part of the effort to shape a new reality. Whilst he emphasises the ‘bottom up’ nature of such struggles, the intervention of enlightened outsiders is often a necessary and frustrating complement. However, by turning attention to the manner in which hegemony relates to the production of nature, and through bringing this into dialogue with radical artistic practice, such implicit elitism might be challenged. City Mine(d) and Izhar, I argue, develop a non-vanguardist politics that sees the contestation of hegemony as a struggle integral to the day-to-day nature of cities.     

Neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility: A political economy of corporate citizenship

In this paper we situate the rise of corporate social responsibility in the context of a re-casting of the boundaries between corporate- and state-centred regulation. We argue that this process can be understood in a theoretical framework of “rolling-out” neoliberalisation. We focus firstly upon an emergent CSR consultancy industry within the UK context, demonstrating that there is now a network of organisations dedicated to making profit out of socially-responsible corporate behaviour. These organisations have helped to re-define the nature and meaning of the private sector. Then we interpret global framework agreements on corporate behaviour (such as the UN Global Compact, the Equator Principles, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative) as examples of how neoliberalism is created in and through new “in-between” spaces that set the rules of political action. Subsequently, we note that some NGOs have recently recognised the limits on campaigning for more socially responsible corporate activity, and re-connect these concerns with longer-term debates on corporate voluntarism versus state-centred regulation. We conclude that demonstrating how hegemony is constructed in and through neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility remains to be fully explored, but argue that it is beneficial to consider the diversity of political projects involved in this ongoing process.     

The dilemma of decontamination: A Gramscian analysis of the Mexican transgenic maize dispute

An intense environmental dispute surrounds the maize-fields of Mexico. Mexican maize traditional varieties (or ‘landraces’) constitute a global genetic resource that may well be critical to future agricultural development and corn breeding. Many environmentalists, farmers, and consumers in Mexico are therefore concerned that their maize landraces may have been ‘contaminated’ by imported transgenic maize, grown in the USA. The criticisms of this transgenic technology are complex and call into question the nature of the boundary between political and ecological (i.e. scientific) disputes. Our paper surveys these criticisms, and this political-scientific boundary, in a three-part analysis. First, we turn to Gramsci’s notes on science from his eleventh prison notebook to rethink the political ecology of transgenic maize, i.e., the way the ecological analysis of transgenic introgression is treated as politics. Second, we present the multiple criticisms of transgenic maize as scalar phenomena. Third, we review the recent scientific literature on transgene introgression to evaluate recent calls for the ‘decontamination’ of Mexican maize. Our reading illustrates two dilemmas facing the group that occupies the hegemonic subject-position in this dispute, ecological scientists. First, the popular desire to ‘decontaminate’ Mexican maize exceeds their capacities (due to complications involved with sampling). Second, although the political debate surrounding ‘contaminated’ Mexican maize exceeds science, the boundary between the dispute’s scientific and parascientific elements cannot be adjudicated scientifically. In other words, the boundary between science and politics is porous. Thus in two respects the dispute is ecological, yet beyond the capacity of this science to resolve. Yet, following Gramsci, these findings should not lead us to see science as mere ideology, or apolitical, or encourage a retreat into metaphysics. Rather it points to the need for a social transformation that sees science as “humanity forging its methods of research … in other words, culture, the conception of the world.” By exploring the dilemmas of decontamination, the dispute over transgene introgression in Mexican maize-fields provides an opportunity to elaborate upon Gramsci’s neglected insights into the politics of science.     

Navigating the terrains of transnational education: Children of Chinese ‘study mothers’ in Singapore

This paper demonstrates the value of child-centred migration studies which highlight children’s role in shaping the migration journeys of their families, as well as their own projected journeyings. It examines the case of children from China who move to Singapore, an aspiring global education hub, expressly for the purpose of an overseas education that will facilitate longer-term migration and life goals. Focus is given specifically to the children of ‘study mothers’ or peidu mama (literally: ‘mothers accompanying their children who are studying’). Through interviews with the teenagers and the conceptual optic of ‘social navigation’, our paper demonstrates that children are resilient and creative beings able to navigate the twists and turns of their immediate trajectories, as well as develop their own goals and projected destinations for their futures. The paper calls for a refinement in the way we understand children’s mobilities. First, in arguing that their spatial journeying across the terrains of transnational education cannot be decoupled from their process of social becoming and emotional development from passive followers to active negotiators, we wish to disrupt hegemonic discourses and dominant representations of children in migration as simply ‘migrant’s children’ and restore them to the status of ‘migrant children’. Second, adopting the concept of social navigation as an analytical lens allows us to highlight the fluid ways that young people think about their futures and the different pathways by which they can get there. This leads us to conceive of social and cultural capital accumulation through transnational education as a process with many more degrees of provisionality than what is often presented in the literature as a ‘strategic project’ with a fixed and abstract goal.