Noel Castree

Neoliberalising Nature: The Logics of Deregulation and Reregulation

This and a companion paper examine a new and fast-growing geographical research literature about neoliberal approaches to governing human interactions with the physical environment. This literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two papers survey the literature theoretically and empirically, cognitively and normatively. They are written for the benefit of readers trying to make some sense of this growing literature and for future researchers of the topic. Specifically, they aim to parse the critical studies of natures neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions posed, variously, in many or most of them: what are the main reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’? what are the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice? what are the effects of natures neoliberalisation? and how should these effects be evaluated? Without such an effort of synthesis, this literature could remain a collection of substantively disparate, theoretically informed case studies unified only in name (by virtue of their common focus on ‘neoliberal’ policies). Though all four questions posed are answerable in principle, in practice the existing research literature makes questions two, three, and four difficult to address substantively and coherently between case studies. While the first question can, from one well-established theoretical perspective, be answered with reference to four ‘logics’ at work in diverse contexts (the focus of this paper), the issues of process, effects, and evaluations are currently less tractable (and are the focus of the next paper). Together, the two pieces conclude that critical geographers interrogating natures neoliberalisation will, in future, need to define their objects of analysis more rigorously and/or explicitly, as well as their evaluative Schemas. If the new research into neoliberalism and the nonhuman world is to realise its full potential in the years to come, then some fundamental cognitive and normative issues must be addressed. These issues are not exclusive to the literature surveyed and speak to the ‘wider’ lessons that can be drawn from any body of case study research that focuses on an ostensibly ‘general’ phenomena like neoliberalism.

Neoliberalising Nature: Processes, Effects, and Evaluations

This and a previous paper review systematically a new and fast-growing geographical research literature about ‘neoliberalising nature’. This literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two papers survey the literature theoretically and empirically, cognitively and normatively. Specifically, they aim to parse the critical literature on natures neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions: (1) what are the reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’? (2) what are the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice? (3) what are the effects of natures neoliberalisation? and (4) how should these effects be evaluated? Without such an effort of synthesis, this literature could remain a collection of substantively disparate, theoretically informed case studies unified only in name (by virtue of their common focus on ‘neoliberal’ policies). This paper addresses questions 2, 3, and 4, while the previous paper concentrated on the first. It is argued that some unresolved issues in the published literature make it very difficult for readers and future researchers in this area to draw ‘wider’ lessons about process, effects, and evaluations. This is not so much a ‘failing’ of the literature as a reflection of its newness and the way its constituent parts have evolved. It is argued that these issues require careful attention in future so that the ‘general’ lessons of the literature published to date on natures neoliberalisation can be made clear. Where the previous paper detected some ‘signals in the noise’ viz question 1, this paper suggests that more work needs to be done viz questions 2 to 4 for any signals to be detected.

Commodifying what nature

In this essay contemporary Marxist writings on the commodification of nature in capitalist societies are reviewed systematically. Recent research on commodities in human geography, cultural studies and related fields have been largely post or non-Marxist in tenor and have paid relatively little attention to the ‘natural’ dimensions of commodities. By contrast, recent Marxist writings about capitalism-nature relations have tried to highlight both the specificity of capitalist commodification and its effects on ecologies and bodies. This fact notwithstanding, it is argued that the explanatory and normative dimensions of this Marxist work are, respectively, at risk of being misunderstood and remain largely implicit. On the explanatory side, confusion arises because the words ‘commodification’ and ‘nature’ are used by different Marxists to refer to different things that deserve to be disentangled. On the normative side, the Marxian criticisms of natures commodification are rarely explicit and often assumed to be self-evident. The essay offers a typology of commodification processes relating to specific natures with specific effects to which a variety of criticisms can be applied. Though essentially exegetical rather than reconstructive, the essay tries to pave the way for a more precise sense of how the commodification of nature in capitalist societies works and why it might be deemed to be problematic.

False Antitheses? Marxism, Nature and Actor‐Networks

This paper stages an encounter between two critical approaches that have been central to the recent ?greening? of left geography. The theoretical and normative claims of the first approach, eco-Marxism, have been subject to sometimes biting criticism from advocates of the second approach, actor-network theory (ANT). Taking a nonorthodox Marxist perspective, I argue that the ANT critique of political economy approaches to nature is overstated and only partly defensible. By distinguishing between different modalities of eco-Marxism and ANT, I show the seeming standoff between the two approaches to society-nature relations to be false. Splitting the difference between a weak version of ANT and a relational version of eco-Marxism yields a political economy approach to socionature that arguably avoids the excesses of strong modalities of ANT and dualistic forms of eco-Marxism. By seeking to bridge the apparent gap between Marxism and ANT, the paper avoids reducing either approach to society-nature relations to one fixed position or theoretical-normative ?essence?. Instead, a particular modality of ANT is used to address the weaknesses of certain extant versions of eco-Marxism. The resulting synthesis offers conceptual tools with which Marxists can still critique a pervasive mode of human relationality to nature?namely, capitalist?while multiplying the actors and complicating the politics involved in approaching the society-environment nexus.

Environmental issues: relational ontologies and hybrid politics

Neil Smith (1996: 49) has argued that we urgently need a new ‘political theory of nature’ that can reconceptualize the means and ends of politics in an increasingly hybrid world. In this report, I scrutinize recent attempts in human geography and cognate fields to construct an ‘amodern’ political vocabulary. Since these attempts are underpinned by relational ontologies, I also examine the work of those who are seeking to recognize ‘society’ and ‘environment’ in non-dualistic ways. Two recent books about life in a chimeric universe illustrate what is at stake in these rethinkings of reality and politics. In Our posthuman future, Francis Fukuyama (2002a) offers a plenary account of the ‘new genetics’. His worry is that the physical mixing of humans and non-humans will prove to be politically debilitating, even dangerous: ‘The posthuman world . . . could be one in which any notion of “shared humanity” is lost, because we have mixed human genes with those of so many other species that we no longer have a clear idea of what a human being is’ (Fukuyama, 2002b: 7). For Fukuyama, the trangressive potentials of biotechnology threaten the very foundation of political reasoning. In a posthuman world, he fears, we will be unable to assign political Progress in Human Geography 27,2 (2003) pp. 203–211

Introduction: Professional Geography and the Corporatization ofthe University: Experiences, Evaluations, and Engagements

While the recent “cultural turn” in geography has sometimes led to a neglect of political economy, the capitalist economy in all its creative and destructive dynamism has not neglected professional geographers. Instead, as both producers and consumers of academic knowledge and as teachers, students, researchers, and readers, we have been witness to, or at very least blind participants in, a sweeping set of economically driven changes steadily transforming academic institutions around the world from the 1980s onwards. In the last decade we busily debated how postmodernism might relate to both postFordist economic reorganization and postfoundationalist thinking, moved on to address situated knowledges and the politics of location, and have become fascinated more recently with bodies and their diverse cultural geographies. However, we have tended not to address as directly as we might the ways in which our own bodies as academics situated in universities are being fed, counted, and variously decorated, maintained, and exhausted in institutions altered at the very foundation by the same flexible accumulation dynamics that earlier excited such analytical enthusiasm. To be sure, the “we” assumed in these opening sentences is problematically homogenizing, and one of the purposes of this special issue of Antipode 32:3, 2000, pp. 222–229 ISSN 0066-4812

Professionalisation, activism and the university: whither 'critical geography'?

In this paper I seek to describe, explain, and evaluate three decades of Left geographical change. Now that ‘critical geography’—rather than ‘radical geography’—has become the privileged descriptor for Left geographical inquiry, it is argued that this temporal switch of labels is of more than merely semantic significance. Specifically, it is suggested that the supercession of the ‘radical geography’ label is symptomatic of a substantive shift in the nature and purposes of Left geographical inquiry. This shift has entailed the ‘professionalisation’ and ‘academicisation’ of Left geography. Both developments have occurred in the context of a thirty-year transition from a ‘modern’ to an ‘after-modern’ higher education system. Taking the Anglo-American case, it is argued that the current vitality of the geographical (read ‘critical’) Left in the academy correlates with its detachment from ‘real world’ political constituencies and also a blindness to the academic changes underpinning this inverse correlation. Rather than worrying over their apparent failure to connect with constituencies ‘out there’, it is argued that geographical Leftists need to recapture something of the radical geography spirit of action and engagement in order to contest changes occurring ‘in here’: that is, changes in the political and moral economy of the higher system that enables and constrains our academic labours. A brief manifesto for a ‘domesticated critical geography’ is offered by way of a conclusion.

Geographic Scale and Grass‐Roots Internationalism: The Liverpool Dock Dispute, 1995–1998*

Abstract In the context of ongoing debates over the effects of “globalization” on organized labor and, specifically, recent experiments in labor internationalism, this paper examines the geography of the Liverpool dock dispute, 1995–98. The dispute has rarely been subject to a serious analysis of its causes and trajectory. This is surprising since it was not only the most protracted industrial dispute in recent British history but also the hub of a relatively novel form of transnational labor organizing: namely, a form of grass-roots internationalism organized largely outside the formal apparatuses of national and international unionism. In the paper I focus on the nature and dynamics of this “grass-roots internationalis” with a view to making two claims that have a wider thematic and theoretical relevance to the study of labor geographies. First, contrary to an emerging new orthodoxy in labor geography (and labor studies more generally), the Liverpool case in fact suggests that the necessity for labor to “up-scale” solidarity and struggle in the 1990s is much overstated. Second, the Liverpool case suggests that international labor organizing is only efficacious when considered in relation to two scales of struggle often thought increasingly irrelevant or ineffectual in a globalizing world: the local and the national. Thus, while those few analysts who have cited the Liverpool dispute, basing their assessments on secondhand knowledge, have held the dockers up as exemplars of a new form of labor internationalism, in this paper I suggest the need for a more complex and contingent appreciation of the multiscalar dynamics of labor struggles. In short, we have not yet reached the stage, even in a globalizing world, where labor’s “spatial fixes” must be preeminently supranational.

Marxism and the production of nature

This essay surveys a century of debate on the Marx-nature question. It seeks to expose, critique and reformulate a set of foundational assumptions which, it is argued, have informed this debate. Three main arguments are put forward. First, it is suggested that successive attempts to expound a Marxian theory of nature have see-sawed between naturalistic and social constructionist positions. Second, as such many Marxist theories of nature are shown (ironically) to have much in common with forms of bourgeois and anti-bourgeois environmentalism they otherwise oppose. Finally, as a way out of the impasse of Marxian thinking on nature, a conception of the production of nature is tentatively put forward.

Research assessment and the production of geographical knowledge

This Forum examines the research assessment systems (RASs) that affect professional human geography, and offers perspectives on the whole idea of formal research assessment. The Forum aims to assist professional geographers in their reflections on present and future research assessment in their own countries. It comprises two parts. The first offers highly succinct and detailed descriptions of the RASs currently in place in a range of countries -be they highly centralized, standardized and formal systems, or devolved and relatively informal ones. Many professional geographers know little about the assessment procedures outside their own countries and the first part allows a comparative understanding to be developed. The second part (‘Whither research assessment?’) offers reflections on the whole notion of research assessment beyond the ‘normal’ assessment offered by peer review of papers, books and chapters; considers whether actually existing systems of research assessment in one or more countries embody the values conducive to an ‘appropriate’ form of research assessment; and it also considers the actual or probable impacts on the content and form of geographical knowledge of real or possible RASs.