Trina Hamilton

Just green enough: contesting environmental gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

While sustainability and green urbanism have become buzzwords in urban policy circles, too little analysis has focused on who gets to decide what green looks like. Many visions of the green city seem to have room only for park space, waterfront cafes, and luxury LEED-certified buildings, prompting concern that there is no place in the “sustainable” city for industrial uses and the working class. We will use the case study of Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, New York, to explore how different visions for the green city are enacted through activism and policy-making. Neighbourhood residents and business owners seem to be advocating a strategy we call “just green enough”, in order to achieve environmental remediation without environmental gentrification. Following the crash of both the financial and real estate markets, attempts to construct a sustainable city that is economically diverse and socially just seem to be taking hold. We interrogate how urban sustainability can be used to open up a space for diversity and democracy in the neoliberal city and argue that there is space for interventions that challenge the presumed inevitability of gentrification.

Power in Numbers: A Call for Analytical Generosity toward New Political Strategies

This paper is a methodological and epistemological reflection on the power of numbers to contribute to the debate over the potential and limitations of market politics as a regulatory force in the global economy. Informal regulatory networks, including transnational corporate campaigns, form a new sphere of politics which leap-frogs the state and targets corporations directly concerning their social and environmental impacts. I describe my statistical analysis of corporate campaigns targeting US multinationals to argue in favor of analytical generosity when evaluating these new political forms. I argue that a reflexive and critical quantification can provide new insights into stakeholder power and contemporary political processes.

From “Five Angry Women” to “Kick-ass Community”: Gentrification and Environmental Activism in Brooklyn and Beyond

In this article, a new conceptual framework is advocated to evaluate the range of environmental activism in already-gentrifying neighbourhoods and to recognise the agency and resilience of long-term residents. The category of gentrifier-enhanced environmental activism is meant to account for attempts to forge coalitions (however uneasy they may turn out to be) between long-term residents and gentrifiers. This includes attempts by long-term residents to mitigate environmental gentrification by ‘schooling’ gentrifiers in communities’ longstanding concerns and needs, framing these concerns as a common cause rather than allowing for the takeover of local environmental politics often associated with environmental gentrification. The example is used of the fight to clean up Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as a case study in how environmental veterans made strategic alliances with gentrifiers who brought new resources to the area in order to achieve political pressure for change and to promote more just sustainabilities.

Beyond Market Signals: Negotiating Marketplace Politics and Corporate Responsibilities

Abstract In the face of stiff resistance to their legislative efforts in national and multilateral arenas, nongovernmental organizations, unions, and others are engaging in marketplace politics to press their social and environmental concerns. While important criticisms of market-based regulation abound, recent research has suggested that this form of politics is not restricted to simple market signals or a singular market logic, so the question of what drives corporate responsiveness remains. Drawing on a statistical analysis of a large data set of marketplace campaigns and in-depth interviews with campaign proponents, consultants, and targeted executives, this article proposes a relational framework for understanding marketplace politics, situating campaign strategies in relation to targeted firms’ brand vulnerabilities and corporate social responsibility (CSR) “absorptive capacity,” on the one hand, and parallel actions of key intermediaries—including investment advisory firms and pioneering competitors—on the other hand. I argue that it is influential minorities of consumers, investors, and intermediaries—often in dialogue with targeted executives—who create change, rather than majority, arm’s length market movements. Overall, this research enhances the multiplicity of recent case studies by identifying common opportunities and barriers for marketplace politics and contributes to the burgeoning literature within economic geography that is redrawing the boundaries of corporate CSR decision making and capacity building.

Development and Dependence Along the New York–Haiti Remittance Corridor

Haiti and other developing countries have increasingly turned to emigrant remittances as a potential source of development capital. There is a vigorous debate in the development community about the impacts of remittances, however, with concerns about dependence challenging the optimism about a potential new development engine. Based on interviews with forty-two remittance recipients in Haiti and forty-five corresponding senders in New York State, we find that the remittance economy in Haiti is indeed productive and has the potential to generate employment and other important development benefits. That said, there are important limitations created by broader political–economic conditions and deeply entrenched inequalities.

Sustainable Practice? An Examination of Canada's Agricultural and Energy Cooperatives

Cooperatives are member-run organizations focused on combined social and economic goals. Based on surveys and interviews with agricultural and energy cooperatives in Canada, we explore the range of cooperatives’ ethical orientations and trajectories within the context of environmental sustainability. We develop a new typology of environmental performance and identify market, institutional, and strategic drivers that underscore the typology. Our findings suggest that whereas younger and smaller cooperatives are the most inclined to embrace integrated environmental principles, other outlier cooperatives have resisted ethical dilution by cultivating a progressive localism rather than focusing on broadening and widening their markets.

Trade governance at a crossroads: Continuity and change in uncertain times:

The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 represented a watershed in international trade governance. The agreement set precedent in new trade disciplines, such as intellectual property rights, that had hitherto remained outside of the traditional trade realm. It was also credited with rescuing then-stalled multilateral trade talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and shaping their outcome (Wilkinson, 2014). At least equally significant is what the agreement achieved in terms of political discourse. In the United States, for instance, debate over NAFTA was central to the 1992 Presidential election. Independent candidate Ross Perot famously croaked from the edge of the debate stage that if NAFTA were passed, ‘you are going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country’ (quoted in Mayer, 1998). His opponents, Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party and the incumbent George H.W. Bush of the Republican Party, were unfazed. Both mainstream parties had signed on to the free trade agenda. Opposition from sectors fighting for the wellbeing of US, Canadian and Mexican workers alike in the face of lowest common denominator environmental and labour regulations, and the then new, binding investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, were delegitimized in the face of this mainstream consensus, dismissed as a facet of the billionaire-turned-presidential candidate’s parochial nationalism (Sparke, 2005). In the years that followed, far-reaching regional trade agreements (RTAs) would become principal tools to organize a new global trade and investment order amid continued protest from labour and progressive social movements. A quarter of a century later, another billionaire, Donald Trump, revived the discourse of Ross Perot, this time from the centre of the Presidential debate stage as the candidate for the Republican Party. Trump mixed racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric with a potent message on trade: NAFTA had been ‘the worst trade deal ever’ (quoted in Hirschfeld, 2017), responsible for huge losses in US jobs, leaving disinvested communities and disenchanted workers in its wake. To bring ‘their jobs’ back, Trump pledged not only to renegotiate NAFTA under the threat of US withdrawal (Appelbaum and Thrush, 2017), but also to cease participation in what he argued was a continuation of the same bad strategy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (Swanson, 2016). The TPP had been touted by the Obama Administration as the next

The Potential Role for Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in Trade Agreements

Trade liberalisation is often blamed for creating and exacerbating many significant environmental and social problems. The weight of these issues is evident from the importance given to them in recent trade negotiations. This article considers the potential role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting standards as mechanisms to help address some of the transparency and accountability concerns that come with trade agreements, and the corresponding potential of trade negotiations to serve as venues for refining reporting standards. Several free trade agreements (FTAs) already include provisions that encourage the disclosure and standardisation of financial reporting standards, and there is an increasing link between CSR and FTAs. The content of several recent FTAs is reviewed, demonstrating how the inclusion of CSR initiatives, including the promotion of CSR reporting, is gaining acceptance. A voluntary approach to CSR reporting (and other issues in FTAs) may have the support of developing countries that reject binding standards and fear exploitation. It may also have the support of developed countries that are looking for more actionable methods that will result in improved performance and that can also be agreed upon by partner countries that resist regulations. This article suggests that a CSR reporting link with FTAs represents an opportunity to add mechanisms of transparency and accountability that address some of the social and environmental concerns that come with FTAs.