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• Water systems rely on a set of complex social arrangements. • Water access cannot be separated from wider political processes. • Financialisation is resisted if it does not align with the interests of the elite. • Water rights are observed if this suits the interests of the ruling class. Despite pressure from international donors and the national government, neoliberal policies have not had a transformational impact on the way water is provided in Mumbai. Some modest reforms were introduced but these have not led to major change. Moreover, in 2022 the city introduced a policy of 'Water for All' to extend water access to slum areas. At first sight this system might seem to be a socially progressive approach to water management, which might be surprising given the right-wing orientation of Shiv Sena, the political party which has been in power since the 1990s. But this paper shows that policy has been shaped by an unlikely alignment of diverse interests. Campaigners have been resisting neoliberal policies and demanding fair water rights for slum dwellers for years. But these demands gained policy traction when they overlapped with the interests of the engineers who manage the complex water system, as well as the political regime. For decades, slum households have been scapegoated and water access was deemed illegal for millions of the city's poorest residents. But the political climate has recently shifted such that it now suits the ruling party to expand water access, although restrictions remain. This paper shows how global paradigms intersect with embedded structures, politics and institutions to create contextually specific outcomes. Drawing on Brenner and Theodore (2002) , we argue that the same context that generated Mumbai's form of 'actually existing' neoliberalism has also created a distinctive, 'actually existing', interpretation of the human right to water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper examines wildlife conservation discourses promoted by hunting companies. • Considers the significance of technology for four hunting companies in the U.S. • Analyzes discourses of technology promoted on company websites. • Finds companies emphasize trophy animals, neoliberalism, and exclusionary politics. • And argues environmentality studies should explicitly consider discursive absences. Understanding dynamics around the neoliberalization of conservation is an important direction within current scholarly research. In this paper, we contribute to these discussions by examining how companies within the hunting industry engage in practices that are reflective of neoliberal environmentality. We conduct a Foucauldian discourse analysis of four companies' websites to interrogate what discourses of technology companies promote to hunters and anglers, how they mobilize these discourses, and how these discourses function to reproduce wildlife conservation-minded subjects and maintain particular beliefs, identities, and practices about both wildlife conservation and conservationists that uphold state conservation objectives. Through our discourse analysis, we find that companies within the hunting industry construct hunter/angler wildlife conservation-minded subjects by educating consumers, legitimizing trophy animals, using identity politics, positioning technology as a conservation(ist's) tool, and through wearing camouflage. Subsequently, we argue these companies present a view of wildlife conservation that problematically privileges neoliberal values, trophy animals, and exclusionary politics, illustrating how discourses of technology function to obscure such issues. Examinations of environmentality must therefore more explicitly consider discursive absences and other hidden aspects of conservation as well as potential consequences of failing to address oversights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that aroma hops are a neoliberal crop par excellence , shaping new political ecologies and economies of hops production and marketing globally. The value of aroma hops has grown significantly over the last decade. The aesthetic and chemical properties of new aroma varieties are central to the new cultural and political milieu of the rapidly expanding craft beer brewing sector. In response, some hop-growing regions are expanding their production, while others are re-orienting to new market dynamics or attempting to maintain their existing production traditions. This paper will draw from qualitative fieldwork in the USA, Aotearoa (New Zealand), the UK, and Germany to explore the political, social and economic effects of the massive and rapid growth of aroma hops production. Developing the concept of an aesthetic regime , we will consider how the botany of hop plants have influenced the development of new power dynamics around distinction and control of aroma hop varieties. This generated a new aesthetic regime that reshapes regional infrastructures in breeding, cooperative marketing, and trade, while bringing regions into new relations with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship of the Trump presidency to both American conservatism and neoliberalism, and then uses this discussion to focus on the questions of populism and authoritarianism. It does so through a focus on the populist idea that America has been betrayed, and examines the similarities and differences between neoliberals and paleoconservatives over how the republican ideal can be revived through the promise of Making America Great Again. The paper thus explores how both theories explain this notion of betrayal and how they both promise the reconstruction of a betrayed nation. In doing so however, the article explores the tensions within and between the two theories and suggests that in the area where there is significant difference, namely (neoliberal) globalisation and (paleoconservative) anti-globalisation, these tensions are played out in specific ways, and specifically between populist promise and corporate reality. Ii is this tension which goes to the heart of the nature of both Trump's authoritarianism and his populism, and the paper concludes that while the contemporary American populist moment is in some respect a backlash against neoliberal globalization, it is less a wholesale break from neoliberalism and more a shift to a renewed form of right wing neoliberal populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy efficiency represents a financial threat to energy companies. This paper examines how investor-owned electricity companies in North Carolina have turned the threat of energy efficiency – or "negawatts" – into a new arena of accumulation. They have done this by exploiting features of the North Carolina Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard (REPS), a law passed in 2007 that encourages energy efficiency. I argue that under REPS, electricity companies have positioned themselves, counter-intuitively, as the primary producers of less of their main product. As such, these companies have been awarded high rates of return for creating energy efficiency projects. This paper builds on previous research into how environmental crises like climate change have been turned into new opportunities for accumulation in the neoliberal era. It focuses on neoliberal accumulation in an understudied system (electricity), socio-nature (energy efficiency), and political economic context (the regulated monopoly). Through reregulation, REPS creates negawatts as a new monopoly product for IOUs, contrary to what might be expected from previous research on green neoliberalism which often emphasizes the processes of commodification. This case study offers insights into the kinds of accumulation tactics that may occur in other regulated monopoly political economic contexts. Illuminating these tactics can inform more equitable and sustainable energy efficiency policies and programs by focusing attention on the need for transparency, alternative energy efficiency producers, and diverse energy efficiency programs aimed at reducing energy poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as 'actually existing austerity'—referring to the uneven ways through which austerity is felt, negotiated, embodied and contested in the varied spatial tapestry of everyday life. Through theorisation of the contemporary operation of food banking in the UK, it will be argued that the gaps in provisioning (in this case, of food) left by welfare reform and state spending cuts in the UK under the guise of austerity are engendering new forms of responsibility that are unevenly distributed and performed—often by those already excluded, marginalised and impoverished. This localisation of responsibility has crucial implications for how austerity becomes embodied and negotiated, as well as the unequal material implications it holds for different people and places. This paper concludes by arguing for a future research agenda concerning actually existing austerity, signalling the need for 'thicker' and more grounded accounts of austerity at scales beyond the nation-state and/or city alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Debates on the political ecology of populism has not reached the conservation field. • Yet a new populist conservation model is appearing in different locations in Spain. • Populist conservation builds on neoliberal and participatory conservation. • It permits the co-optation and privatization of conservation. • It can be resisted from an environmental justice rationale. The global surge of right-wing populism and its impact on environmental policies are attracting the attention of political ecologists. However, little of this debate has reached the nature conservation literature. In this paper, I explore the emergence of populist logics in conservation as a result of the entrenchment of neoliberalism after the 2008 economic crisis. On the one hand, neoliberalism has incited the roll-back of public institutions that hitherto monopolised the management of protected areas (PAs), as well as the roll-out of market-based and network-based forms of PA governance. At the same time, it has also had a significant impact on rural communities, imposing austerity policies that have caused a great deal of social and economic precarity and vulnerability, generating feelings of abandonment, dispossession and disenfranchisement. To illustrate how these two phenomena intersect and motivate the surge of right-wing populism in conservation, this paper dissects a number of parliamentary debates on a recent policy reform that seeks to decentralise the management of PAs in Asturias, a region in the north of Spain. These debates brought together stakeholders and members of several rural groups with different political orientations and views, including public administrators and policy-makers, farmers and livestock breeders, farmers' unions, landowners, tourism business owners, hunters and academics. I analyse how right-wing populist discourses framed this policy change, scapegoated the public management of conservation for all the problems suffered in rural areas, and co-opted popular demands of rural communities, reducing them to the economic interest of private landowners. I will also describe the various attempts made to negotiate a left-wing, progressive democratic alternative that hinges on the recognition of the social complexity of rural communities and the diversity of problems that affect them. The paper ends with a reflection on the lessons that the critical studies of conservation and public participation can learn from this negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years local governments in many North American cities have engaged in "land value capture," which involves state actors exchanging greater density for condominium developers through rezoning as a way to build social housing and affordable rental units. This paper focuses on how these policies are framed and implemented by developers, planners and politicians in two large Canadian cities, Toronto and Vancouver, to address a long-standing but under-theorized question: what is the relationship between altruism and profitability for private development companies? Drawing on concepts from economic and cultural sociology, including Beckert's fictional expectations, Goffman's frame analysis, and Bourdieu's forms of capital, I challenge existing accounts of developers as either following the logic of profit maximization, or "giving back" through charitable acts. Instead, I argue that land value capture policies involve the process of "giving back to get ahead;" through acts of gift-giving developers enhance their symbolic capital, or reputational prestige, leading to new opportunities for profit-making. Thus I show how meaning and symbolism accompany the pursuit of monetary gains and mystify "giving back" as a strategy of accumulation for the private sector. This research holds implications for understanding "condo-ization" as a form of urbanism, as well as the increasing privatization of affordable housing in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Trump presidency abandoned the legitimation tactics of American power. • American power depends on domestic conditions and transformative changes in the international system. • American power includes its material capabilities and legitimation tactics. • American decline constitutes its decreasing legitimacy as a dominant actor in the international system. Is American power in decline? What is the relationship between the perceived decline of American power and the rise of Donald Trump and authoritarian politics elsewhere? Understanding the puzzle of American decline and the world order requires the recognition of how capital and wealth are unjustly distributed, entrenched, and sustained across the society. The core argument here maintains that American decline pertains not only to the decreasing economic vitality underscored by the concrete detrimental effects generated through sharpening material inequality within the US. Rather, decline also constitutes its increasingly tarnished legitimacy as a dominant actor in the international system. This paper contributes to current scholarly and policy debates on American power and authoritarianism in three ways. First, it offers a more holistic conception of American power, particularly by highlighting both its materialist and ideational foundations that co-constitute each other during its periods of ascent, consolidation, and decline. Second, it underscores the mutually reinforcing interdependence of domestic and transnational dimensions of US power. Third, while dominant scholarship on American decline rarely address its implications on international human rights, the paper highlights the uniqueness of the Trump and the emerging authoritarian politics elsewhere: while neoliberalism's detrimental consequences to human rights within and beyond the US constitute a relatively long history, Trump and his allies have abandoned the legitimation tactics that their predecessors had so willingly used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Variegated perspectives are required for conceptualizing governmentality. • Applying governmentality to Asian contexts extends Foucault's western analyses. • Governmentality framework delivers insightful analysis to Gross National Happiness. • Biopower embodying non-western spiritualities emerges in the Bhutan context. • Gross National Happiness is a governance model inclusive of neoliberal tendencies. Abstract This paper employs a "variegated governmentality" framework to analyse Bhutan's well-known Gross National Happiness (GNH) agenda. GNH is both a philosophy and form of governance that the Royal Government uses to guide national policymaking. While previous research frames GNH in terms of Foucault's early discussion of governmentality, it does so by establishing monolithic characterizations of governance rationalities and positioning them against one another. By contrast, we suggest that GNH can be more productively understood in terms of Foucault's more recently translated work as embodying multiple governance rationalities situated alongside each other and locally understood as complementary. From this perspective, recent promotion of neoliberalism within the country can be understood not as an intrusion of "western rationality" upon a distinct GNH but rather as a component of the complex bricolage that GNH has become. We suggest that this produces an indigenous form of biopower, which we term 'Buddhist Biopower', appealing to a combination of Bhutanese tradition and religious belief to legitimize the state's claim to govern in the interest of the population. A policy review of Bhutan's GNH Index and Eleventh Five Year Plan is conducted to illustrate this analysis. In this way, the paper brings together research concerning multiple governmentalities and variegated neoliberalization to illuminate the complex ways that biopower can be exercised in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlight • Care work is bodily work, dirty work, and emotional work. • Caregivers are required to be ethical when providing care. • Caregivers are put in a "prison of love" situation. Abstract Recently, feminist geographers have been calling for research that contributes to a more ethical geography of care that is responsible to society. However, after thoroughly examining the care ethics of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, this paper argues that adhering to these ethics in caring relations actually exploits caregivers, instead of contributing to a more just society. Based on empirical research in Shanghai and Beijing, this paper examines the nature of caregivers' work and provides three significant insights: (1) Care ethics embedded into job requirements demands that caregivers conduct not only bodily and "dirty" work, but also emotional work. (2) The involvement of care ethics in care work establishes different social relations between caregivers and care-recipients, which produces a different subjectivity that blurs the boundary between life and work. (3) The new subjectivity formed when operating under care ethics tends to put caregivers in a "prison of love" situation, where being ethical means being willing to work long hours for low wages. By theorizing the ethics of care work from the three aspects indicated above, this paper challenges the geography of care agenda that seeks to promote the care ethics of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the peculiar particularities of the dual trends towards urban water privatization and commodification. It uses as its analytical entry point the extraordinary emergence of large-scale seawater desalination, delivered through public-private partnerships, as an alternative municipal water supply for the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan region. The paper engages and extends Karen Bakker’s work on water as an ‘uncooperative commodity’. Interrogating the neoliberalization of water through desalination, it is argued, requires reference to the socio-technical relations drawn together under the ‘desalination assemblage’. Such water treatment technologies –and the social relations that flow through them– are, in other words, efficacious in the market-disciplining of water. The paper presents an understanding of privatization and commodification as diffuse, and as unfolding through multiple and contradictory materially heterogeneous relationships. Drawing on both urban political ecology (UPE) and assemblage thinking, the paper calls for a more constructive dialogue between different concepts of socio-material relationality. The empirical case studies of two large seawater desalination plants (one in Southern California, one in Baja California) and the re-configuring relations of public/private water governance associated with these projects, provides a pertinent imperative for greater attention to be paid to contingency and heterogeneity in our understanding of the ecology of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical consumption is routinely promoted as a form of individualised responsibility taking whereby citizen-consumers consciously engage in morally/politically directed purchasing decisions. This has been heavily critiqued as a neoliberal reduction of civic engagement to market choice. It has also been contested by way of a shift to problematizing the consumer as moral agent; where attention is drawn instead to networks of agential entities - advocacy organisations, certifying bodies, marketing discourses, retail spaces, packages, household routines, and so on - that configure consumption alternatives as practice and performance. In reflecting on these concerns, this paper qualitatively explores the enterprising (rather than consumer enactment) of the ethical. Drawing on a multifaceted, three-year study of alternative consumption in Australia, the paper attends to the framing of ethical enterprise through business language, to the often ambivalent deployment of various commercial models and marketing strategies in the doing of ethical business, and to how a contestatory commerce is being imagined, especially in terms of its relations to a politics of social and economic change and to a commercial mainstream. Informed by work on markets as pragmatically assembled and on the economy as multiple, emphasis is placed throughout this article on ethical enterprise as a space of political ambiguity and as a gesture towards an alternative commerce that displaces an understanding of ethical consumption as resting on the actions of the virtuous consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Mixed economies challenge the assumption that people need capitalist labour. • Canadian government is newly invested in incorporating Indigenous wage labour. • Diamond mines target Indigenous workers as marker of "responsible extraction". • The mixed economy resists dispossession by northern extractive capital. Grounded in an analysis of the mixed economy of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, this article examines the contemporary relationship between surplus populations and colonial capitalist accumulation of new spaces. The functioning of the reserve surplus population requires that the unwaged, or under-waged, want, or need, wage labour. Thus, like all capitalist relations, a reserve surplus population is predicated on the separation of workers from their means of subsistence: what Marx calls "primitive" accumulation. Traditionally the home of the Dene and Inuit, and now home to approximately equal parts Indigenous (primarily Dene, Inuit and Métis) and non-Indigenous residents, the NWT mixed economy is a set of social relations that combine subsistence and social reproduction, wherein labour is oriented toward the daily and intergenerational wellbeing of the collective rather than the profit of the individual, with capitalist production. With a focus on the diamond industry, this article traces the shifting Canadian State approach to Indigenous labour in this space across time and the state policies and extractive projects that have both "made" Indigenous labour surplus and rhetorically justified their existence through evocations of regional unemployment and imagined dependency. In so doing, the paper identifies a move from the welfare-state era, wherein the state structured northern Indigenous "dependency", to the neoliberal era, wherein dependency became a problem to be solved through increased Indigenous incorporation into capitalist wage labour. The northern diamond mining industry, responding to both Indigenous demands for land recognition and neoliberal imperatives for lean operations, exemplifies this latter approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the variegated natures of (post-)neoliberal environmental governance in Latin America using environmental crisis as an entry point. It examines the institutional measures put forth by Ecuador’s government, in concert with other actors, to contain and manage the damaging effects of an insidious palm oil plant disease known as Pudrición del Cogollo (PC). Using empirical data collected through qualitative means, my analysis demonstrates that nature’s biophysical processes – in particular, disease ecologies – can play a crucial role in the pursuit and achievement of national accumulation goals. Specifically, I argue that the ecologies of the PC crisis have been rendered functional to the Ecuadorian government’s current political and economic strategies of intensified accumulation and market competitiveness. By making environmental crisis the basis of key accumulation strategies, the state is able to convert negative environmental outcomes into opportunities for profit-generation. Utilizing the notion of the ‘ecological fix’, this paper reveals two major conclusions: (1) plant health emergencies and the actions used to mitigate environmental crises are not only challenges but opportunities that can be mobilized to support further accumulation strategies and (2) the study of PC and Ecuador’s palm oil industry provides new fruitful terrain to examine the connections between the deepening variegated effects of neoliberalism through nature and environmental crisis solutions in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, perhaps the two most prominent debates in geography on issues of biodiversity conservation have hinged upon, firstly, the positive and negative social impacts of conservation projects on human populations, and, secondly, the apparent neoliberalisation of conservation. Yet so far there have been few explicit linkages drawn between these debates. This paper moves both debates forward by presenting the first review of how the neoliberalisation of conservation has affected the kinds of impacts that conservation projects entail for local communities. It finds that, whilst there are important variegations within neoliberal conservation, processes of neoliberalisation nevertheless tend to produce certain recurring trends in their social impacts. Firstly, neoliberal conservation often involves novel forms of power, particularly those that seek to re-shape local subjectivities in accordance with both conservationist and neoliberal-economic values. Secondly, it relies on greater use of use of representation and spectacle to produce commodities and access related markets, which can both create greater negative social impacts and offer new opportunities for local people to contest and reshape conservation projects. Thirdly, neoliberal conservation projects frequently widen the distribution of social impacts by interacting with pre-existing social, economic, and political inequalities. Accordingly, the paper illuminates how neoliberal approaches to conservation generate novel opportunities and constraints for struggles toward more socially and environmentally just forms of biodiversity preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we undertake an extensive review of the neoliberal conservation literature with the aim to explore and substantiate the principal ways in which conservation is neoliberalized in practice as well as who has studied these processes and through which collaborative patterns. Using descriptive statistics and thematic content analysis, we explore selected characteristics of the peer-reviewed scholarship, including most commonly used concepts, methods and topics, geographical and co-authorship patterns, critical readings of key processes of neoliberalization, including commodification, privatization, dispossession, governance rescaling, governmentalities, and its engagement with the economic crisis, austerity politics, and social struggles. Our analysis shows the breadth of the literature in unraveling the unequal social, spatial and environmental impacts of neoliberal conservation policies as well as a significant degree of novelty in terms of topics and theories. Nonetheless, it also unravels some key gaps, including a limited engagement with quantitative methods and community-engaged social sciences and humanities approaches, a lack of focus on urban areas and urbanization, some important gaps in the theorization of the commodification of nature, a domination of Global North scholarship that contradicts the clear empirical focus of the field on the Global South, a limited engagement with social movements and grassroots activism, and a conspicuous lack of attention to the dynamics of class, gender and race. We conclude by identifying key directions for future research to address current gaps in the literature, and initiate a shift towards a decolonial, interdisciplinary, intersectional, community-engaged approach and an in-depth encounter with everyday practices of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A combination of coercion and consent-building explains the AKP regime's resilience. • The prosperity appeal of developmentalism is vital in grasping the consent-building. • Prosperity is narrowly interpreted as growth, fueled by the construction sector. • To achieve growth, heavy environmental costs of construction are given consent. • Authoritarian-populism and developmentalism are interdependent. The era of the AKP—the incumbent regime in Turkey since 2002 under Mr. Tayyip Erdoğan's leadership—has been marked by the interdependent functioning of authoritarianism, populism and developmentalism; the three pillars worked and reworked to garner popular support, win legitimacy and co-opt or buffer opposition. One pivotal area where these three pillars have surfaced is the environment, along with the grievances the regime created. The puzzling point in this picture is that most of the social dissent that directly or indirectly arose from such developmentalist projects has only been partially pronounced, and did not translate into a robust anti-government stance. AKP supporters who were adversely impacted from these projects have mostly continued to back the party. Although the AKP's authoritarian power puts constraints on any kind of opposition, there is an additional element that needs to be addressed in any form of coercion, real or perceived: people seem to be partially or fully convinced that shouldering environmental costs is a must on the path to prosperity. This paper uses a Gramscian framework to unpack the AKP's specific combination of authoritarianism and consent-building in the environmental domain to better understand the resilience of their hegemonic power, and claim that the prosperity appeal of developmentalism made it possible for the AKP to legitimise its claim to rule by drawing on broad-based support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 'Infrastructure-first' approach is inadequate in understanding local vulnerabilities and needs. • Technocratic approaches to resilience planning exacerbate local tensions. • Adverse outcomes of climate plans impact residents' sense of security and wellbeing. This paper argues that the rise of a global mainstream resilience narrative is advancing a strategically simplified concept of vulnerability that is being exploited to open up lucrative new opportunities for profit. In particular, it presents three ways in which mainstream narratives are currently masking--if not exacerbating--the vulnerability of residents in New York City and Copenhagen. First, it explores how a technocratic orientation to community engagement is affecting local perceptions of participatory processes such as planning consultations and visioning exercises. Next, it investigates how the pursuit of an 'infrastructure-first' approach to interventions and a reputation for eco-innovation is creating tensions between institutional and local experiences of resilience. Lastly, it discusses some of the ways in which simplistic understandings of vulnerability are leading to adverse outcomes--such as eco-gentrification and displacement--that are making local communities more, not less, vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. It concludes by arguing that the meaningful integration of diverse perspectives and values is integral to the process of giving rise to more critical and expansive narratives of resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Neoliberal urban development on the Central Coast increases disaster risk. • Mass tourism and informal development are key drivers of vulnerability. • Vulnerability and informality are leveraged against low-income communities. • There is a need for DRR research drawing on political ecology and urban studies. This paper examines the links between neoliberal urbanism and disaster vulnerability in Cartagena, a town on the Chilean central coast. In recent decades, this area has been transformed by speculative urban development, resulting in environmental damage and increased socio-economic segregation. We adopt a political ecology perspective to consider how these changes interact with disaster risk, drawing on ten interviews with representatives of local community organisations, a collaborative mapping exercise and census data. We find that mass tourism and informal urban expansion contribute to environmental degradation, as well as infrastructural and economic fragility, leading to increased risks for residents and tourists alike. We position our case study against the critiques of vulnerability leveraged by several critical geographers, who have come to see the term as depoliticising. While sympathising with these critiques, we argue for the usefulness of vulnerability analyses combining political ecology approaches to the study of human-nature relations and insight from critical urban studies on issues such as neoliberal planning policies, extractivism, urban informality and touristification. Articulated in these terms, vulnerability can be usefully mobilised to push for substantive policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • A mixed-methods approach links uneven waste exposure in Jakarta's slum and neoliberal waste governance. • The circular economy model has strengthened the informal sector with high-tech measures and global finance. • Strengthening of the informal sector has been unevenly articulated, creating two flows of neoliberal waste activities. • The informal sector focuses on recyclable materials, accumulating non-recyclable waste in their dumpsites. • Public services in capital-intensive areas transport collected waste to the unregulated dumpsites in slums. Urban slums in the Global South have a formidable challenge of mismanaged waste. Behind this challenge lies urban politics, creating disproportionate exposure to waste in marginalized settlements. This paper articulates an urban political ecology of uneven waste accumulation in slums with a case study of Jakarta, Indonesia. I apply a mixed-methods approach, by integrating a spatial regression model with a critical qualitative analysis, to draw the connection between the slums' waste crisis and neoliberal waste infrastructure. Since the mid-2010s, Jakarta's waste governance has shifted from a conventional collect-transport-dispose model to a circular economy model operating under a technocratic and neoliberal economy. Under the shifted governance, the informal sector has been strengthened through the integration of high-tech infrastructure to reduce waste and extract new profits from materials. However, the sector has been unevenly strengthened across the city, creating two flows of waste accumulation activities. First, the strengthening has been accelerated in low-income residential areas by introducing financial incentives for the informal sector to make up the shortfall created by public services. Consequently, the informal sector in slums—with its limited focus on recyclable materials—has led to the accumulation of mismanaged non-recyclable waste in unregulated dumpsites of slums. On the other hand, public services are relatively prevalent in capital-intensive areas to promote the economic growth. However, due to its compact land-uses in those areas, the services utilize the unregulated dumpsites in slums as semi-permanent landfills for storing the collected waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 2004 special issue of Geoforum , McCarthy and Prudham argued that the connections between neoliberalism and the environment had been underexplored in critical scholarship. In an attempt to address this gap, the special issue reflected on a number of different case studies and set the stage for a decade of analysis and critique. This paper aims to contribute to the increasing body of literature by presenting a detailed theoretical analysis of neoliberal environmentalism and its role in modern society. Specifically, the paper focuses on one particular environmental issue – climate change – and uses it to categorise six discourses that either conform to the principles of neoliberalism (reformist) or reject neoliberal ideas (revolutionary). Drawing on interviews with designated ‘climate champions’ (individuals who are given responsibility for promoting climate protecting behaviour) in large corporations, the paper then demonstrates how this kind of typological framework might be applied to the analysis of neoliberal environmentalism in the ‘real world’. The paper finds that neoliberalism played a very influential role in the promotion of climate protecting behaviour in the workplace. However, there was also some limited evidence of resistance in the form of revolutionary discourses and ideas. Going forwards, the typological framework may provide a valuable analytical tool to assess the dominance and resistance of neoliberal environmentalism in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical evolution and geographic biases of the Initiative for the Integration of South America’s Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA). The study presents an analysis of the initiative’s origins in the neoliberalization of Brazilian planning in 1990s; the characteristics of its first round of cross-border infrastructure investments during the 2000–2010 period and its unaltered incorporation into the UNASUR institution, following South America’s recent post-neoliberal transition. The paper conceptualizes IIRSA’s spatial planning framework of ‘integration and development axes’ as an enduring form of neoliberal territorial design. By prioritising public investment in logistics corridors, IIRSA has privileged the global competitiveness of select export sectors over all other infrastructure provision and macro-regional planning considerations. It also aggravates geographically uneven development and fails to reflect extensive urbanization dynamics. The analysis is supported by archival research, a careful reading of policy documents and primary fieldwork conducted in the borderland Brazilian state of Roraima which illustrates the socio-spatial impacts that IIRSA has produced on the ground through its selective roadway development and lack of comprehensive planning in the Guianese Shield Axis – the designated corridor with the lowest level of investment. In addition to presenting a comprehensive empirical assessment of IIRSA, the paper aims to contribute to the literature on the variegated geographies of neoliberalism and emerging debates on planetary urbanization by emphasizing the ways in which state intervention (re)shapes extensive networked infrastructures, which, in turn, condition urbanization processes and inter-urban relations. The paper’s conclusion includes policy recommendations and suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of physical and social infrastructure in the form of roads, green spaces and community facilities has traditionally been provided for by the state through the general taxation system. However, as the state has been transformed along more neoliberal lines, the private sector is increasingly relied upon to deliver public goods and services. Planning gain agreements have flourished within this context by offering another vehicle through which local facilities are privately funded. Whilst these agreements reflect the broader dynamics of neoliberalism, they are commonly viewed as a tool which can be employed to challenge these very dynamics by empowering local communities to secure more just planning outcomes. This paper counters such claims. Based on evidence gathered from 80 interviews with planners, councillors, developers and community groups in Ireland, the paper demonstrates how planning gain agreements have been strategically redeployed by the holders of political and economic power to serve their own ends. In seeking to understand why and how this has occurred, specific consideration is given to the changing power dynamics between the state and private capital under neoliberalism. The paper highlights how institutional arrangements have enabled developers to infiltrate the political sphere in more subtle and implicit ways than ever before. We conclude by arguing that planning gain must be understood as a mechanism which has been manipulated in ways which essentially work to preserve and enhance, rather than redress, existing power imbalances in the planning system by facilitating large scale transfers of wealth upwards in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apple varieties boom and bust as the vogue for new flavors cycle through the market. Dwarfing rootstocks, an old but freshly blossoming orchard technology, allows growers to intervene in trees in new ways and keep up with shifts in consumer demand. They cultivate customization in apple orchards and facilitate emerging neoliberal trends in food systems. However, the rootstocks do more than entrench actors further into the whims of the market—they also shape economic agency in ways that have multiple expressions. Drawing on work on actor-networks and assemblages, this paper considers how technologies play a role in contemporary food politics through their material characteristics and the performances they inspire. Using apple production in the American Midwest as a case study, this paper discusses the ways that rootstock technologies both reproduce current power structures and conventional organizational forms in food, while providing a platform for an alternative type of assemblage. In doing so, it contributes theoretically to conversations about the role of materials in economic politics and substantively to an optimistic vision of the future of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s and 1990s, an era of neoliberal reform, global development institutions like the World Bank began promoting and financing the collective titling of indigenous territories. Extending and linking existing discussions of neoliberal multiculturalism and neoliberal natures, this paper interrogates indigenous land rights as a type of “ethno-environmental fix”, designed to synergise protection of vulnerable populations and highly-valued natures from the destructive effects of markets, in an era of multiple countermovements. Using the example of the titling of TCOs (Original Communal Lands) in Bolivia, the paper explores how governmental aspirations for indigenous territories unravelled in practice, producing hybrid, double-edged and “not-quite-neoliberal” spaces – spaces which have, paradoxically, emerged as key sites for the construction of more radical indigenous projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bolivia’s leftward political shift, which is frequently described as “post-neoliberal,” is crucially linked to the ideal of autonomy. While autonomy has a long history among leftist theorists and social movements in Latin America, its contemporary importance is related to an ongoing effort on the part of scholars and activists to identify an alternative organizational form that eschews both state actors and private entities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with a group of community-run water systems in peri-urban Cochabamba, this paper asks what autonomous water governance looks like in practice. By presenting a case in which the community water systems made a series of structurally limited “autonomous” decisions that ultimately bound them more closely to the local state and private sector, the paper argues that autonomy faces socio-ecological limitations when conceptualized as a project of internal self-governance. Socio-ecological processes take place at multiple scales and over long time spans; a radical politics of autonomy therefore necessitates a spatially extroverted project that focuses on building strategic alliances that strengthen community autonomy in the long-term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of ‘not-quite-neoliberal natures’ in relation to contemporary theoretical debates and Latin American political processes. The phrase is meant to signal both our appreciation of and reservations about theoretical elaborations of neoliberalism, post- neoliberalism, and (post-)neoliberal natures in relation to the wide variety of reforms currently transforming resource governance in Latin America. After reviewing theoretical debates about (post-)neoliberalism and situating them within Latin American history, we present the major themes emerging across the papers in this special issue: (1) the prevalence of concomitant and overlapping political processes, (2) the productivity of tensions and contradictions, particularly with respect to the state-society relationship, and (3) dynamism, or an insistence on the depth and liveliness of ‘context’ and ‘contestation’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic instruments are being promoted as a desirable alternative to public sector action in the allocation and management of natural resources. A wide body of literature has developed that critically analyzes this phenomenon as part of a wider project of ‘neoliberalization of nature’, trying to uncover the underlying rationale and commonalities of geographically specific phenomena. The case of water is at the vanguard of these processes and is proving to be particularly contentious. In the European Union water policies are increasingly emphasizing the application of economic instruments to improve the allocative equity and economic efficiency in the use of scarce resources. However, there are few analyses of how these instruments are really working on the ground and whether they are meeting their objectives. This paper aims to contribute to this debate by critically analyzing the experience with water markets in Spain, the only country in the European Union where they are operative. It looks at water permit sales during the 2005–2008 drought period using the Tajo–Segura transfer infrastructure. The paper describes how the institutional process of mercantilización of water works in practice in Spain. It shows that the use of markets requires an intense process of institutional development to facilitate and encourage their operation. These institutions tend to favor the interests of clearly identifiable elites, instead of the public interest they supposedly promote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diverse range of actors in Alberta, Canada have recognized terrestrial conservation offsets as a way to compensate for the ecological consequences of the province’s oil sands boom. Offset programs are representative of a global trend toward the rescaling of environmental governance, and greater use of market-oriented tools for conservation practice. This global shift in conservation techniques has generated a somewhat divisive academic literature that views market oriented approaches as either utopian win–win scenarios, or as part of a larger class-based project that threatens democracy and serves to channel benefits to powerful societal actors. Much less attention has been paid to how seemingly neoliberal practices might be appropriated for a diverse range of political ends, resulting in more heterogeneous political and material outcomes. Drawing on recent scholarship that frames neoliberalism as a set of governance techniques, rather than a unified political project, the paper explores the ways in which market-based conservation tools, such as conservation offsets, might be put to progressive political ends in a manner unanticipated by the often bifurcated literature on the topic. Specifically, the paper explores recent attempts by some First Nations in Alberta to implement conservation offset programs as a means of securing greater control of traditional territory and social and cultural sustainability. The case study complicates some of the dominant narratives of market-based conservation, and works to expand our understanding of neoliberal conservation practice by focusing on how the context of particular places may complicate both the underlying logics and material outcomes of market-oriented conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Development NGOs in the global North undergo complex processes of professionalisation. • Top-down neoliberal professionalisation isn't the only driver of professionalisation. • A form of self-legitimating professionalisation profoundly shaped UK education NGOs. • For UK development education NGOs the driver was education to enable change. This article explores the complex ways in which development NGOs become professional development actors. It offers a uniquely holistic understanding of professionalisation that draws on extensive new research data. It challenges the accepted narrative, presented by development scholars, of neoliberalism as the fundamental driver of professionalisation. Instead, it offers a more nuanced theorisation that recognises that professionalisation from outside, driven by neoliberalism, is often preceded by a professionalisation from within. Here the paper develops the concept of self-legitimising professionalisation as part of a 'two stage process' through a case study of international development practice delivered by UK based development education actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Local governments in Accra have not been an intrinsic part of shopping mall development, as in typical PPP's in urban entrepreneurialism. • Mall developments have largely been organic process rather than part of any city strategic or spatial plans. • Enterprising middle class with cosmopolitan dispositions have spearheaded mall development. • Neoliberal austerity made citizens more enterprising. Entrepreneurial and competitive city theorists have argued that in economically-challenged cities, local state and non-state actors 'develop a commitment to realizing a broadly consensual vision of urban development, devise appropriate structures for implementing this vision and mobilize both local and nonlocal resources' to turn around the local economy. This orthodoxy is framed within the context of a strong autonomous local state versus a pro-active private and voluntary sector actors with clearly espoused vision. In other words the existence of a private - public sector common vision. I demonstrate in this paper that there is a need to reconsider this general conception, especially as pertains in the context of a neoliberal African city. Relying on two case studies on the development of shopping malls in Accra, Ghana, I argue that significant urban development results may still be achieved within the context of a non-autonomous local state which may not necessarily subscribe to an entrepreneurial (city) vision. In such a milieu, enterprising citizens, with or without entrepreneurship track record but possessing cosmopolitan dispositions, can act in a way that by-passes the established channels of the entrepreneurial city to shape urban development. I argue that such citizens need to show their connectedness with the larger global network of flows within the current neoliberal order. Thus, local (private actor)-global connection becomes the new link that leads to the achievement of the said urban outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains critical commentary on the emergence and future research tasks for queer world cities, a cross-disciplinary field of inquiry positioned at the intersection of urban globalization studies and the geographies of sexualities. It seeks to advance the concept of homoentrepreneurialism in order to understand the sexualized worlding of cities under the hegemony of neoliberal urbanism. Recent developments in Buenos Aires and other Latin American cities are used as illustrative examples of how sexual diversity and cosmopolitan tolerance are increasingly interwoven with entrepreneurial quests to upgrade the global competitiveness of a city and thereby attract tourists, capital, and a select group of (homo-)sexual citizens. The paper takes critiques of geographical elitism seriously in its interpretation of homonormativity, but relationality and geographically uneven development prevail over reparatory substitution. Commentary on research projects from other world regions is also provided, and a research agenda is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the political and economic strategies through which forests have become targets for the expansion and deepening of neoliberal agendas are relatively well researched, comparatively less is known about the reflections of such dynamics at the level of everyday life within communities and households. This is particularly true in the post-communist states of Southeastern Europe (SEE), which have seen the transformation of formerly centralized and hierarchical integrated monopolies in the management of forest resources into a myriad of diverse commercial enterprises outside the control of the state. With the aid of on-site research undertaken in Macedonia, therefore, this paper investigates the neoliberalization of the Balkan forestry sector within the context of illegal logging practices. The experiences and aspirations of individuals implicated in such activities are used as a basis for interrogating the privatization and marketization of forest resources, and the rise of corruption. The broader purpose of the paper is to explore the 'recombinant' (Stark, 1996) nature of capitalism in this part of the world, thanks to which neoliberalism is 'challenged and changed by its encounter with nature' (Duffy and Moore, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper challenges the economic accounts of the 1997 crisis by stressing not only the role of time and space in the overall dynamics of Korean capitalist crisis formation and fixes, but also the dialectical relationship between capitalist dynamics in Korea and changing conditions of international political economy. Drawing on socio-spatial dialectics, the paper examines the evolutionary aspect of crisis formation and fixes and the role of financial dynamics in deployment of the crisis by drawing on a Minskyan notion of progressive illiquidity. In doing so, I examine how Fordist crisis and neoliberal turns in Anglo-American and Japanese economies co-evolved with peripheral Fordism through two critical junctures: the 1987 Great Labor Struggle and financial liberalization in the early 1990s. The paper argues that dialectical processes of crisis formation and fixes led to new articulations between Korea and the international economy. Within international production networks, Korean firms set their position at the low-end of the high technology tier within regionalized production networks. In the process of building their position in production networks, Korean firms had to rely on expanded liquidity in international financial markets which allowed them to invest in unprofitable ventures in the mid-1990s. These dynamics in finance and non-finance sectors led to a double vulnerability of overaccumulation and progressive illiquidity in Korean political economy that culminated in the 1997 crisis in Korea. In short, what mattered in the crisis dynamics of the 1990s is a coupling of crisis formation in capitalist production with Minskyan financial dynamics that perpetuate progressive illiquidity at multiple geographical scales. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Neoliberalism is the hegemonic economic and geographical discourse of our time. Even though the global recession has proven the fallibility of the system and the need for it to be jettisoned, the geographical aspects of this system will remain intact for the foreseeable future. Although neoliberalism has been part of the geographical lexicon for some time now, and a substantial body of work bears testimony to this, its spatial features and effects have hardly been exhausted in the geographical literature. This is even more salient when it comes to the South African situation. The spatial impact of neoliberalism in South Africa remains largely neglected. This paper is a response to the perceived lacuna in the geographical study of neoliberalism in South Africa. What I want to discuss in this paper is the spaces which the neoliberalisation of water services in the Durban (eThekwini) municipality has created. In this regard the concept of the spatial fix linked to ideas of crisis is deployed. The neoliberalisation of water services has had uneven spatial effects which I seek to elucidate. My contention is that for neoliberalism to survive as a system it has to create an uneven geography. My contention is that the neoliberalisation of water services and in consequence the neoliberalisation of space in the Durban (eThekwini) municipality violates the rights of citizens. Furthermore, I contend that one’s place in space determines the nature of one’s citizenship. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recent work has called into question the status of Costa Rica’s Payments for Environmental Services program (PES) as an iconic example of market-based conservation. The actual practice of this program has proven to have only loose correspondence with its idealized neoliberal vision. Thus far, however, several important aspects of the program have remained under-analyzed. This paper identifies three key ways in which the gap between “vision” and “execution” is being narrowed: through changes to the way the program is financed, through promotion of competitive contracting, and through the removal of collective participation. The paper also explains the detrimental social and ecological implications of these actions. Analysis is situated in a theoretical framework that understands neoliberalization as an incomplete and adapting process, rather than a monolithic ideology that is uniform across history and geography. The empirical evidence demonstrates why this interpretation is essential for assessing the practical effect of neoliberal policies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Farmers are not commonly included in studies of transnational actors, but with the globalization of agricultural markets, and the neoliberal reform of national agricultural sectors, an increasing number of family farm-entrepreneurs have become engaged in transnational activities. Drawing on interviews with ‘globally-engaged’ farmers in Australia – a country in which expansion into transnational activities has been encouraged by the radical deregulation of domestic markets – this paper explores the transnational mobilities of farmers who have sought to capitalize on the advantages of globalization by directly trading with international partners, establishing international business contacts, and learning international best practice in farm efficiency and environmental performance. In particular, the paper examines the varying spatialities and forms of mobility executed by farmers and observes how different patterns of mobility are executed in response to the particular exigencies of their respective industries as well as the ongoing imperatives of maintaining a farm business. By analyzing the farmers’ own narratives of these different spatialities, the paper develops a more critical and reflexive perspective on globalization and its impact on rural producers, with travel becoming both an opportunity to be enjoyed and a compulsion to be endured by those forced to operate in a climate where state-based support structures are absent. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Based on the 2011 Annual Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group Lecture, this paper makes the case for a political ecology of the subsoil. Arguing that subsoil resources have received comparatively little attention within the wider corpus of political ecological writing, the paper explores several ways in which the extraction of mineral and hydrocarbon resources is constitutive of, and constituted by, wider capitalist political, economic and institutional arrangements. Drawing on material from El Salvador and the Andean countries, the paper explores the contemporary governance of extractive industries, and points to significant convergence among the approaches taken by neoliberal and ostensibly post-neoliberal regimes alike. The intersections between the extractive economy, livelihoods and patterns of social protest are also explored. Through these examples, the paper also highlights the ways in which “activist political ecologists” play important roles in counter-movements seeking to re-govern the extractive economy. These countermovements are found in both civil society and different parts of the state. Such activist political ecologists are central to the broader enterprise of an “underground political ecology” and are often vital to the success of scholarly interventions in such political ecologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper critically engages with the role of conservation practitioners as ‘expert intermediaries’ in the development of payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes in the UK. Centring on the case study of the Wildlife Trust’s Pumlumon Project in Mid Wales, the paper connects the advance of neoliberal governance strategies to the experiences and attitudes of conservationists, charting a more personalised geography of how PES has gained traction here, beyond its dissemination as an anonymous discourse or top-down imposition. In methodological terms, the paper combines ethnography with the insights of governmentality in order to demonstrate how conservationists have made sense of, and subsequently engaged with processes of neoliberalisation. This is set out as a means to attain a grounded perspective on the advancement of PES, but equally to appreciate how the hegemony of market-style governance is accepted and advanced by the conservationists involved. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Much of the current work in the field of ‘gender and environment’ has been developed around case studies of environmental roles, rights and responsibilities at the community or household scale in the South. This paper asserts that the theoretical insights developed through these case studies can be of great use when examining issues of gender and environment in the North, particularly when it comes to issues of ethical consumption. In this paper I examine the promotional discourses of two cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns (where consumption of a CRM product triggers a donation to a development cause) using two such insights: (i) the mutual constitution of gendered subjectivities and environments and (ii) a gender and environment approach to questioning neoliberalization. This approach highlights the ways in which – through consumption – gender is constituted transnationally at the same time that it is constituted in relation to environments. This approach also emphasizes a series of questions about the neoliberal aspects of CRM campaigns that are usually hidden behind discourses of motherhood and responsibility. Overall, I argue that bringing gender and environment and ethical consumption research together allows us to advance both areas of study in critical and insightful ways. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines a Rajasthan (India) drinking water supply project that relied on hybrid governance reforms in its original design. Decentralization and marketization, combined with a participatory approach, were intended to facilitate an empowering shift in state-citizen relationships. Paying citizens were expected to make quantity and quality demands of the state as consumers, not welfare beneficiaries. Research on the project 3years after its completion revealed that although payment for water and community participation were intended to compel the state to provide clean water, they failed in this regard. The problem of an unreliable state supply was solved through small scale privatization, a decision ‘independently’ reached at the local scale, but one that served to further undermine the state’s ability to provide clean water. In this paper, we trace the shifts in regulation that evolved in the post-project phase at both the state and village scale that resulted in the delivery of contaminated water. Ethnographic research indicates that community participation was introduced as a set of institutions that would govern how villagers interacted with the state and its water supply, but villagers altered community participation by introducing reforms in water governance as a way of coping with an unresponsive state and increased work burden. Community participation evolved in contradictory ways as the impacts of neoliberal environmental governance were felt. The paper contributes to understandings of neoliberalization processes’ local impacts by analyzing their ongoing hybridization at multiple scales. It further calls into question foundational notions that community participation in resource governance is the appropriate solution to drinking water supply. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Informed by academic writings on non-governmental organisations (NGOs), critiques of neoliberal development, and postcolonial development theory, this paper explores the relationship between football and development through critical analysis of two contrasting initiatives. One is the Football for Hope Movement (FHM), which was the principal backer of the official campaign of the 2010 FIFA World Cup (FWC), called “20 Centres for 2010”. The second is the Katina 2009 football tournament held under the auspices of a community development project in Uganda sponsored by the Guardian newspaper and Barclays bank in the UK. The initial aim was to identify the particular development models at work within ‘development through football’ initiatives. While an established model of NGO-led community development is certainly apparent, different initiatives suggest a basic distinction between neoliberal and postcolonial variants. The paper identifies and explains the differences while showing how contrasting models become sites of struggle and overlap, to some extent, when translated into development practice. Ultimately, the investigation reveals how football is used as a magnet to draw young people deeper into the operational orbit of NGOs and their donors. The paper also draws attention to new actors and partnerships in international development – most notably the Guardian, whose transformation into a development actor suggests a novel ‘NGO-isation’ of the media itself. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: While geographers have contributed greatly to knowledge of the unequal effects of childcare delivery for parents and children as service users, the changing form this provision has taken over the last 10years has received much less attention. Drawing on the emergence of a formalised childcare sector in Ireland since the late 90s, this paper explores the considerable political work which has taken place to prioritise centre-based care services over an established informal childminding sector. Rather than view this change as the outcome of a capitalist logic which scripts the inevitable shift towards larger, more rationalised services under processes of neoliberalisation, this paper calls for a closer examination of the way in which childcare is being respatalised through policy. Justified through a discourse of ‘sustainability’, governmental intervention in Ireland has sought to produce a new marketised childcare infrastructure which will operate without continued state support. The emerging infrastructure has been premised on the creation of centre-based facilities, through which forms of neoliberal governance have been introduced into the sector. It is suggested that the prioritisation of centre-based care over existing informal provision has served to introduce significant financial vulnerabilities to the sector at a time of economic uncertainty. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper reveals the contingent aspect associated with the actualization of a neoliberal space. The paper examines the material, institutional, and economic conditions necessary for a neoliberal agenda to transform its urban policy objectives into a material reality. The study follows changes in housing conditions in Santa Monica, California from 1990 to 2008. During this period, the confluence of three sets of events led to the actualization of a neoliberal space. First, housing damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake removed “dead capital” from the housing sector. Second, subsequent administrative actions at the local level and more importantly deregulation legislation at the state level eliminated rent control regulations and created market incentives that favored upscale development. Finally, the state’s economic recovery generated a substantial flow of private investments into the real estate market. These combined factors led not only to the dismantling of affordable housing in Santa Monica, but also to the erosion of residents’ and local authorities’ ability to manage housing choices and, consequently, to a historic restructuring of Santa Monica’s physical and social space. These changes had a disproportionately and negative effect on low-income and minority renters. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Mobilisation of 'food sovereignty' in the independent Anglo-Caribbean has been partial and limited. • CARICOM food and agricultural policy-making remains within a neoliberal 'food security' paradigm. • A re-emphasis on local production is often conflated with 'food sovereignty' as a political project. • This is linked to the region's unique colonial legacy and the nature of sovereignty itself. • Possibilities for popular sovereignty of the people and political sovereignty of the state are limited. The notion of 'food sovereignty' is often surprisingly absent in food and agricultural discourses in the Anglo-Caribbean, where over the past half century policy-making has aligned with conventional 'food security' approaches. This paper argues that, in addition to its contemporary entrenchment within a neoliberal environment, this is also due to the nature of 'sovereignty' itself in a region which has been shaped by a distinctive colonial, social and economic history. In order to demonstrate this, firstly, it makes the case for why, in the context of rising food imports and enduring structural legacies, food sovereignty matters in the Anglo-Caribbean. Secondly, it charts changes in the regional policy of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to show how, despite repeated calls to increase self-sufficiency, conventional neoliberal approaches to agricultural development and food security have predominated since the 1970s. Finally, it identifies and analyses limited instances where food sovereignty discourses have been mobilized, by farmers' groups and political actors, and interrogates the meaning of both 'internal' and 'external' sovereignty itself in this post-colonial context. It finds mobilisations of food sovereignty to be characterised by a repeated conflation of domestic food production with the concept's ideological principles as a political project, and a particular understanding of sovereignty that places an emphasis on 'the state' and 'the region' over 'the people'. This shows that the very nature of 'sovereignty' itself plays a critical role in both the translation of, and possibilities for mobilising 'food sovereignty' as a radical project as envisaged in the wider literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Biodiversity offsetting relates to UK government's urban development aspirations. • Offsetting enables a social and spatial reterritorialization of socionatures. • Offsetting portrays urban development as the driver of environmental improvement. • Biodiversity offsetting in England is widely contested by local communities. • Struggles for the 'right to the city' should expand to embrace 'rights to nature'. Abstract In this paper, by drawing on primary empirical data obtained through 62 interviews in seven case studies we seek to offer a Marxist historical-geographical analysis of biodiversity offsetting policy in England, and its emergence in the context of the global economic crisis, and government aspirations for large-scale urban development projects. By paying attention to the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation, we aim to extend the focus of the neoliberal conservation literature from the role of offsets as ecological 'commodities' to the way offsetting is used to support the production of space(s), place(s) and nature(s) in line with contemporary patterns of capitalist urban growth. In particular, we show how offsetting operationalized new ideas about nature as a stock of biodiversity, how it streamlined planning to support extended urbanization, how it foreclosed public debate about controversial urban development projects, and how it reterritorialized nature-society relationships. We also give a central role to social contestation against the implementation of offsetting in England, drawing attention to its class character and highlighting the potential for a new emancipatory politics that would encompass a 'right to nature' as a key element of struggles for the 'right to the city'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Informal settlements become an intriguing spatial dimension of urbanization in those countries which experience the systemic shift from socialism to neoliberal regimes. This paper takes chengzhongcun(s) (literally meaning ‘villages encircled by the city’ boundaries) as a case to explore the dynamics of informal settlements in post-socialist China that has certain distinctive features related to the legacy of socialist institutions and restructuring of urban space by various forces. The paper details the political and economic contexts, as well as the ways in which chengzhongcun(s) are transformed into functional but unregulated urban space. It also elucidates the policy approach towards formalizing chengzhongcun(s) and confrontation involving in government-led redevelopment. The analysis illustrates how spatial informality is shaped by the interaction of economic interests and political considerations in a post-socialist economy with retaining the rural–urban dualism of land ownership and the control of urban citizenship. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 and a subsequent Memorandum of Understanding ending three decades of armed conflict has opened up Aceh to international aid, trade, ideas and potential investment. For Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, such disasters have been exploited systematically in processes of neoliberalization. Based on fieldwork in Aceh and Jakarta, this paper shows that while neoliberal elements are present within important economic-geographical imaginaries in post-disaster Aceh, they are intertwined with and exceeded by other imaginaries. We draw attention to the theoretical importance of a fuller understanding of such imaginaries, their origin and reach, content and the actors and mechanisms associated with their promulgation. The paper recounts four economic-geographical imaginaries of the future of Aceh: (1) Aceh as newly (re)opened to overseas investors; (2) Aceh as a site of revivable trade connections to the Malay and Islamic worlds; (3) Aceh as a self-governing economic space; (4) Aceh as a united territory of diverse cultures and districts. The first of these is most closely associated with processes of neoliberalization but is exceeded by the others which, taken together, unsettle any singular script of a “disaster capitalism complex” at work in the reconstruction of Aceh. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]