Stabilizing neoliberalism in Bolivia: popular participation and privatization

Neoliberal theorists and development practitioners contend that economic liberalization and privatization lead to increased private sector productivity and decentralization accompanied by administrative reforms lead to greater democracy, more efficient public sector investment, and faster local development. Examination of the Bolivian case, which has been promoted as a global model for neoliberal restructuring, presents a different picture. There, economic restructuring and privatization have led to a decline in government revenues and a continuing economic crisis. Privatization of public services has led to rate hikes, which, in turn, have generated massive social protests. Political restructuring through decentralization has as often resulted in the entrenchment of local elites as in increases in truly democratic control of resources and social investments. This economic and political restructuring has also served to territorialize opposition to privatization and neoliberal economic policies and, in some areas, reinforce regional social movements. When examined together, it becomes clear how economic and administrative restructuring has sought to provide transnational firms both access to Bolivian natural resources as well as the social stability necessary in which to operate. As privatization through the Law of Capitalization further opened the country’s borders to global capital, the decentralization program through the Law of Popular Participation served to focus the attention of popular movements from national to local arenas. While foreign investment has increased, the lack of benefits for the majority of the country has led to mounting regional social protests in the face of reduced government spending on social programs and increased prices for basic services.     

Urban Governance Under Neoliberalism: New Labour and the Restructuring of State‐Space

Abstract: In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in‐depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll‐out) of neoliberalism. While these “new institutional fixes” are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism.     

Local politics and foreign ventures in China's transitional economy: the political economy of Singaporean investments in China

The re-articulation of China into the global economy since December 1978 has led to a tremendous influx of foreign capital during the past two decades. Constrained by the limited domestic market and encouraged by home-country government, transnational corporations from Singapore are regionalising increasingly into the Asia Pacific region. To date, a significant amount of Singaporean investments abroad has gone to China. Based on personal interviews with parent companies in Singapore and their subsidiaries and/or affiliates in China, this paper aims to examine the political economy of Singaporean investments in China. Specifically, I argue that successful cross-border operations of Singaporean firms are embedded in dense networks of social and political relationships. These relationships provide the political leverage and strategic resources to enable the establishment of Singaporean firms in China. This establishment, however, is contingent on blending with local politics in China through which foreign firms use leverage on the partnership advantage of local governments (difang zhengfu), their enterprises, and business activities. This rise of local corporatism is a key institutional consequence of the recent rescaling of China's political economy. Case studies of ventures by Singaporean firms in China are presented to support my arguments. Taken together, these empirical materials shed light on the importance of understanding the role of politics at different spatial scales in influencing transnational corporations and their international business operations.     

The Making of a Regulatory Crisis: Restructuring New York City's Water Supply

Much practically orientated environmental research is marked by a polarity between functionalist abstraction and ahistorical normative discourse. This paper seeks to bridge the divide between theoretical and empirical research through a case study of New York City's water supply. Current processes of socio-economic restructuring are leading to negative environmental consequences obscured by a failure to extend analysis beyond limited temporal, spatial or sectoral scales. Insights from regulationist theory show that a combination of fiscal, political and other developments are bringing about a wide-ranging reformulation of existing patterns of environmental regulation and service provision in the city. The power of the state is being radically diminished in relation to the power of capital and a plethora of different interest groups. A relatively simple centralized model of environmental regulation is being transformed into a complex decentralized pattern involving the emergence of new approaches to urban governance. Further research is needed on the contradictions between capitalist accumulation and environmental regulation at different spatial scales in order to link New York's changing role within the global economy to the declining political legitimacy and fiscal capability of the state to play an extensive role in environmental management.     

Privatizing Social Reproduction: The Primitive Accumulation of Water in an Era of Neoliberalism

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of critical works seeking to extend Karl Marx's radical understanding of “primitive accumulation” in order to describe the increasing penetration of capital into new spaces and social relations in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This paper will argue that the intensification of the commodification of water may be understood as an ongoing mechanism of primitive accumulation and that this process generates contradictions and tensions not solely for capitalist relations of production, but more crucially, for relations of social reproduction. Further, while recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new discourse on water governance that advocates a more active role for governments in the water sector and for the incorporation of the “voices” of women and the poor in the development of sustainable and equitable water policies, this new discourse ultimately remains informed by neoliberalism's individualist ontology and its material and discursive dedication to economic growth above broader social considerations.     

Policy governance from an autopoietic perspective: revisiting Hungary’s regionalization experience

This perspective on Hungary’s post-socialist regional policy governance is informed by an approach that relates region-building and regional governance to social autopoiesis and the self-referential and self-(re)producing nature of social systems such as states. Following debates in regional studies that reflect tensions between the local constitution and external determination of regional governance, we will demonstrate how Hungary has incorporated European Union (EU) policy frameworks through specific appropriations of territorial politics and regional ideas. These appropriations reflect Hungary’s post-socialist transformation not only in terms of responses to global forces, but also as specific spatial practices and regionalization experiences. As we argue, this has in effect resulted in a regionalism without regions – a strategy of Europeanizing territorial politics without creating institutional structures that directly challenge existing power relations. Autopoiesis thus helps explain the resilience of social systems, not only their resistance to institutional change but also their capability to ‘domesticate’ external influences. While criticisms of Hungary’s technocratic and post-political regionalization projects cannot be ignored, our analysis indicates why externally driven intervention in self-organizing governance processes, for example through EU conditionality, has had less impact than expected.     

Economic Restructuring,Coping Strategies and Social Change: Implications for Institutional Development in Africa

Since the early 1980s, most African countries have experienced unsatisfactory rates of economic growth and profound changes in livelihood systems, which have affected the way their modern institutions function. However, when confronted with evidence of poor economic performance in countries undergoing adjustment, the international financial institutions often blame governments for their lack of political will in regulating the activities of bureaucrats and vested interests. They recommend policies aimed at restructuring public sector institutions through privatization, public expenditure cuts, retrenchment, new structures of incentives and decentralization. Despite efforts to implement these measures in a number of countries, the problems of low institutional capacity remain. Two key contradictions appear to explain why institutions have been largely ineffective in crisis economies in Africa: the growing contradiction between the interests of bureaucratic actors and the goals they are supposed to uphold; and the contradiction between the institutional set-up itself and what goes on in the wider society. To understand how these contradictions work, it is necessary to look more closely at the set of values and relationships that anchor institutions on social systems. The issues here are social compromise and cohesion; institutional socialization and loyalties; overarching sets of values; and political authority to enforce rules and regulations. The crises in these four areas of social relations, which are linked to the ways households and groups have coped with recession and restructuring, have altered Africa's state institutions so that it has become difficult to carry out meaningful development programmes and public sector reforms without addressing the social relations themselves.     

Melting the Cold War Permafrost: Restructuring Military Industry in Scotland

Military industry stands at the confluence of local, national and global processes. This paper examines the restructuring of this peculiar industry in one region, Scotland, from a perspective that takes the geography of production to be a joint, though contradictory, creation. Following the work of Lovering for the UK as a whole, the case of Scotland—often imagined as "militantly proletarian"—allows a specific study of the accumulation strategies of state and capital and the role of organized labor in mediating the spatial fix. Until the early 1990s accumulation was premised on additive "capital widening" strategies. Since then, both "capital narrowing" rationalization strategies and "capital deepening" intensification strategies have been pursued. Through restructuring, the UK military industry attempts to utilize the abstract spaces of the social economy to expediently and opportunistically reconstitute the concrete spaces of production and renegotiate its dependency on the refractory material of proximate living labor. Yet spatial shifts have not uniformly benefited the southern core of the UK military industry. One reason for thecontinuing salience of military industry in Scotland has been the role of a pan-class alliance, "the Scottish lobby," in campaigning against closures and for the allocation of defense contracts. Trade unions have attempted to mediate the contradictions of restructuring by supporting external strategies to retain firm survival in their present localities, even as internally workforce numbers are cut in half and management regimes become more abrasive.     

Locating creative city policy in East Asia: neoliberalism,developmental state and assemblage of East Asian cities

This paper attempts to map how creative city policy emerged as a new form of urban politics in East Asia. It locates the emergence of creative city policy within the East Asian context, where the current political economic movement of neoliberalism intersects with the developmental state’s historical legacy. By investigating institutional and economic practices and consequences of creative city policy in Seoul and Yokohama, this study focuses on how the urban place become carefully rearranged settings through certain procedural, institutional, and technical mechanisms implemented by various discursive and material practices of policy actors. Through this analysis, this research critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy driven-development and considers the social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within the new creative city policy discourse.     

新国家空间理论的内涵与评价

新国家空间理论是对国家空间重构的系统性描述,它将国家空间看作动态的"过程",而非预定的、固定的"容器"。其核心观点为：①以社会建构的国家空间为研究对象,并关注其多维重构,尤其是尺度重组过程;②关注资本积累方式的转变、国家管制模式转型和行动者的社会政治斗争等多重动因;③关注国家空间选择性及其演变趋势,以及国家空间重构的分层特征。不过,该理论也存在若干不足,如缺乏对行动者的详细探讨、缺乏对尺度和领域以外的空间维度的分析、重构趋势仍有待验证等。尽管如此,新国家空间理论有效整合了人文地理学关于国家治理与空间关系的相关理论,对于全球化研究、城市和区域治理研究以及行政结构重组研究等仍具有重要的借鉴意义。     

The making of an 'arcane' infrastructure: immigrant practitioners and the origins of professional engineering regulation in Ontario

Many immigrant professionals have difficulty securing the appropriate licenses required to practice their professions in Canada. Complex licensing procedures managed by professional regulatory institutions compose what a former federal immigration minister called an 'arcane infrastructure'. This article draws on a discourse analysis of historical professional periodicals to investigate the origins of these institutions, using the regulated engineering profession in Ontario as a case study. Within a conceptual framework based on institutional cultural capital, cultural regulation of labour and habitat, the article analyzes the justifications employed by Canadian engineering societies to establish institutional qualification standards. We conclude that these standards represented a strategic effort on the part of engineering society members to protect their professional, social and economic interests by excluding non-members and foreign engineers. Passage of engineering licensing legislation in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s institutionalized these processes of exclusion and established the professional regulatory framework that is still in place today.     

Managerialism,governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance

After decades of relative stability, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a radical restructuring of local–central relations in Britain. This paper draws on neo-Foucauldian writings on ‘governmentality’ to argue that local state restructuring is a product of the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as a distinct political rationality. Material drawn from empirical research on local economic governance in the Scottish Highlands shows how the functioning of a distinct set of managerial ‘technologies’ — embedded in specific practices such as budgetary management, audit and targeting — is instrumental in giving the central state the capacity to shape local institutional practice. At the same time, however, local institutional actors retain some scope to adapt and ‘translate’ central directives to their own particular purposes. Whilst recent neo-Gramscian contributions argue that local governance must be seen as a product of national state restructuring, the neo-Foucauldian emphasis on governmental technologies specifies the precise mechanisms which give central state authorities the reach and capability to monitor and steer the activities of local institutions. In conclusion, the paper suggests that focusing on the reception of governmental technologies within sub-national institutional sites may offer a productive line of inquiry which can expose the internal contradictions and fissures of neo-liberal programmes.     

Agglomeration,foreign firms and firm exit in regions under transition: the increasing importance of related variety in Hungary

ABSTRACT

Related variety of economic activities is widely recognized to induce regional development; however, it is not clear how this mechanism takes place in regions that go through major structural and institutional transformation. Furthermore, foreign direct investment (FDI) is typically a major source of structural change in these areas; and we still need a better understanding on how foreign-owned (foreign) firms affect the dynamics of domestic-owned (domestic) companies. For these reasons we analyse firm-level exit in Hungarian city regions between 1996 and 2011, over the late post-socialist transition in manufacturing industries, focusing on the difference between foreign and domestic firms. Introducing ownership into the related variety calculation, we estimate the probability of firm exit with the region-level related variety calculated separately for foreign and domestic firms. Our results suggest that related variety of foreign firms decreases the probability of domestic firm exit earlier during the economic transition compared to the related variety of domestic firms. This finding supports the idea that FDI plays a formative role in regions under transition, and shows that domestic firms benefit from being in agglomerations where foreign firms are technologically related to each other.     

Export-led Technology Development in the Four Dragons: The Case of Electronics

To date, little attention has been paid to the strategies of local firms in bringing about industrialization in Bast Asia. This article focuses on the methods by which domestic firms utilized foreign connections to overcome technology and market barriers in electronics. A simple market-technology model is developed as a first approximation of how domestic technology assimilation relates to export marketing in the four ‘Dragons' of East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore). It proposes that export demand shaped the pace and pattern of technological progress in electronics in each of the four Dragons. Historical evidence shows that each country used a distinctive mix of direct and indirect export mechanisms to acquire technology and to enter international markets. Foreign buyers, transnational corporations (TNCs), original equipment manufacturer (OEM) arrangements, joint ventures and licensing deals were exploited by ‘latecomer’ firms to their market and technology advantage. Asian firms progressed from simple assembly tasks to more sophisticated product design and development capabilities, travelling ‘backwards' along the product life cycle of traditional innovation models. Today, leading Asian firms invest heavily in R&D and engage in partnerships with TNCs to acquire and develop advanced new electronics technologies. The technological progress of latecomers remains closely coupled to export demand through OEM and other institutional arrangements.     

Looking in the wrong direction? Reflections on Italy's most recent ‘crisis’

This paper argues that, rather than focus on Italy's well-known institutional deficits, especially vis-à-vis its larger, more prosperous European neighbours, we should examine instead the experiences of another set of countries (India, Israel, etc.) that have promoted economic reform and growth through entrepreneurship. Relying on cross-national networks to provide local firms with capital, technology, market access and managerial skills, firms in these other countries were able to supplement or even circumvent institutional deficiencies in their home countries and build successful enterprises. Perhaps a similar strategy could be pursued by Italy's small and medium-sized firms and thus help relaunch growth in the Italian economy.     

内蒙古阿尔山森林资源枯竭型城市转型战略决策量化分析

本文通过对阿尔山市实际情况分析基础上,采用层次分析法(Analytical Hierarchy Process),通过建模、计算,对阿尔山市资源枯竭转型战略作了定量化分析,得出以下结论:在相当长的时期内,阿尔山追求生态效益应是第一位的,因此加强森林资源环境的保护与生态治理是首要战略目标,且加强森林养护与生态功能建设是第一重要的发展战略;当前亟待解决的首要发展问题是森林资源枯竭及生态环境恶化、林业系统体制矛盾及资金欠账严重,应采取的重要措施是依托国家政策尽快建立生态补偿机制及衰退产业援助机制,加快阿尔山林业企业的资产剥离重组,理顺政府与林业局关系,进而培育以"绿色"为主题的接续产业体系。     

Capital,Labour and State Relations in the Analysis of Enterprises and Restructuring: An Australasian Debate

The paper arises out of the debate of a group of Australian and New Zealand geographers who attended a workshop in ‘Enterprises and Restructuring’ held in Canberra in September 1988. The paper outlines a framework for a political economy analysis of processes at the heart of economic restructuring and examines the units of analysis, concepts and approaches used by geographers bringing different philosophic positions to the investigation of economic restructuring. It explores how the three threads of production, accumulation and social relations are intertwined in the study of enterprise and restructuring and how an understanding of these dimensions provides a basis for reinterpreting the utility of many analytical categories. The discussion of the meaning, relevance and content of terms such as enterprise, industry, capital and the state confirms the validity and value of concepts derived from different theoretical positions and goes some way towards demonstrating that researchers from opposing positions can meaningfully communicate and cooperate.     

Ruhr Firms between Dynamic Change and Structural Persistence – Globalization, the 'German Model' and Regional Place-Dependence

This paper¹ investigates recent restructuring strategies of medium-sized firms in the Ruhr area, and assesses the role of institutional, organizational and socio-economic factors in shaping their strategic responses to economic change. By pointing out the extent to which embeddedness in different political-economic contexts constrains the expansion of organizational space, it is argued that medium-sized firms respond by falling back on routinized, predominantly regional, interaction structures. 'Embedding' and cooperation are, however, constrained by market forces and competitive pressures, which manifest themselves in various governance dilemmas. Solving these dilemmas between institutional persistence and 'economic imperatives' constitutes a major organizational challenge for the sample firms.     

资本、权力与空间:“空间的生产”解析

全球化时期的生产方式从根本上决定了资本和权力是城市空间产生和演化的主要动力。它们分别展现了不同的作用范围、形式及效果:资本主要作用于物质的、社会—经济空间的生产,而权力主要作用于抽象的、政治—制度空间的生产。这两个过程相互影响、相互交织。本文将"空间的生产"理论与城市空间实践结合起来进行转型中国语境下的解析,尝试提供一个研究我国城市与区域空间重构问题的马克思主义政治经济学视角。     

Class in a Glass: Capital,Neoliberalism and Social Space in the Global Wine Industry

Abstract: This paper explores the evolving relationship between class and capital in the neoliberalised global wine industry. Wine is a unique sector that is possessed of intricate and underexplored aspects of class formation. Having investigated the recent restructuring of the industry under neoliberalism the paper goes on to analyse class formations in the production and consumption spheres. In this discussion we note not only the concrete economic and social dynamics of change, in terms of the differing fortunes of consumers, investors, landowners and workers, but also the physical and symbolic expressions of class in and through the countryside, as manifested in changing landscapes, discourses and idylls. In conclusion we analyse relationship between capital, class formation and accumulation across and within different scales in the context of a rapidly globalising sector that is so rooted in place.