Reading for Difference in the Archives of Tropical Geography: Imagining An(Other) Economic Geography for Beyond the Anthropocene

This paper is based on the 2016 Neil Smith Lecture presented at St Andrews University. It honours the work of a geographer whose pioneering work on uneven development and the complex relations between capitalism and nature shaped late 20^th century thinking inside and beyond the discipline of Geography. Today the collision of earth system dynamics with socio-economic dynamics is shaking apart Enlightenment knowledge systems, forcing questions of what it means to be a responsible inhabitant on planet earth and how, indeed, to go onwards “in a different mode of humanity”, to quote eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood (2007; Australian Humanities Review 42:1). “The Great Acceleration” since the 1950s of trends in key aspects of earth system health and socio-economic change highlights powerful dynamics that have shaped a new geological epoch, contentiously named the Anthropocene—or more perhaps to Neil’s liking, the Capitalocene. In this paper I ask how might we do geographic research in these times? I reflect on this question by drawing on the feminist anti-essentialist thinking strategy of reading for difference developed by J.K. Gibson-Graham. I attempt to open up new ways of working with uncertain possibilities. I do so with reference to field research into place-based knowledges of resilience in Monsoon Asia—a region that is experiencing increasingly uncertain and extreme “natural” events that signal Anthropogenic climate change. I return to “area studies” scholarship of Monsoon Asia conducted in the 1950s when the engines of economic change were starting to rev, fuelled by dire predictions of population explosion and the fear of communism. Like Neil, I am interested in the genealogy of geographical scholarship and the institutional contexts in which it developed and was influential. I look back to see how local knowledge was described and appreciated by two of our geographic forefathers and I consider how reading against the grain of capitalocentrism might play a role in making other worlds possible.     

Decentralization and Democracy in Indonesia: A Critique of Neo‐Institutionalist Perspectives

This article assesses some of the major premises of neo‐institutionalist explanations of decentralization policy and practices, but focuses especially on the relationship between decentralization and democracy, in the context of the recent and ongoing Indonesian experience with decentralization. In the last two decades ‘decentralization’ has become, along with ‘civil society’, ‘social capital’ and ‘good governance’, an integral part of the contemporary neo‐institutionalist lexicon, especially that part which is intended to draw greater attention to ‘social’ development. The concern of this article is to demystify how, as a policy objective, decentralization has come to embody a barely acknowledged political, not just theoretical, agenda. It also suggests alternative ways of understanding why decentralization has often failed to achieve its stated aims in terms of promoting democracy, ‘good governance’, and the like. What is offered is an understanding of decentralization processes that more fully incorporates the factors of power, struggle and interests, which tend to be overlooked by neo‐institutionalist perspectives. The current Indonesian experience clearly illustrates the way in which institutions can be hijacked by a wide range of interests that may sideline those that champion the worldview of ‘technocratic rationality’.     

One for all,or all for oneself? Governance cultures in regional public transport planning

Due to the fragmented organizational landscape characterizing public transport, it is important to study and explore how regional governance of public transport adapts to national institutional reforms. By employing the term ‘governance cultures’ to a comparative case study of regional public transport planning in Sweden, we contribute to theories of governance by cultural sensitization. Combining governance theory with cultural analysis, we apply a cultural perspective to understand the two cases. We conclude that public transport planning in the Stockholm region is defined by ‘negotiations’ between stakeholders, whereas in the Västra Götaland region it is characterized by a governance culture of ‘collaboration’. The evidence from our case studies emphasizes the importance of understanding local governance practices as situated in cultural contexts as well as of viewing governance cultures as an important factor affecting the purpose, degree and outcomes of collaboration in planning practices.     

Legal Geographies of Intellectual Property, ‘Traditional’ Knowledge and Biodiversity: Experiencing Conventions,Laws, Customary Law,and Karma in Thailand

This article explores the existence of customary laws relating to ‘traditional’ knowledge of plants in Thailand through micro‐ethnographic case studies. This is juxtaposed against global and national frameworks of intellectual property laws that have a privatising effect on knowledge under the rubric of discovery or ‘invention’, as well as liability rights approaches of compensation and benefit‐sharing for research access. By understanding scale and legal jurisdiction as socially and politically constructed phenomena, we explore how laws at different scales and in different jurisdictions may override each other, discriminate against foreign laws and practices, and ignore customary laws. In doing so, the paper presents complex legal geographies of plants and associated knowledge, which suggest that the customary laws and norms of Indigenous groups and traditional healers are often ignored by ‘outsiders’. The paper notes that the possibility of ‘injury’ to traditional healers remains considerable without appropriate consent and given the discriminations surrounding knowledge made by patent laws. However, the ethnographies also point to the possibility of local remedies to these injuries through ritual processes, and we note resistant co‐constitutions of law and scale through the Nagoya Protocol.     

Governance at community level: Small towns in rural Victoria

The ‘blurring’ of the boundaries between and within public and private sectors has led to new styles of governing that affect the way that rural communities organise themselves. Some have called this a shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ where there has been a convergence of neo-liberal and communitarian ideologies to form the basis of a new relationship between the state, the market and civil society. We analyse the impact of these converging ideologies using a survey of development groups in 35 towns in rural Victoria and explore the types of community governance that have emerged as a response to changes in those towns that lost their local government authorities in the last decade of the twentieth century.     

Settler geology: Earth's deep history and the governance of in situ oil spills in Alberta

Alberta's bitumen industry is frequently identified as a key site of environmental politics in the Anthropocene owing to the scale of its fossil fuel extraction operations. While popular images of surface mining activities often focus these discussions, approximately 80% of the bitumen reserves in the Canadian province lie too deep for surface mining and are extracted through in situ technologies, including processes that inject high-temperature, high-pressure steam to mobilize geologic formations of the tar-like fossil fuel. This article examines how in situ extraction was governed in response to four flow-to-surface (FTS) events in which bitumen unexpectedly migrated to Earth's surface as the result of in situ operations. The governance response to these events is of particular interest because it counters the assertion that existing governance institutions operate on time scales that are incommensurate with those relevant to the Anthropocene. The Alberta case shows the opposite owing to how Earth's deep history was used to provide temporal syntax for a geotechnical debate that ensued over what caused the FTS events. By detailing the controversy over what caused the FTS events, and the search for “enabling conditions” that would link causal explanations to the spatial distribution of the four bitumen seeps, Earth's deep history was also made commensurate with the political geography of settler colonialism in Alberta. The article introduces and develops the notion of ‘settler geology’ in order to capture the naturalization of geologic forms of reasoning about Earth's deep history, the geologic force of anthropogenic in situ operations, and the temporal framework of settler colonial governance in Alberta.     

Feared Rumours and Rumours of Fear: The Politicisation of Ethnicity During the Fiji Coup in May 2000

In this article I explore rumour and fear as crucial to the politicisation of ethnicity and the attempt of ethno‐nationalists to gain political hegemony during the coup in Fiji in May 2000. I discuss rumours during the Fiji crisis as emotional discourses articulating fears and anxieties that have influenced interethnic relations in Fiji since the indenture of Indian labour. I argue that these feelings of fear and insecurity are linked historically to issues of land, demography and race and investigate how the George Speight Team and Fijian ethno‐nationalists aimed at reinforcing and foregrounding these emotions to mobilise support. I also look at the role of rumours and fear in the silencing of dissent and opposing voices. I ask how rumours were in dialogue with other discourses circulating at the height of the crisis and how they complemented ethno‐nationalist political strategies. I suggest that part of the political success of the George Speight Team stems from their effective engagement of different local, national and global levels to reinforce an old discourse of ethnic Fijian unity and fear of Indo‐Fijian colonisation around which they mobilised ethnically based political support. The effect of this ‘indigenous articulation’ was a polarisation of Fijian and Indo‐Fijian positionings in the nation.     

Geographers and the Discourse of an Earth Transformed: Influencing the Intellectual Weather or Changing the Intellectual Climate?

This article considers how geographers might choose to respond to many geoscientists' claims that we are entering ‘the age of humans’. These claims, expressed in the concepts of the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and global tipping points, make epochal claims about Earth surface change that are also far‐reaching claims upon Earth's current inhabitants. The scale and scope of their normative implications are extraordinarily grand. After describing the content and wider context for these claims, the history of some geographers' engagement with global change research is sketched and their current contributions described. Wider alterations in the modus operandi of global change scientists seem to offer a perfect opportunity for geographers to demonstrate the intellectual and societal value of their discipline's ‘integrative’ aspirations. However, the article suggests that this opportunity is likely to be used in a rather conservative way that downplays the sort of wide, deep and plural forms of integrative analysis that a post‐Holocene world surely calls for. Such forms exist in geography but are currently not, by and large, feeding into wider debates in global change research about how to understand and influence the future of Earth and humanity. The question is: how might they serve to alter the intellectual climate prevailing in global change research as Future Earth becomes the new umbrella for its next phase of development?     

The temporary as the future: Ready‐to‐use therapeutic food and nutraceuticals in South Africa

The reconfiguration of food as a pharmaceutical in biomedical regimes has been considered by scholars along two axes: (1) food supplementation as humanitarian intervention, based on a specific value of life and delivered in ‘crisis’ situations with a short temporal horizon; (2) food supplementation as commodity, marketed as enhancing ‘wellness’ or potential, based on notions of risk in broad temporal frames. We consider nutraceuticals and ready‐to‐use‐therapeutic foods as they are deployed by state and commercial actors in South Africa in relation to two key figures: the pregnant woman and the HIV‐positive population. These biopolitical expressions of post‐apartheid regimes of knowledge, care and governance reveal how state distribution and the corporate marketing of supplements employ a future‐oriented logic that appeals to notions of power, energy and potential. Therapeutic foods in this context are thus not merely humanitarian technologies that reconfigure crisis as a chronic condition – the temporary becoming permanent – but are premised on new potentialities, in which the temporary may (re)shape the future.     

Hill of Thorns: Custom,Knowledge and the Reclaiming of a Lost Land in the New South Africa

This article provides a detailed ethnographic exploration of a case of land restitution in South Africa. It shows how the development discourse invoked during the process of reclaiming land, rather than being imposed in an entirely top‐down manner, has been the result of negotiations between those claiming and those — in government and NGOs — who have helped them claim. The resulting knowledge about the ownership and appropriate governance of land reveals a complex and often contradictory understanding of concepts like ‘custom’, ‘community’ and ‘power’.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.     

The disciplining of scientific communities

Abstract

Amidst ongoing concern with training students in the skills and knowledge necessary to contribute towards a knowledge-intensive economy, we explore how particular ‘epistemic subjects’ are produced within specific epistemic communities. We examine how social studies of science have probed the ‘disciplining’ practices that constitute scientific knowledge production, but have tended to overlook how students participate in, and become members of, epistemic communities. We propose that training contexts provide a window onto the disciplining processes through which scientific fields and their practitioners are co-produced. We offer an empirical example of an emerging scientific field that is working to establish community boundaries through the recruitment and training of university students. We explore how newcomers’ practices, values and identities are disciplined through participation in this nascent community whilst remaining open to negotiation and resistance. The conclusion calls for more scholarly attention to educational trajectories as processes through which disciplines and their disciples are produced.     

Expertise and the making of World Heritage policy

This paper contributes to two emergent areas of scholarship: first, the role of expertise within the domain of cultural heritage practice; and second, international heritage institutions and their processes of governance. It does so by exploring expertise within the context of World Heritage Committee meetings. These forums of international heritage policy formulation have undergone significant changes in recent years, with larger geopolitical forces increasingly shaping process and decisions. This paper foregrounds the idea of these annual meetings as ‘locales’ in order to explore the inflows of expertise that help constitute authoritative decision-making, how expert knowledge is crafted for and by bureaucratic structure, and how the interplay between technical knowledge and politics via an ‘aesthetics of expertise’ bears upon future directions. In offering such an analysis, the paper seeks to add nuance and conceptual depth to our understanding of international conservation policy and the regulatory, governmental practices of organisations such as UNESCO.     

Capitalism and the emergent world order

The two‐centuries‐old hegemony of the West is coming to an end. The ‘revolutions of modernity’ that fuelled the rise of the West are now accessible to all states. As a consequence, the power gap that developed during the nineteenth century and which served as the foundation for a core–periphery international order is closing. The result is a shift from a world of ‘centred globalism’ to one of ‘decentred globalism’. At the same time, as power is becoming more diffuse, the degree of ideological difference among the leading powers is shrinking. Indeed, because all Great Powers in the contemporary world are in some form capitalist, the ideological bandwidth of the emerging international order is narrower than it has been for a century. The question is whether this relative ideological homogeneity will generate geo‐economic or geopolitical competition among the four main modes of capitalist governance: liberal democratic, social democratic, competitive authoritarian and state bureaucratic. This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of these four modes of capitalist governance, and probes the main contours of inter‐capitalist competition. Will the political differences between democratic and authoritarian capitalists override their shared interests or be mediated by them? Will there be conflicting capitalisms as there were in the early part of the twentieth century? Or will the contemporary world see the development of some kind of concert of capitalist powers? A world of politically differentiated capitalisms is likely to be with us for some time. As such, a central task facing policy‐makers is to ensure that geo‐economic competition takes place without generating geopolitical conflict.     

Contestation and negotiation: regionalism and the politics of school textbooks in Ukraine's eastern borderlands

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to explore the (re)construction of identities in three regions adjacent to the Russian–Ukrainian border. The article analyses the areas' historical and political development and argues that placing such areas within a mega‐region term such as ‘eastern Ukraine’ fails to recognise important differences between them. Content analysis of regional history textbooks reveals that the ‘official’ state historical narrative found in school history textbooks is heavily negotiated, with regional elites in each area ‘picking and choosing’ which parts of the ‘official’ state narrative to accept and which parts to reject. In this way, the article demonstrates how the notions of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ are highly debated topics in the Ukrainian classroom as the central and local state elites are both part of the dynamic process of (re)definition of national identities.     

Resilience unpacked – framing of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘adaptability’ in long-term flood risk management strategies for London and Rotterdam

Resilience is held as a promising concept to produce a paradigm shift from traditional flood control to an integration of flood risk management and spatial planning. Central ideas to the resilience narrative are that ‘nothing is certain except uncertainty itself’ and ‘adaptability’ is key to ‘governing the unknown’. However, this terminology is far from clear, yet increasingly used, which raises the question how it is made sense of in practice. To answer this question, we examine two long-term flood risk management strategies in the London and Rotterdam region with a policy framing perspective (i.e. the English Thames Estuary 2100 Plan and the Dutch Delta Programme). In both strategies, uncertainties are a key concern, leading to adaptive strategic plans. Reconstructing the framing processes shows that the English adopted a ‘scientific pragmatism’ frame and the Dutch a ‘joint fact-finding’ frame. While this led to different governance approaches, there are also striking parallels. Both cases use established methods such as scenario planning and monitoring to ‘manage’ uncertainties. Similarly to previous turns in flood risk management, the resilience narrative seems to be accommodated in a technical-rational way, resulting in policy strategies that are maintaining the status quo rather than bringing about a paradigm shift.     

Infrastructures of environmental governance

To the extent that environmental governance aspires to be based on positive knowledge of what ‘the environment’ consists of and how it functions, programmes of environmental management must find ways to study it. This article draws on scholarship on knowledge infrastructures to examine a trajectory of scientific work in Ecuador focused on biodiversity and the recent uptake of this infrastructure for the study of climate change. When combined with an appreciation for the character of power and knowledge in modern institutions, analyses of experts’ ‘infrastructure work’ elucidate how environmental problems take shape as objects of expert intervention at the level of concrete, technical practices. Incorporating scientific infrastructure within the ambit of environmental anthropology can help us to understand the shape of environmental politics to come.     

The Politics of Vigilance in Southeastern Nigeria

This article argues that governance can be best analysed within modes of vigilance. Where recent work on the post‐colonial state has emphasized the symbolic and practical constitution of the state through surveillance and spatialization, so in counterpoint, this analysis illustrates that social engagement with the state is based on conceptions of vigilance and practices of counter‐surveillance with both spatial and temporal dimensions. Drawing on an ethnography of Annang youth associations in southeastern Nigeria, this analysis outlines how the micro‐politics of vigilance are based on knowledge of the states' patrimonial ‘ways of operating’ and processes which define internal, localized rights, registers and styles of action. This argument is based on an analysis of popular responses to disorder which contribute to an ‘insurgent’ construction of the public realm in which groups marginalized and excluded challenge the logic, locations, patterns of discourse and constructions of the public good.     

The OECD and the Reconfiguration of the State in Emerging Economies: Manufacturing ‘Regulatory Capacity’

This article explores attempts to construct ‘regulatory capacity’ in developing countries, focusing on the work of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) and its role as an international standard‐setting institution in regulatory governance. The article explores how the construction of specific forms of regulatory capacity, and attempts to orchestrate the adoption of regulatory reform agendas in emerging economies, reflect broader processes of political‐policy transfer that impact state capacity and the ability of developing states to manage economic development. By analysing the OECD's engagement practices with third party organizations such as APEC (Asia‐Pacific Economic Cooperation organization) and ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and its specific engagement with emerging economies through country ‘reviews’ and ‘audits’, the author explores the implications for state capacity in terms of the adoption of regulatory systems of governance.