Between Water Abundance and Scarcity: Discourses,Biofuels, and Power in Piura,Peru

In 2006, transnational ethanol corporations arrived in Chira, a semi‐arid zone located in the Piura region of northern Peru. Large expanses of land were used to produce sugarcane for ethanol, which triggered local concern over the pressure this would mean on the regional water balance. From political ecology, I examine how the state and a corporation produced discourses on the idea of water abundance in the Chira Basin in order to secure water rights, which increased the risk of water scarcity for small communities, pastoralists and farmers in the region. In doing so, I call attention to the discursive strategies aimed to facilitate processes of dispossession under a technical ethos that reinforce capital accumulation. Finally, I argue that water abundance discourses contributed to produce a “waterscape” that not only produced unsustainable water use but also reinforced social inequalities.     

Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change

In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.     

Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment

How do states make the built environment more flexible and responsive to the investment criteria of real estate capital? Spatial policies, such as urban renewal funding for slum clearance or contemporary financial incentives, depend on discursive practices that stigmatize properties targeted for demolition and redevelopment. These policies and practices have become increasingly neoliberalized. They have further distanced themselves from those “long turnover” parts of the city where redevelopment needs are great but where the probability of private investment and value extraction is slight. They have become more entwined in global financial markets seeking short–term returns from subsidized property investments. They have shifted their emphasis from compromised use values (embodied in the paternalistic notion of “blight”) to diminished exchange values (embodied in the notion of “obsolescence”). I argue that obsolescence has become a neoliberal alibi for creative destruction and, therefore, an important component in contemporary processes of spatialized capital accumulation.     

Introduction: Financialisation and Development in Asia under Late Capitalism

Abstract

Multilateral development agencies have increasingly focused attention on underdeveloped countries in Asia as potential new sites for financial capital. Often referred to as “emerging markets”, these economies are seen as ripe for private sector investment and, at the same time, in need of foreign capital to support rapid industrialisation, modernisation and poverty reduction. For development agencies, this confluence of interests suggests a means for quickly closing the “development gap”, primarily through mobilising techno-managerial modalities designed to reduce barriers to capital entry and other institutional inefficiencies seen as inimical to investment. Thus development agencies now encourage the construction of “enabling environments” to support “market driven development” through processes of “financialisation”. Development, in this sense, is no longer state-led or state-centred, but rather financially driven and privately procured.

As we highlight in this special issue, however, financialised modes of development are highly contested and problematic. Indeed, the diffusion into the underdeveloped world of essentially developed world financialisation agendas that seek to instil a broad-based market rationalism that downloads new costs and risks to populations is of significant concern. This Introduction sets in context and introduces a much needed set of articles that bring clarity to financialisation in developing Asia and its implications for development as a process of substantively improving material conditions.     

The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism

Digital platforms are a nearly ubiquitous form of intermediary and infrastructure in society. By positioning platforms in the geographical political economy/ecology literature, this paper provides a critical analysis of platforms as a dominant form of rentier in contemporary capitalism. In doing so, I extend this work on rent theory beyond applications to land and nature so that it also includes platforms and data. I argue that the rapid rise of the “X-as-a-service” business model across nearly all sectors of the economy is creating rentier relations by another name. This model is premised on the platform latching onto and inserting itself into the production, circulation, or consumption process, thus creating opportunities to capture value. To better understand the operations and implications of platforms, I outline three key mechanisms: data extraction, digital enclosure, and capital convergence.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

“Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions,Spatiotemporal Fixes,and the Political Economy of Delay

Models suggest that climate change mitigation now depends on negative emissions, i.e. the large‐scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This assumption has been criticised in the climate policy literature for being unfeasible and unjust. This article asks how critical scholars can make sense of, and contribute to these debates. It suggests that negative emissions can be conceived of as a spatiotemporal fix that promises to defer the devaluation of fixed capital. But the negative emissions example also challenges us to broaden our conception of how the socioecological contradictions of capitalism can be “fixed”. I outline three ways in which it does this by highlighting the significance of a predominantly temporal fix, the role of hegemonic, sociopolitical interventions involving multiple actors, and the possibility of safeguarding existing production processes. I conclude that spatiotemporal fixes to climate change should be seen as part of a wider political economy of delay in devaluing carbon‐intensive accumulation processes.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

Eco‐urbanism and the Eco‐city,or, Denying the Right to the City?

This paper critically analyses the construction of eco‐cities as technological fixes to concerns over climate change, Peak Oil, and other scenarios in the transition towards “green capitalism”. It argues for a critical engagement with new‐build eco‐city projects, first by highlighting the inequalities which mean that eco‐cities will not benefit those who will be most impacted by climate change: the citizens of the world's least wealthy states. Second, the paper investigates the foundation of eco‐city projects on notions of crisis and scarcity. Third, there is a need to critically interrogate the mechanisms through which new eco‐cities are built, including the land market, reclamation, dispossession and “green grabbing”. Lastly, a sustained focus is needed on the multiplication of workers’ geographies in and around these “emerald cities”, especially the ordinary urban spaces and lives of the temporary settlements housing the millions of workers who move from one new project to another.     

Neoliberalisation from the Ground Up: Insurgent Capital,Regional Struggle,and the Assetisation of Land

In this paper we argue that “assetisation” has been a central axis through which both neoliberalisation and financialisation have encroached in the post‐Fordist era. We focus on the mobilisation of land as a financial asset in northwest England's former industrial heartlands, offering an account of how property developer the Peel Group came to dominate the land and port infrastructure of the region through aggressive debt‐led expansion and, in particular, a hostile takeover of the Manchester Ship Canal for its land‐bank. In doing so, we illustrate how the capture of resources, especially land, by private corporations has shaped both substance and process of neoliberalisation from the ground up. By focusing on transformative struggles over land we contribute to research agendas attempting to understand the systemically dispossessive nature of assetisation, its relationship to fictitious capital formation, and the way such neoliberalising transformations are produced through grounded and situated socio‐spatial struggles.     

The Romantic Anti-Capitalisms of Short-Term Rental Hosting

This article focuses on how Airbnb hosts in the Boston metro, San Francisco, and Washington, DC respond to legislative short-term rental (STR) regulations. I trace how hosts justify their multiple STR practices by way of the civic good all while foreclosing a debate about the potential negative effects of their monetisation. I show how hosts displace the displeasing aspects of STRs onto the abstracted category of the “Investor Host”, a stand-in for foreign investment capital and indifferent corporations. I argue that STR owners replicate what Iyko Day calls “romantic anti-capitalism”, a mode of critiquing capitalism that valorises the local and concrete uses of capital while displacing capital's destructive effects onto an abstracted and racialised other. I build on Day's theorisation by demonstrating how there are multiple genres of romantic anti-capitalism that function differently based on a person's structural position within settler-colonialism.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Narco-Cattle Ranching in Political Forests

In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected areas through a process known as narco-ganadería, narco-cattle ranching. Drawing on the case study of Laguna del Tigre National Park, this article argues that narco-cattle ranching is a key driver of deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Using ethnographic and remote-sensing methods, we describe narco-cattle ranching's money-laundering practices, its territorial dynamics, and its environmental impacts. We draw on theorisations of “political forests” to explain how drug trafficking organisations transform land use in the reserve, and along the way, remake its ecology, territories and subjects. Our work illustrates that drug policy is inextricably linked to conservation policy in the Americas. More specifically, we argue that community-based resource management improves forest and protected area residents’ abilities to resist drug-trafficking related land use change by strengthening local governance and land tenure regimes.     

On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”

This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define communities by the violence they suffer, abolition ecologies call for attention to radical place‐making and the land, air and water based environments within which places are made. To that end, we suggest that an abolition ecology demands attention to the ways that coalitional land‐based politics dismantle oppressive institutions and to the promise of abolition, which Gilmore describes as making “freedom as a place”.     

What Is and Isn't in a Name

Although I remain sympathetic to the narrative behind the notion of “History of Knowledge,” I argue against redrawing the disciplinary boundaries around “knowledge,” as opposed to retaining the term “science.” This is not because I think there is no place for a “history of knowledge,” and not because I am concerned that such a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries would open the floodgates of “anything goes.” Rather, I am doubtful that problems of demarcation and exclusion can be resolved solely by changing a name. I draw on my personal experience as an East Asianist to suggest that the challenges I faced trying to fit into the community of historians of science and technology would not have been solved by renaming the discipline. At the same time, I also argue that changes can and do happen without a change of name. And finally, I maintain that the word “science” has important connotations that we do not want to give up.     

Climate change,environmental degradation and armed conflict

Climate change is expected to bring about major change in freshwater availability, the productive capacity of soils, and in patterns of human settlement. However, considerable uncertainties exist with regard to the extent and geographical distribution of these changes. Predicting scenarios for how climate-related environmental change may influence human societies and political systems necessarily involves an even higher degree of uncertainty. The direst predictions about the impacts of global warming warn about greatly increased risks of violent conflict over increasingly scarce resources such as freshwater and arable land. We argue that our best guess about the future has to be based on our knowledge about the relationship between demography, environment and violent conflict in the past. Previous rigorous studies in the field have mostly focused on national-level aggregates. This article represents a new approach to assess the impact of environment on internal armed conflict by using georeferenced (GIS) data and small geographical, rather than political, units of analysis. It addresses some of the most important factors assumed to be strongly influenced by global warming: land degradation, freshwater availability, and population density and change. While population growth and density are associated with increased risks, the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant. The results indicate that the effects of political and economic factors far outweigh those between local level demographic/environmental factors and conflict.     

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.     

State Stigmatisation in Urban Turkey: Managing the “Insurgent” Squatter Dwellers in Dikmen Valley

This paper contributes to the accounts of territorial stigmatisation by examining the state role in it in the case of Turkey, a country that suffers from growing state power. The existing debates are mainly restricted to its function as an economic strategy paving the way for capital accumulation through devaluing working-class people and places. Drawing on textual analysis of political speeches, local newsletters and mainstream national newspapers and fieldwork material that include interviews and observations in Dikmen Valley where some squatter communities mobilised against the state-imposed urban transformation project, I demonstrate that state conceptualisation of “problem people” targets the “insurgent” rather than the “unprofitable” groups. Stigma in urban settings functions in inciting the desire to meet the patterns deemed appropriate by the state, rather than the market. Moving from that, I argue that stigma is used as a state-led political strategy, which is integral to the growing authoritarianism in Turkey.     

THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL: ON THE SHARED METHODOLOGICAL LIMITS OF MODERNIZATION THEORY AND ITS CRITICS

This article argues that critical scholarship in historical studies has not overcome the methodological limits of modernization theory for failing to question the ontological principles that construct its object of analysis. I call these principles the “ontology of capital” and explicate them through Bourdieu's conceptualization of the field and capital. I argue that this ontology is established according to a distribution model in which social entities come into the analysis with the amount and value of the capital they hold. This model grasps all social relations in the form of competition, and actors and actions enter into the analysis only when they are involved in such relations. I then analyze Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey, which is written explicitly from a modernization perspective, to show how the principles of the “ontology of capital” operate in this text. The analysis focuses on how sociohistorical facts are constructed through selection and articulation of empirical evidence that become meaningful only on the basis of this ontology. The aim of this analysis is to show the ontology of capital that constructs the object of analysis in Lewis's text rather than the Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist character of his analysis of history that critics in recent decades have addressed as problems of the modernization paradigm. Based on this, I argue that for a productive critical approach, relational analysis, which characterizes critical scholarship in contrast to essentialism, also has to consider the ontological principles in a historical work to overcome methodological limits. The failure to interrogate this ontology leads to an analytical separation in critical scholarship between the analysis of historical reality and of alternatives to this reality. This separation not only produces a dehistoricized analysis of the present from a critical perspective, but also turns the alternatives into utopian models.