Gender,Risk and Micro‐financial Subjectivities

Abstract: This article analyses the gendered contradictions of microfinance's celebrated “double bottom line” of social and financial impact. The example of microfinance is used to illustrate the gendered and colonial constructions of “risk” and “responsibility” that underpin neoliberalism and its gendered paradoxes. After revisiting the discursive critique of these terms, I draw on how indigenous women participating in a microfinance institution in Bolivia describe their experience to suggest how gendered ideas of risk and responsibility are framing their negotiation of and resistance to the market. While the gendered and colonial construction of risk creates dynamics that perpetuate indigenous women's exclusion from the market, the terms of the resistance and use of the intervention also challenge feminist critiques of neoliberal governmentality developed mostly with reference to advanced modernity and welfare regimes.     

The Neoliberalisation of the Local State in Durban,South Africa

Abstract: There exists a growing literature on the geographical aspects of neoliberalism and neoliberalisation. In this paper I focus on how the neoliberalisation process is articulated at the scale of the local state in Durban, South Africa. I examine the neoliberalisation process through the lens of the water sector. This paper contributes to the body of literature showing how private sector governance techniques are being used in the public sector effecting its neoliberalisation. I show how pricing structures are neoliberal and in turn how they are deployed and contribute to the neoliberalisation of the local state in Durban. I show that accounting strategies, tariff structures, and cost recovery measures are central to the neoliberalisation process in Durban.     

Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for Conservation

Abstract: By exploring the shifting and uneven power relations among state, market and civil society organizations in US environmental foreign aid policy‐making, this article forges new ground in conversations about conservation and neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, an evolving group of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) has lobbied the US Congress to support environmental foreign assistance. However, the 1980s and 1990s rise of neoliberalism laid the conditions for the formation of a dynamic alliance among representatives of the US Congress, the US Agency for International Development, environmental NGOs and the private sector around biodiversity conservation. In this alliance, idealized visions of NGOs as civil society and a countering force to corporations have underpinned their influence, despite their contemporary corporate partnerships. Furthermore, by focusing on international biodiversity conservation, the group has attracted a broad spectrum of political and corporate support to shape public policy and in the process create new spaces for capital expansion.     

Neoliberalism and the Institutions for Regional Development in Australia

This paper examines some effects of the pursuit of neoliberalism on regional development policy and practice in Australia, and in particular on the activities and effectiveness of regional development organisations. The paper interprets data from a survey of 505 regional development organisations across Australia through the framework of Jessop's contribution to state theory and his identification of four key trends in economic management under neoliberalism. Regional development policies are seen as a response of governments to electoral pressure from regions, but a response that is constrained by the dominance of neoliberal ideology. The objectives of regional development are predominantly economic, but are often limited to the role of facilitation and the provision of information. Some responsibility for regional development has been shifted downwards to regions, but the effectiveness of the organisations given this responsibility is reduced by the short‐term and competitive nature of much of their funding, the lack of coordination between regional development actors at the local level, the proliferation of agencies and the competition between them. The paper concludes that regional development agencies in Australia are in many ways a product of neoliberalism, since they represent one way in which governments can be seen to be responding to regional pressure for assistance but they can do so without incurring significant costs. Yet regional development bodies are also a victim of neoliberalist thinking, since it denies them the resources and the powers they need to be more successful in their work.     

Real Institutional Responses to Neoliberalism in Australia

The paper defines the state's apparatus as a site of power and contestation. This view enables contingency in the realm of government to be taken seriously. Accordingly, the paper takes a critical view of the idea of neoliberalism as a general global process. The paper reviews Paul du Gay's history of the state's apparatus, including his nostalgia for bureaucracy and his disdain for entrepreneurship. The paper contrasts du Gay's stylised take with a study of shifts in institutional structures and behaviours in Australia's state apparatus since the mid 1970s leading to the present period of Howard neoliberalism. The paper positions these shifts in the context of Coombs‐led institutional reform in Australia; it examines the potential for institutional resistances and responses; and draws implications for how we view institutions as having agency in the political processes of state apparatus reform.     

Educating the national citizen in neoliberal times: from the multicultural self to the strategic cosmopolitan

The paper is a broad, comparative investigation of shifts in the educational rhetoric and policy of three countries over the past two decades. Using England, Canada and the United States as case studies, I argue that the spirit of multiculturalism in education has shifted from a concern with the formation of tolerant and democratic national citizens who can work with and through difference, to a more strategic use of diversity for competitive advantage in the global marketplace. This shift is directly linked with and helps to facilitate the entrenchment of neoliberalism as it supports a privatization agenda, reduces the costs of social reproduction for the government, and aids in the constitution of subjects oriented to individual survival and/or success in the global economy.     

Neo-Liberalism as Creative Destruction

Neoliberalization has swept across the world like a vast tidal wave of institutional reform and discursive adjustment, entailing much destruction, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers, but also of divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of thought, and the like. To turn the neoliberal rhetoric against itself, we may reasonably ask: in whose particular interests is it that the state take a neoliberal stance and in what ways have these particular interests used neoliberalism to benefit themselves rather than, as is claimed, everyone, everywhere? Neoliberalism has spawned a swath of oppositional movements. The more clearly oppositional movements recognize that their central objective must be to confront the class power that has been so effectively restored under neoliberalization, the more they will likely themselves cohere.     

The Cultures of Capitalism: Glasgow and the Monopoly of Culture

Abstract:  While many have recognized since the 1970s the strong relationship between culture and urban renewal, particularly as cities began to use cultural amenities to change their images and lure potential investors, little has been written about how and why cultural assets may be valued investments in their own right. There is at least one notable exception, in the work of David Harvey, and this approach takes as its starting point the importance of the monopoly aspects of culture, particularly for rents, competition and fixed capital. In part, I bring Harvey's theoretical insights on the political economy of culture to bear on the case of Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1980s, and particularly its nomination as the European City of Culture, with particular attention paid to how the economics of culture is related to local politics.     

The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco

Abstract:  Recently a "mobility turn" has entered critical geographic discourse. This mobility turn recognizes that mobility is at once physical movement and contains social meanings that are manifested in a politics of mobility. In this paper I contribute to this emerging line of inquiry by exploring how the politics of mobility is manifested in localized urban processes. Mobility, as with the broader localized urban process, is political and ideological, and this is particularly true with contemporary debates about automobiles and parking in cities. I explore parking as an example of the broader contestation of urban space, using a case study of San Francisco, California. There are three broad factions in San Francisco's parking debates—progressives that advocate for less parking, neoliberals that advocate that market-based pricing determine the amount of parking, and neoconservatives that advocate for more parking. Throughout the paper, I provide thoughts on the relationship between parking, space, ideology, and the broader urban process.     

Acts of Aid: Neoliberalism in a War Zone

Abstract:  International aid is a dynamic bundle of geographical relationships at the intersection of war, neoliberalism, nature, and fear. The nexus between development and security warrants further conceptualization and empirical grounding beyond the instrumentalist and alarmist discourses that underwrite foreign aid. This article examines two such discourses, that of "aid effectiveness" and securitization, that serve to frame an analysis of aid to Sri Lanka. Since 1977, neoliberal policies of international assistance have shaped the country's economy and polity, and, since 1983, government troops and militant rebels have been at war. International aid focuses on economic development and support for peace negotiations, but little attention has been paid to the ways in which these agendas intersect to shape donor behavior and aid delivery. Drawing from research on international aid agencies operating in Sri Lanka, in particular the Canadian International Development Agency, the geopolitics of aid are analyzed.