Geography, nature, and the question of development (original) (raw)

Dialogues in Human Geography Eric Sheppard Geography , nature , and the question of development

2011

During the last decade, geography has gained new salience as a development factor in the public imagination and policy realms, through the work of scholars located outside the discipline. Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs have popularized the idea that a physical geographic backcloth, first nature, profoundly shapes the conditions of possibility for global economic prosperity or poverty, and sustainability. Geographical economists have built microfoundational accounts of second nature: how uneven geographies emerge on a uniform biophysical backcloth. ‘New’ development economists, now profoundly critical of neoliberal globalization, argue for both Keynesian and Hayekian alternatives. Notwithstanding their differences, these communities of scholarship share a sociospatial ontology that underwrites a stageist, teleological conception of economic development, to be made possible by globalizing capitalism. A geographical, relational/dialectical conception of the relationship between the ec...

Introduction: Uneven Development 25 Years On: Space, Nature and the Geographies of Capitalism

New Political Economy, 2011

This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 25 years after its publication. Few books have made such productive contributions to expanding the horizons of political economy, particularly the spatiality of political economy, as has Uneven Development. This introductory article explores some of these aspects of the book's significance for the readership of New Political Economy; it remarks on the lasting if not growing significance of Smith's intellectual and political contributions two and a half decades after one of his, and the discipline of geography's, crowning achievements. At the same time it foreshadows ways in which the text can continue to push our understanding of the interconnections among nature, capital and the production of space.

Re-thinking geoeconomics: Towards a political geography of economic geographies

Geography Compass, 2019

Geoeconomics is a contested concept. What seems common to recent attempts to define the concept of geoeconomics is that it is almost invariably discussed with relation to geopolitics. In this paper, I seek to provide a reading of “geoeconomics” from political geography that both evaluates geoeconomic claims on their own terms and, moreover, avoids a political/economy binary that even some of the critical approaches tend to fall into. For this purpose, I provide a selective mapping of some of the ways in which geoeconomics has been scrutinized in IR and in human geography and defined with relation to the concept of geopolitics. I single out two main fields of scholarship. First, I introduce a foreign policy tradition that at least superficially draws from the realist tradition in IR. Second, I discuss various materialist and poststructuralist approaches in political geography that can be at least implicitly connected to the term geoeconomics. Third, I develop a reading of geoeconomics as political geographies of knowledge-intensive capitalism. This perspective turns attention to the geopolitical space economy of capitalism, draws from work in critical human geography, heterodox political economy, and urban studies, and seeks to overcome the separation between geoeconomics and geopolitics.

Neoliberalism and geography: expansions, variegations, formations

Geography Compass, 2010

The pervasiveness of neoliberalism within the field of human geography is remarkable, especially when we consider its virtual absence from the literature less than a decade ago. While the growing attention afforded to neoliberalism among geographers is new, the phenomenon of neoliberalism is not. This paper traces the intellectual history of neoliberalism and its expansions across various institutional frameworks and geographical settings. I review the primary contributions geographers have made to the literature, and specifically their recognition for neoliberalism’s variegations within existing political economic matrixes and institutional frameworks. Contra the prevailing view of neoliberalism as a pure and static end-state, geographical inquiry illuminates neoliberalism as a dynamic and unfolding process. The concept of ‘neoliberalization’ is thus seen as more appropriate to geographical theorizations insofar as it recognizes neoliberalism’s hybridized and mutated forms as it travels around our world. I also consider some of the most salient ways that neoliberalism has been theorized among human geographers. In particular, I highlight understandings of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, as a policy-based approach to state reform, and as a particular logic of governmentality, arguing that while there are significant differences between these various formations, it may also be important to work beyond methodological, epistemological, and ontological divides in the larger interest of social justice.

Development Geography: Critical development studies and political geographic imaginaires

This article offers a selective slice into the wide-ranging scholarship in critical development studies. It reaches outside of ‘development studies’ proper to explore points of intersection and complementarity with cognate fields, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry, analysis, and practice. It attends in particular to the political geographic imaginaries that frame contestations over the 2010 G20 Summit. These struggles represented both the extremes of anti-democratic neoliberal governance, as well as diverse and creative tactics aimed at building alternative alliances and social movements. The strength of recent critical development studies lies in its capacity to connect analysis of the violence and exclusion characteristic of both old and new imperialist geographies with practical and normative commitments to the creation and sustenance of spaces of political possibility. In making this call, we seek to expand the conversations of critical development scholars by paying particular attention not only to senior scholars in the field, but also to some important new research by emerging scholars.