Neoliberalizing nature: the logics of de- and re-regulation

Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University, England M13 9PL

AbstractThis and a companion essayexamine a new and fast-growing geographical research literature about neoliberal approaches to governing human interactions with the physical environment. This literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two essays survey the literature theoretically and empirically, cognitively and normatively. They are written for the benefit of readers trying to make some sense of this growing literature and for future researchers of the topic. Specifically, they aim to parse the critical studies of nature’s neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions posed, variously, in many or most of them: what are the main reasons why all manner of qualitatively different non-human phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’?; what are the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice?; what are the effects of nature’s neoliberalisation?; and how should these effects be evaluated? Without such an effort of synthesis, this literature could remain a collection of substantively disparate, theoretically-informed case studies unified only in name (by virtue of their common focus on ‘neoliberal’ policies). Though all four questions posed are answerable in principle, in practice the existing research literature makes questions two, three and four difficult to address substantively and coherently between case studies. While the first question can, from one well-established theoretical perspective, be answered with reference to four ‘logics’ at work in diverse contexts (the focus of this essay), the issues of process, effects and evaluations are currently less tractable (and are the focus of the next essay). Together, the two pieces conclude that critical geographers interrogating nature’s neoliberalisation will, in future, need to define their objects of analysis more rigorously and/or explicitly, as well as their evaluative schemas. If the new research into neoliberalism and the non-human world is to realise its full potential in the years to come, then some fundamental cognitive and normative issues must be addressed. These issues are not exclusive to the literature surveyed and speak to the ‘wider’ lessons that can be drawn from any body of case study research that focuses on an ostensibly ‘general’ phenomena like neoliberalism.

KeywordsNeoliberalism, neoliberalisation, abstraction, ideal types,biophysical environments, environmental fixes

I. Introduction

Why are human interactions with the non-human world being ‘neoliberalised’ across the globe? In what principal ways does nature’s neoliberalisation operate in practice? What are the effects of this process? And how should these effects be evaluated? These are live and profound questions. Neoliberal policy has, for some time, beende rigeur in many parts of the ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds as a means of managing natural environments and biophysical resources. As controversial as it is widespread, such policy is ripe for detailed understanding and assessment. The four questions posed above can, if addressed systematically, offer us the tools to examine comprehensively nature’s neoliberalisation in light of twenty-plus years of policy experimentationin areas such as water management, commercial fisheries, logging, mining and ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions (to name but a few).[1]However, until very recently, the critical mass of research necessary to construct informed answers to these questions did not exist. In human geography and cognate subjects, examinations of neoliberal ideas and practices tended to focus on issues such as (un)employment, welfare provision, industrial policy and trade. Apart from a handful of academic studies (e.g. Bauer, 1997; Ibarra, Reid and Thorpe, 2000) and some ‘grey literature’ issuing from think tanks, non-governmental organisations and the like, anyone seeking reasoned answers to the fundamental questions of logics, processes, outcomes and evaluations had relatively few places to look for inspiration.[2]

Fortunately, this has changed– and it has done so in a very short space of time. Of late, numerous theoretically informed but empirically grounded studies of neoliberalism and nature have appeared in scholarly journals and as monographs.[3] These studies – undertaken by researchers across the social sciences, including human geography – constitute a vital resource. We now have a body of credible (sometimes brilliant) research that both critics and champions of neoliberalism can refer to in assessing its environmental credentials. This research, as we will see, covers both cognitive and normative issues. Surveyed systematically, it thus allows us to fashion potentially robust –albeit provisional and revisable – answers to thefour questions posed above.[4]

In geography, the bulk of the new research into neoliberalism and the non-human world is broadly unsympathetic to the project of ‘market rule’. Karen Bakker, GavinBridge (my colleague), Jessica Budds, Jeffrey Bury, Graham Haughton, Nik Heynen, Roger Keil, Nina Laurie, Alex Loftus, Becky Mansfield, Simon Marvin, James McCarthy, Tom Perreault, Scott Prudham, Paul Robbins, Morgan Robertson, Kevin St. Martin, Erik Swyngedouw and Wendy Woolford are among those who have called the neoliberalisation of nature into question in some way, shape or form.[5]Though many critical accounts of neoliberalism have employed a ‘governmentality’ approach indebted to Foucault, the above-named analysts prefer to interrogate nature’s neoliberalisation in another way.[6]Adopting what Bridge and Jonas (2002, 764) call (in the broadest sense) an “institutional political economy approach” to the biophysical world, these and like-minded geographers have deliberately positioned themselves outside the domains of neoliberal thinking and practice being analysed.[7] This contrasts with other research – some of it by geographers (e.g. Klepeis and Vance 2003), most of it not (e.g. Pagiola, Arcenas and Platais 2005) – that accepts the fundamentals of neoliberal thinking while aiming to (re)design and calibratethe environmental policies that derive logically from it.

Another key difference arises from the geographical sensibility of the authors listed above. Unlike many studies of nature’s neoliberalisation by political scientists or traditional political economists (say), those now being published by critical geographers have three strengths. First, they often pay close attention to the materiality of the non-human world: nature in its various forms figures as a biophysical actor not a tabula rasa or neutral ‘backdrop’. This is important because nature can be shown to alter the workings and outcomes of neoliberal governance ideas, rules and mechanisms (see, for example, Bakker, 2005). Secondly, close attention is also often paid to issues of scale-crossing and scale-jumping: the links between different socially constituted geographical scales in terms of logics, processes and outcomes (less so evaluation, as we will see in the next essay) are often strongly accented, so that one or other scale of environmental governance is not hypostatised or fixated upon as if others can be conveniently bracketed-out (see, for example, McCarthy, 2005a). Finally, critical geographical research into nature’s neoliberalisation covers a remarkable array of places, regions and countries. This, potentially at least, offers readers of the literature and future researchers of the topic a fairly comprehensive sense of why and how neoliberal environmental governance operates today and with what effects.

In light of all this, the wider value of the evidence-based critiques of nature’s neoliberalisation by critical geographers is, it seems to me, two-fold. First, by analysing neoliberal environmental policies ‘on the ground’, they present us with the volume and depth ofevidence necessary to give the architects of those policies pause for thought. Secondly, evidence-based critiques also keep those of us instinctively opposed to the neoliberal project both honest and optimistic: for they concretise, modify and complicate broad theoretical claims about neoliberalism. After all, in the absence of non-anecdotal findings, critics’ explanations and complaints would remain purely abstract with the attendant risk of becoming dogmatic.

In this and a follow-on essay (Castree, 2007) I aim to sift and sort the recent (and already quite large)critical geographical literature on neoliberalism and nature with a view to addressing the questions of logics, processes, outcomes and evaluations.[8] While, at one level, this inevitably makes my efforts derivative, at another I aim to ‘add value’ to readers’ understanding of what the research I survey here is telling us about its objects of analysis. When these two essays were first conceived, the intention was to parse the literature and so perform the useful function of providing systematic answers to the questions of cause (why and how?), effect and assessment. My aim was to identify commonalities and differences among the published case studies so that a wider understanding of nature’s neoliberalisation could be achieved en route to further grounded analyses and policy prescriptions in the future. That aim lives on in the pages below and the essay to come. It is, I think, a worthy one for the simple reason that the literature reviewed covers a potentially befuddling array of natural resources and socio-economic contextsexamined at different geographical scales. Given this fact, it is not easy to identify signals in the noise (supposing, of course, that such signals actually exist upon closer inspection).For readers of the literature an effort of both conceptualand empirical mapping is required that can identify lessons learnt to-date and so inform future research on (and teaching about) nature’s neoliberalisation.[9]

However, this essay and (especially) its successor have a second objective that was not part of my original intentions but which I now regard as being equally important. As I surveyed the new case study literature on neoliberalism and nature produced by critical geographers, I came to realise that constructing systematic and substantive answers to my four questions (especially the last three) wassurprisingly difficult to do. This revealed a seeming paradox. The literature I was reading bythe authors named above was conceptually lucid and empirically rich: in short, full of insights about neoliberalism’s environmental ‘logics’, modes of operation, outcomes and evaluations. Yet, for all this, comparing across individual pieces of research proved to be a major challenge. The root of the problem, I will argue, is that the authors whose work I review here are using the same terms – ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘neoliberalization’ – to refer to and judge phenomena and situations that are not necessarily similar or comparable.[10]At one level, this is unsurprising, and not a ‘problem’ at all. After all, ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is, as Brenner and Theodore (2002) argue, comprised of many different but often interconnected neoliberalisations in the plural that are organised at a variety of spatial scales. One would hardly expect ‘neoliberalism’ to operate uniformly across the globe and so the fact of heterogeneity, path-dependency and divergence should be neither a surprise nor a profound analytical issue. Indeed, the point of research should, precisely, be to account for what Mansfield (2004a: 566, emphasis added) calls “the geographicalconstitution of neoliberalism”.

But this raises two key issues.First, where one is dealing with transnational neoliberal governance mechanisms that impact on otherwise different biophysical and socio-economic settings, it is important that their operation and relative causal efficacy is carefully specified by analysts. If researchers with specific biophysical, local, regional and national interests are examining the same ‘global’ ideas, rules and mechanisms but doing so in very different ways conceptually and methodologically, then it becomes a major challenge to compare or relate their analyses. Secondly, where one is dealing with sui generis forms of neoliberal environmental governance – at the national or local scale, say –the hoary question of how far one can compare from case-to-case in geographical research arises.[11]Ostensibly similar, but causally or substantively unconnected, forms of national and local governance can only be meaningfully compared if there is real clarity and consistency in the specification of the ‘neoliberal element’ of the situations. Otherwise, one might be comparing apples and oranges while labelling them all pears or peaches. Even then, there is an issue of how far the context in which neoliberal policies operate affects or alters those policies so that they are not, in practice, strictly comparable to ostensibly similar ones elsewhere (see Castree [2005a, 2006] for a capsule elaboration of the above arguments).[12]

These extended introductory comments having been made, the topical difference between this and the follow-on essay can now be described. In the pages to follow I address the first of the four questions posed at the outset. In Castree (2007) I focus on the questions of process, outcome and evaluation. This essay, therefore, aims identify the principal logics that underlie all manner of different neoliberal policies relating to different aspects of the non-human world in different parts of the globe. It is structured as follows. In the next section I explain the need for an overarching critical account of why nature is being neoliberalised. I then (in section III) explain why such an account has not, to date, been forthcoming. I argue that a synthesis of the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and certain ecoMarxists – as used separately by a sub-set of the authors whose work I am reviewing – offers one such account and a powerful one at that (but not the only conceivable account).[13]The following section sets the scene for this synthesis by explaining what, in abstract terms, constitutes ‘neoliberalism’. Section five then links various of the empirical case studies theoretically by exploring what a comprehensive and integrated Polanyian-Marxian explanation of nature’s neoliberalisation looks like. This leads to the identification of four ‘environmental imperatives’ that can be shown to underlie several of the case studies reviewed here. A brief conclusion then follows.

As should by now be clear, I aim in this and the follow-on essay to act as an ‘underlabourer’ for the research being reviewed. In so doing I hope to set future research in this vein on a stronger cognitive and normative footing by reflecting on some fundamental issues that cross-cut the individual studies that will comprise it in the years ahead. The specific contribution of this first essay relates to both researchers of nature’s neoliberalisation in general and that sub-set who draw centrally upon Polanyian and Marxian ideas. For the former audience the utility of a theoretical, empirically-relevant synthesis regarding the question of logics is shown, even if not all researchers will ultimately persuaded by its substantive content. For the latter audience, the construction of a coherent, comprehensive, and conceptually specific argument with empirical origins and applications is attempted that might inform future research in a Polanyian-Marxian vein.[14]

II. Neoliberalising the non-human world: the need to specifypolitical economic (il)logics

Why ‘neoliberalise’the governance of thenon-human world?As the recent research by critical geographers shows so well, the last thirty years have seen an ever greater variety of biophysical phenomena in more-and-more parts of the world being subject to neoliberal thought and practice. To offer some examples: Becky Mansfield (2004a, 2004b) has investigated new fisheries quota systems in the north Pacific as a form of marketisation and enclosure; Jeffrey Bury (2004, 2005) has examined the sell-off of mineral resources in Peru to overseas investors; Karen Bakker (2004; 2005) has scrutinised the post-1989 privatisation of British water supply and sewage treatment, and also water mercantilisacion in Spain (Bakker, 2002); Morgan Robertson (2000, 2004, 2006) has looked at the recent sale of wetland ecological services in the mid-western USA; Nik Heynen and Harold Perkins (2005) have explored why and with what effects public forests have been privatised in ‘post-Fordist’ Milwaukie; James McCarthy (2004) has investigated the new ‘right to pollute’ among certain firms in the NAFTA area, and also community forest projects in North America (McCarthy, 2005b; 2006); Scott Prudham (2004) has traced the dire consequences of ‘regulatory rollback’ in the area of drinking water testing in Ontario; Kathleen McAfee (2003) has examined corporate attempts worldwide to commodify the genetic material of plants, animals and insects; Graham Haughton (2002) has examined the differential character of national neoliberal water governance frameworks globally; and Laila Smith (2004) has explored the effects of implementing cost recovery measures in the management of Cape Town’s water supply. These and several other recent studies provide rich, context specific answers to the question posed immediately above (and the other three to be addressed in the companionessay).

This is very much in keeping with the drift of geographical research on neoliberalism more generally. In urban, economic and development geography (the main disciplinary subfields where neoliberalism has been examined to-date), it has become axiomatic among researchers that they are investigating a spatiotemporally variable process (‘neoliberalisation’) rather than a fixed and homogenous thing (‘neoliberalism’). ‘Actually existing neoliberalisms’ are not the same as textbook ‘neoliberal ideology’. As Brenner and Theodore (2002, 353) observe, “an adequate understanding of … neoliberalization processes requires not only a grasp of their politico-ideological foundations but also, just as importantly, a systematic inquiry into their multifarious institutional forms, their developmental tendencies, their diverse socio-political effects, and their multiple contradictions” (see also Larner, 2003). This is echoed by Karen Bakker (2005), who recently emphasised the need to elucidate specific variants(or modalities) of nature’s neoliberalisation, in part by attending to the biophysical influence of nature in the neoliberalisation process. The strengths of Karen Bakker’s and other like-minded geographers’ attention to what Peck and Tickell (2002, 383) call “the non-trivial differences … between actually existing neoliberalisms …” are two-fold, as noted in the introduction. First, it invites both critics and supporters of neoliberal ideas to move beyond abstract argument and universalist rhetoric. While one can usefully speculate about why and with what effects neoliberalism will impact on the non-human world (and vice versa), such speculation is no substitute for concrete analyses of “both the geographical constitution of neoliberalism and its geographically distinct outcomes” (Mansfield 2004a, 566). Secondly, for critics of nature’s neoliberalisation, contextual studies help to “overcome the fear and hopelessness generated by monolithic accounts of the ‘neoliberal project’” (Larner 2003, 512). As Mansfield (2004a, 569) notes, “it is [too] easy to treat neoliberalism as … unified and coherent …[, as] ascendant around the world”. If empirical studies can demonstrate the path-dependency, variability and contradictions of specific neoliberalisations of specific aspects of the biophysical world then critics have a strong hand to play. They can show how and why certain neoliberal policies fail (or not) when they move from the drawing-board to the ‘real world’; and these critics thus have strong grounds on which to argue for alternative modes of governing access to, and utilisation of, the physical environment.