The fall and rise of agricultural productivism? An Antipodean viewpoint

I Introduction

The matter-of-factness of McDonagh’s (2013: 716) reporting of the ‘so-called paradigmatic shift in the countryside’ from ‘modernization in the form of productivism to what is called a post-productivist and/or multifunctional countryside’ belies the charged attention post-productivism attracted a decade ago. Writing of the unsustainability of small farms ‘in a post-productivist society’, he favours a ‘more multifunctional outlook’ (McDonagh, 2013: 716–17), which for some readers is a normative EU viewpoint. Thus Woods’ prior reviews of the subdiscipline (2009, 2010, 2012) focus on rurality, interdisciplinary performative rural geographies, and rural futures in British geography, but also mention, in the context of food security as a contested concept, ‘the intensification of (super-)productivist farming techniques’ (Woods, 2012: 127). A re-reading of the rural geography literature reveals that productivism and post-productivism have persisted on its margins. Dibden et al. (2009) also write of ‘hyper-productivism’ while Burton and Wilson (2012) have identified a number of ‘neo-productivisms’. This paper offers a reappraisal from the Antipodes of productivism and post-productivism for which a threefold justification is offered. First, Australia was an early ‘testing ground’ for productivist to post-productivist transitions (hereafter PPT) beyond Europe (Holmes, 2002). In addition, Wilson, who produced influential papers on the PPT, extended his thinking through studying the Landcare movement in Australia (Wilson, 2004), having also researched the farming-forestry interface in NZ (Wilson and Memon, 2005). Second, while New Zealand offered examples of agricultural productivism and consumptionist and conservationist landscapes regarded as key markers of a PPT, local rural researchers favoured other approaches to rural change (e.g. Panelli et al., 2003). Wilson and Rigg (2003) meantime addressed the important question of whether productivisim and post-productivism had any conceptual traction in the Global South. Their conclusions blunted enthusiasm for post-productivism as a fully generalizable category. But the tendency has been to treat Australia simply as part of the Global North. This overlooks its and New Zealand’s past as imperial farms (Denoon, 1983); there is no reason to expect that productivism or post-productivism here would necessarily closely approximate that described by UK rural geographies. Third, post-productivism, which Wilson (2001: 94) reconceptualized as a ‘multifunctional agricultural regime’, was further refined as ‘multifunctional agricultural occupance’ by Holmes (2002: 381), who in concert with other Australian geographers has continued this research trajectory. In parallel steps, multifunctionality became the preferred term for British geographers (Wilson, 2008). Thus Australia actually occupied a quite central though somewhat unrecognized place in the PPT debate.

More broadly, though, a vital but possibly undervalued aspect of academic labour involves the development of robust taxonomies: categories and accompanying terms that can describe and perhaps even help explain our changing reality. This is, of course, a controversial task. ‘Naming’ change usually and quite properly invites contestation and counter claims over the ‘facts’, large and small, of this change. Yet it is a critically important part of our work because it helps us and the rest of the world that we engage with (policy-makers, hopefully, as well as the lay public) make sense of the key drivers and implications of change at a range of geographical and temporal scales. Our intellectual labour ought to help the broader society see the general in the particular and vice versa, and is therefore a vital aid in divining likely and more-or-less possible futures (see Harvey, 1984). Although rural geography has not always been regarded as an incubator or crucible of theoretical ideas, the productivism/post-productivism debate of the 1990s was a key period in the subdiscipline’s intellectual development and engagement with human geography more broadly. Important and fruitful research programmes, like those associated with amenity migration, ‘new’ rural governance, alternative food networks and the like were arguably spawned by this debate. In retrospect, though, it seems puzzling that only a small number of researchers from a select few sites led this debate and related research avenues.

In reviewing this still substantial body of work, we cannot help but feel that the time is ripe for some refinement of the key terms and concepts. We feel increasingly uneasy at the now frequent loose use of terms like monofunctionality, multifunctionality, hyper-productivism, super-productivism, and neo-productivism. To help us communicate more clearly and precisely with each other, and with the policy organizations and the broader public that we seek to influence, perhaps there is a need for the development of a heuristic framework that clearly sets out the key concepts and terms related to contemporary agrarian change and, vitally, their relative relationships to each other. This is one of the key aims of this paper.

II Productivism and post-productivism in Australia

Ilbery and Bowler (1998) were arguably the first to systematically set out the terms of the PPT, although a number of rural geographers and sociologists had begun to reinterpret the post-war political economy of British and European agriculture beforehand through a similar lens (Ward, 1993; Shucksmith, 1993; Evans and Morris, 1997; Potter, 1997). Wilson (2001) provided a catalyst for Australian geographers to consider, with mixed reactions, the PPT. Smailes (2002: 80) was clear that, ‘the term “post-productivism” has misleading connotations in much of rural Australia’. Argent (2002) and Holmes (2002), also keying off Wilson (2001), produced contrasting assessments of productivist to post-productivist transitions in Australia. Argent (2002: 98) interrogated its ‘internal logic’ while Holmes (2002) looked to adapt the model to Australian conditions. Argent acknowledged that while there was a relatively neat fit for Australian agriculture from 1945 to 1973 with a productivist phase and thereafter with a post-productivist phase, these categories had little explanatory value in the Australian context:

Does the finding that the material and symbolic values of the old hegemonic order of agricultural productivism are being overrun by a new paradigm – based on economic fundamentalism, environmentalism and a landscape aesthetic drawn from the rural idyll – actually reveal anything new about the ways in which rural areas, and practices within them, are changing? (Argent, 2002: 106)

Simultaneously, Holmes (2002) reached a different conclusion about a PPT after ‘testing the model’ against the Australian rangelands. This strategy meant that, though he accepted the PPT’s underlying concepts, he also identified areas where the UK and Australian experience varied significantly, for instance over the ‘composition of post-productivist interests’, local drivers of the transition, and the mapping of different PPT regions (Holmes, 2002: 372). In elaboration of each of these points for Australia he observed that ‘the main emerging rangeland interests lie outside the market economy’ (Holmes, 2002: 372) and ‘Australia’s rangelands [were] rarely offering real estate attractive to the seekers of positional value’ (Holmes, 2002: 375). Indeed, he described the Outback as being ‘still viewed as hostile by those seeking the rural idyll’ (Holmes, 2002: 375). Nevertheless, a PPT was ‘being sharply delineated in Australia’s rangelands, where regions are much more expansive and more homogeneous than in Western Europe or the American West, making a provisional post-productivist regionalization a realistic goal’ (Holmes, 2002: 376).

Holmes believed the evidence from the rangelands was ‘strongly supportive of the validity and utility of the post-productive transition concept’ and even proposed that ‘such a transition was more readily recognizable in Australia’s rangelands than generally in Western Europe’ (Holmes, 2002: 379). The main ‘deficit’ Holmes (2002: 380) found in Wilson’s seven dimensions of the transition was ‘the incorporation of emerging amenity values within his ideology and actors dimensions, rather than their being identified as a separate dimension’. But for all his enthusiasm for a PPT, Holmes did not adopt the terminology, instead following and further modifying Wilson’s ‘multifunctional agricultural regime’ to a ‘productivist agricultural regime’ in an era of emerging ‘multifunctional rural occupance’ (Holmes, 2002: 381).

Having opted for multifunctional agricultural regimes over a PPT, Wilson (2004: 462) also continued to explore the problem. Shifting attention to actors and what he termed ‘post-productivist regime governance’, Wilson studied the Landcare movement in Australia mindful of both the oversimplification of equating local autonomous actors with mutifunctionality and of state-led actions with productivism, while sensitive to Argent’s deeper Antipodean criticisms of post-productivism. The Landcare movement, he concluded, ‘only depicts certain characteristics that would fit into our notion of “post productivist rural governance”’ (Wilson, 2004: 479). He also took from this that the ‘individual components’ of a post-productivist rural governance regime may change at quite ‘different rates’ (Wilson, 2004: 481). In this manner, by becoming a ‘laboratory’, something Holmes (2002) suggested it was eminently suited to be, rural Australia was directly incorporated into the international PPT debate in rural geography.

Since 2002 the productivist and PPT geographical writing in Australia can be tracked largely through Holmes’ repeated efforts to ‘test’ its concepts at a range of scales and locations, carried out in terms of ‘multifunctional rural occupance’ (Holmes, 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2012). These publications were augmented by an agenda-setting review paper (Holmes, 2006) which informed Wilson (2007). Productivism has also been scrutinized by other Australian geographers writing about neoliberalism and the WTO, in the context of different European and Australian meanings of multifunctionality (Cocklin et al., 2006). Argent (2011) further commented on the PPT in the setting of rural governance, suggesting that it ought now to be framed within other theorizations.

Holmes identified seven modes of rural occupance notionally produced by the relative power of the three forces of production, consumption, and protection (Holmes, 2006, 2008, 2010a). In terms of understanding rural change, Holmes (2006) asserted that the PPT, however imperfect, was the only conceptualization available for understanding the balance between economic, social, and environmental forces shaping contemporary rural spaces at a number of scales. While applauding the concept of a PPT as having the ‘attraction of being a generous, commodious receptacle, seemingly capable of assimilating many disparate ingredients’, he acknowledged that, ‘As in the United States, Canada and New Zealand’, the PPT concept ‘has failed to capture attention among “mainstream” Australian rural researchers’ (Holmes, 2006: 143). Pondering this ‘Australian disregard’ for a PPT, his two explanations – that the concept was seen as of ‘little diagnostic value’ in rural Australia and that other ‘research agenda’ markedly different from the UK were shaping the national scene – apply equally well to the New Zealand situation (Holmes, 2006: 143).

Holmes (2006: 143) maintains that multifunctionality is the encompassing concept for understanding rural change in Australia and ‘more generally in affluent societies’. This rather than post-productivism he regarded as ‘the central dynamic driving rural change’ in Australia (Holmes, 2006: 143). Accordingly, he wrote of shifting focus from agriculture to all modes of broad-scale rural resource use. He believed an added advantage of his terminology was that it was accurate, concise, and generalizable and ‘avoids the historicist myopia attached to the prefix “post”’ (Holmes, 2006: 145). Holmes (2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2012) has continued to explore multifunctionality at a range of scales with a focus on transitions between modes in real geographical space. Post-productivism has been omitted in favour of further amended concepts, evident as when he described ‘rural transition as a move away from monofunctional productivism towards multifunctionalism values’ (Holmes, 2010a: 343–4). The Antipodean genesis of ‘monofunctionalism’ (Holmes, 2006: 145) is returned to later.

Dibden et al. (2009) in an intervention drawing on anthropological approaches contrast the trajectory of productivism and multifunctionality in the EU with Australia in the context of the liberalization of agricultural trade and the WTO. Multifunctionality in the EU they depict as a ‘protectionist exercise’ which they contrasted to the ‘competitive productivism’ of Australia (Dibden et al., 2009: 302). They explained that competitive productivism and multifunctionality represented sharply divergent discursive positions, but in practice each had socially and environmentally protectionist (or ‘welfarist’) and neoliberal ‘moments of expression’, and that at the WTO level neoliberalism was not an ‘irresistible ideology’ but rather a ‘negotiable discourse’ (Dibden et al., 2009: 300). Of greater centrality to this discussion, Dibden et al. also contrast the heavily subsidized productionist agriculture of the EU with ‘unsubsidised highly productive agriculture’ of Australia, managed under what they term conditions of ‘competitive productivism’ (Dibden, et al., 2009: 300).

Pre-empting Rosin (2013), Dibden et al., (2009: 302) also noted that some Australian farmers have adapted to liberalized trade by intensifying farming practices, consolidating properties and displacing ‘inefficient’ farmers through the use of more sophisticated business management practices. The outcome they note has been ‘a form of hyper-productivism or competitive productivism’ (Dibden, et al., 2009: 302). They do not elaborate on the nature of the relationship between the two terms or their geographical situatedness, all of which would seem to be avenues for further research. The other side of the multifunctionalism argument is put by Fielke and Bardsley (2013: 759), who make a normative case for policy to improve access to farmers’ markets for Australian farmers and thus enable them to escape from the struggle to maintain a livelihood under ‘the dominant neo-liberal form of the productivist paradigm’. Also pertinent here, Fielke and Bardsley (2013) prefer ‘multifunctional’ agriculture over post-productivist regimes because it incorporates a mix of economic, social and environmental elements. Sociologists Lawrence et al. (2013: 37) have deployed ‘competitive productivism’ under Australian neoliberalism particularly as it relates to climate change though, tellingly, much of their analysis still rests on Argent (2002), particularly when it comes to rejecting an ‘environmentally benign’ PPT future.

A decade on, rural governance now provides a new means of positioning of a PPT in Australia.

The notion of a post-productivist transition – in many respects rural geography’s equivalent to Fordism/Post Fordism – is now well known and has been quite thoroughly critiqued. Within the antipodes – the regulatory antithesis of the EU the context in which the PPT was originally conceived … the general concept, if not its dichotomous structure, has been applied to Australian conditions. (Argent, 2011: 185)

III Productivism and post-productivism in New Zealand

Geographers in New Zealand, though aware of the productivist, post-productivist and multifunctional debates, never brought these fully into their analyses. Willis (2001: 62), for instance, observed: ‘it is interesting to briefly examine New Zealand farming in the light of this model’, continuing that ‘on the one hand New Zealand farms are as affected by these post-productivist trends in the same ways as their overseas counterparts … on the other hand New Zealand farming remains firmly productivist in most senses as trends in the dairy industry show’. Deregulation and sustainability, rather than productivism and post-productivism, anchored Smith and Montgomery’s (2003) discussion of agricultural restructuring. This holds also for a regional case study of hill country farmers in the North Island which was informed by a local expanding sustainability literature (Smith, et al., 2007). But in discussing a ‘transition to sustainability’ they acknowledged an international literature identifying the social, economic and environmental ‘components of sustainability’. They noted that ‘issues associated with aesthetics and values link to issues of both social and environmental sustainability as viewed in a post-productivist agriculture’ (Smith et al., 2007: 38).

Willis (2003) identified evolutionary changes in New Zealand farming, amongst them increasing farm size, rural depopulation, small rural village decline, centralization of rural industries, and centralization of rural cultural and sporting institutions. He noted that ‘in the international literature, these fit with some of the terms in the new cultural geography such as post agrarian rural communities, or post productivist economies’ (Willis, 2003: 64). This he contrasted with revolutionary change stemming from deregulatory changes in the mid-1980s. Illustrating this with the example of Buller in the South Island and contrasting it to a South Taranaki (North Island dairy heartland) case study of evolutionary change, he acknowledged that ‘the decline of Buller’s mining and indigenous forestry fits the model, as does the tendency to view future economic salvation in tourism and other post-productivist services’ (Willis, 2003: 76). Of South Taranaki, he, in contrast, observed a ‘restructured centralised form’ in which larger family farms remained and corporate agriculture was not present, though rural ‘cultural life has also been centralised’ (Willis, 2003: 76).

Other New Zealand geographical research explored rural themes at the farm, locality, and regional scales using a variety of theorizations. Johnsen (2004), for example, in scrutinizing the aftermath of 1980s farm sector ‘reform’, deployed ideas about family farming and pluri-activity. Conradson and Pawson (2009), in contrast, adopted a regional scale perspective, focusing on the west coast of the South Island, the scene of various natural resource booms, from gold through to coal, indigenous timber and, more recently, tourism. The latter, they note, ‘is seen as a potential source of economic development in many post-industrial and post-productivist settings’ (Conradson and Pawson, 2009: 83). Their substantive discussion is concentrated on renewed mineral exploitation, expansion of dairying, contested production and conservation forestry and tourism, which at one level would seem to include the ingredients of post-productivism, if not multifunctionality. However, this was not their preferred approach, which emphasized ‘regional marginality’ and the complexities of the return of some local development responsibilities to the regions under neoliberalism (Conradson and Pawson, 2009: 78).

Researchers of farmers’ markets in New Zealand have also eschewed their placement within ‘a post-productivist rural landscape’ (or that of local food) in favour of the dynamics of agriculture-community links (Chalmers et al., 2009: 321). They did not see farmers’ markets as necessarily embedded in a post-productivist countryside. Indeed, like Argent (2002), we see a poor fit between largely European notions of a post-productivist rurality and the continued dominance of much of the Antipodean landscape by large productivist farms. Consequently we view farmers’ markets as intriguing symptoms of growing diversity within a landscape still dominated by traditional productivist values (Chalmers et al., 2009: 322). Instead they invoke a much broader approach to the interaction of agricultural and rural change, imported in part from the North American context (Joseph et al., 2001).

Jay, also drawing on anthropological approaches, conversely engaged directly with post-productivism in the regional setting of the Waikato, the other traditional centre of the dairy industry in New Zealand, where she uses ‘productivism’ in the traditional British agricultural geography sense of an intensive expansionist form of agriculture oriented towards increased output and productivity assisted by state support (Jay, 2007: 267). Canvassing the UK and Australia literature, she drew particularly on Wilson (2001), Argent (2002) and Holmes (2002), distinguishing the latter’s focus on the drier rangelands from Argent’s interest in the comparatively moister areas of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. Jay noted that, ‘while the New Zealand form [of productivism] may vary in detail from that described in the UK, a key element of New Zealand dairy farming and the dairy industry is its focus on the expansion of production and economic efficiency’ (Jay, 2007: 268) and ‘in short New Zealand dairy farming is characteristic of productivist farming in most western industrial economies’ (Jay, 2007: 269). Her attention then turned to the environmental implications of the expansion of dairying and farmer management practices and philosophies. Elsewhere she referred to ‘the productivist practices of New Zealand dairy farming’ (Jay, 2005: 15) but also acknowledged the role of non-economic motives in farmer decision-making, including the preservation of forest remnants on some farms. In neither of these responses, which might be seen as resisting more intensive productivism, did she see any sign of multifunctionality as some PPT form of land use. Regarding its utility in New Zealand, she gave productivism/post-productivism only ‘a qualified yes’ (Jay, 2003: 162). Her caveat was that while productivism fitted fairly well, post-productivism ‘is more problematic because it fails to accurately describe the changes that are occurring within New Zealand agriculture and conflates social change with agricultural change’ (Jay, 2003: 163). Importantly from a geographical point of view, she also observed that ‘in the New Zealand context, productivist and post-productivist forms of agriculture co-exist within the same social and agricultural spaces’ (Jay, 2003: 163). Likewise she considered that changes to rural society rather than just agriculture were driving the transition and, in weighing up the balance between ‘hard’ environmental change (e.g. contaminated water) versus ‘soft’ damage (e.g. valued landscapes, symbolic icons and indigenous rights), suggested that it was the latter that ‘are the most regionally and nationally distinctive, and which reveal the most significant spread of change from a productivist to post productivist paradigm’ (Jay, 2003: 165).

Wilson also undertook New Zealand-based research into productivist/PPT in the context of indigenous forests, which he termed ‘an ideal case study’ (Wilson and Memon, 2005: 1495). Here they set out to move beyond ‘Eurocentric debates’ and build on both Holmes’ (2002) and Argent’s (2002) responses to productivist/post-productivist (Wilson and Memon, 2005: 1495). Their analysis revealed that agricultural and pastoral lands and forests involved ‘a separation into productivist and postproductivist mental and physical spaces’ (Wilson and Memon, 2005: 1497). Wilson and Memon (2005: 1511), in conclusion, were emphatic that ‘the New Zealand farmland-indigenous forest interface illustrates that it is problematic to directly transfer European conceptions that are based on the historical development of European agricultural and forested landscapes to the situation of the New World’. This led them to agree with Holmes’ (2002) nomenclature of ‘occupance’ rather than ‘regimes’ and point to the comparative importance of ‘land use, land tenure and land management issues as key indicators of postproductivism in the New Zealand context’ (Wilson and Memon, 2005: 1511). They believed their study reinforced Argent’s (2002) criticism of the linearity and dualism of the PPT while New Zealand reinforced Wilson’s earlier ideas about the territorialization of productivist and post-productivist spaces within a multifunctional space.

A case study of New Zealand dairy cooperative Fonterra is the entry point to a new term, neo-productivism (Burton and Wilson, 2012). As an omnibus term it includes competitive productivism and super-productivism as part of a larger typology which distinguished four types of neo-productivism, although, interestingly, hyper-productivism is not incorporated (Burton and Wilson, 2012: 58). Helpful as this is, it does raise a question as to whether the focus on Fonterra as an organization exemplifying ‘cooperative productivism’ is to subtly shift the object of discussion away from productivism in the landscape and onto underlying productivist processes.

Most recently, Rosin (2013), from a political ecology perspective, has both made use of the term productivist agriculture and reintroduced a new ‘productivist ideology’ in analysing the New Zealand pastoral sector. Ideology was included in earlier assessments of productivism and post-productivism (e.g. Wilson, 2001; Burton and Wilson, 2006), but this attracted little attention in Australia and New Zealand. Viewing pastoral farming in New Zealand over the last century, Rosin (2013: 54) pointed to how its commodities were virtually all consumed on the British market and how this conferred ‘reward and status’ to pastoral farmers while simultaneously downplaying the ‘exploitation of land and labour’. He argues that this productivist ideology began to unravel in the mid-1980s with Britain’s 1973 entry into the EU and with the abrupt removal of agricultural subsidies in the 1980s, which seemingly terminated the ‘utopian vision of a prosperous pastoral society’, but that it has been subsequently re-invigorated. In its newer form it was not only self-congratulatory about farming without subsidies but also contained a new utopian ideal that Rosin (2013: 54) summarized as ‘feeding the world’, in which there was a shift from quantity pre-1973 to efficiency. This latter repositioning was incorporated into a broader neoliberal ideology. It meant that a productivist ideology employing a ‘moral justification to feed the world’ at a time of heightened global food security issues has been used to contest and reject an ETS approach to combat global warming, with livestock-generated methane a significant contributor to national emissions (Rosin, 2013: 57). The robustness of the discourse is especially striking, linked as it is to ‘a utopian imperative to feed the world’ and a ‘moral justification’ for business as normal in terms of accommodating environmental considerations in the form of climate change (Rosin, 2013: 57).

IV Discussion

On reflection, the relatively short-lived debate over the utility or otherwise of the terms productivism/post-productivism and multifunctionality to both describe and explain the post-1970s shift in agricultural policies and practices across the western industrialized world has advanced rural geography in numerous respects. Reviewing the work that has contributed, even if only tangentially, to this debate, it is clear that a substantial body of scholarship on the multi-dimensional reconfiguration of agriculture and its broader relations with rural (and urban) society and economy has emerged; one which has become increasingly sensitive to the complexity of forces driving farm – and landscape – scale change. The notion of a PPT brought together rural and agricultural geographers and related social scientists, from a range of political, historical geographical and agri-environmental settings, even if only for some brief if heated skirmishes, many choosing to examine traditional research foci within broader and more conceptually-nuanced approaches, including globalizing food and fibre commodity chains and related fields of private and public policy-making. Of course, inasmuch as it drew on insights from more established fields such as the food regimes and counter-urbanization literatures, the debate also contributed to the development of a multi-disciplinary and potentially more powerful and enduring analysis of past, present and likely future agrarian and rural dynamics. It could also be said that the debate temporarily drew the subdisciplines away from the intellectual cul-de-sac of the ‘rural-urban continuum’ into which it had occasionally steered itself. Although the majority of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities, it is also increasingly recognized that it is ‘the rural’ where crucially important contemporary issues and concerns regarding local, national and global food and natural resource governance and politics are anchored. Who is ‘down on the farm’, how the farm is being managed, with what effects on the land, natural resources, the farm household, and the local economy is now increasingly an issue for that majority population. It is our contention that the PPT/multifunctionality debate played no small role in that outcome, and that the Antipodes – and Antipodean geographers and other social scientists – were important players in the debate.

However, and as the preceding summary has demonstrated, while productivism/post-productivism had considerable appeal as an explanation for policy and institutional changes at international and national scales, its (understandable) failure to account for the myriad responses at regional and local scales led to its subsequent abandonment. The question now is whether or not the PPT or its successors have any relevance to understanding and perhaps intervening in the complex reality of contemporary agricultural, environmental and rural change that continues to unfold across space, place to place. We argue that there is some mileage yet in these ideas, but only if we can develop some conceptual and terminological clarity surrounding their use. For the remainder of this paper we seek to develop just such a heuristic framework for approaching the multi-scalar totality of contemporary agrarian change, focusing primarily on the arguably still productivist farm and rural sectors of Australia and New Zealand. We focus on two aspects: the development of a truly multi-scalar appreciation of agrarian and rural change that draws on the salient features of the PPT/multifunctional countryside literature, and a proposed clarification of key terms.

Our first observation is that the relative strengths and weaknesses of productivism/post-productivism and the PPT are fundamentally related to conceptions of scale. One of the strengths of the PPT is that it enabled a clear focus on national agricultures and the restructuring processes under way within them in the wake of growing (though certainly not uniform) supra-national movements against farm subsidies and in favour of more ecologically sustainable farm management. While the political economy of agriculture literature pioneered research in this area, highlighting the increasing oppression and marginalization of the farm family by globalizing farm supply firms and corporate supermarket chains (Whatmore et al., 1987), PPT research provided a subtly different (though still largely a structuralist) lens on agrarian and rural change, emphasizing the ‘new faces’ and values appearing in rural areas and the economic opportunities afforded by the related re-interpretation of rural space. Part of the PPT’s attractiveness to researchers – Antipodean and elsewhere – lay in its potential portability from one politico-regulatory and agricultural context to another.

The leading protagonists in the discussion and debate over the plausibility of the PPT, Wilson and Holmes, took the lead here. Wilson (2009, 2010) mapped the normative dimensions of agricultural multifunctionality across and through geographical scales. Drawing upon the ‘capitals’ framework, Wilson (2010) argued that ‘strong’ multifunctionality is the normative ideal, for it exhibits the optimal values for each of the capitals (human, social, environmental, economic), providing rural communities and regions with the best opportunity to develop their stocks of resilience and robustness in increasingly pressured times and spaces. At the core of his nested hierarchical schema are the twin normative contentions that, ‘in the long term, economic efficiency and survival of farming systems may be predicated on development or maintenance of strong multifunctional pathways’ and that ‘Multifunctionality … has to be about the link between human decision-making and spatial expression of these decisions on the ground’ (Wilson, 2007: 257, emphasis in original). Wilson’s research leadership in this field extended to the use of social psychology (with Rob Burton) to investigate farmer self-identities in Bedfordshire, UK, and the extent to which local farmers conformed to productivist, post-productivist or multifunctional farming types (Burton and Wilson, 2006).

In an altogether different approach, Holmes (2006) focused on the development of a set of meso-scale concepts to explore ‘actually-existing’ multifunctional landscapes. Via his triad of driving forces (production, protection and consumption), Holmes identified seven ‘modes of occupance’ along with their dominant trajectories. The attempted operationalization of meso-scale concepts like multifunctionalism is important and relevant for a range of reasons. In the context of Australia’s ongoing rapid headline population growth and large immigration intakes, the reconfiguration of the non-metropolitan settlement system and urban hierarchy, a sophisticated understanding of the diverse regionalization of rural space is vital to an appreciation of the likely future demographic, economic, social and ecological health of different regions and towns (McGuirk and Argent, 2011). Similarly, given the prevalence of neoliberal local and regional development policy settings, a detailed local-scale understanding of past, current and likely future land use patterns, economic development options and service provision needs is vital for rural communities and funding and policy organizations alike. Overall, though, and in spite of the ground-breaking conceptual work completed (noted above), relatively few, if any, have sought to explicitly build upon this research programme.

An avenue that we feel offers some promise in the exploration of rural transitions is evolutionary economic geography (EEG). In a recent appraisal of the nature of change in rural Australia, Tonts et al. (2012: 292) focused on the search for a missing ingredient: ‘explicit understanding of the mechanisms underpinning change and continuity’. In this respect their objective was the development of a more situated approach in which the particularity of the rural Australian context informs broader theoretical debates and, potentially, ‘provides ‘a “stress test” for broader theories of the transformation of rural economies’ (Tonts et al., 2012: 300). From an EEG standpoint, the long-term maintenance of a particular regime – e.g. productivism – could easily be conceived of as a form of path dependence, with national policy-makers, regional and local scale farm advisers and farmers themselves cognitively ‘locked-in’ to the ‘structured coherence’ of intensified, cost-efficient agricultural production and trade. For economic geographers path dependence is usually an inherently spatial as well as a temporal process, hence the tendency for path dependence to be regarded as a form of place dependence. Equally, a regime shift, such as a regional scale transition away from productivism – however partial that process may be amongst the region’s landholders – could be interpreted within the EEG framework as an example of how path (and place) dependence is occasionally ruptured. Tonts et al. (2014) have demonstrated how quantitative techniques can be employed to help identify the multi-scalar origin and highly localized implications (e.g. in employment and income terms) of a ‘shock’ that helped produce a rural economy-wide regime shift. In addition, the important notion of regional ‘resilience’, a concern of Wilson’s (2010), is also central to the EEG approach to regional analysis.

Another complementary avenue for tracing the shifting influence of different agrarian regimes through geographical scales lies in Marsden’s (2010) twin notions of the eco-economy and the ‘rural web’. Profoundly influenced by the multifunctionality literature, the eco-economy orients its analysis around the highly localized scale of the farm, stressing the role of ‘second nature’ – inherited ecological resources – in the creation of food and fibre products and, spiralling out from these, ‘complex networks or webs of viable businesses and economic activities’ (Marsden, 2010: 226). The eco-economy is an explicitly normative idea, concerned with the attainment of authentic social, economic and ecological sustainability in production and consumption within the modern food and fibre system. For Marsden (2010: 229), the development of the ‘rural web’ – a ‘multidimensional and indeed multifunctional vehicle’ that unites rural and urban, producers and consumers – is essential to the eco-economy’s attainment. Six ‘domains’, many of which resonate strongly with EEG thought, are central to the ‘rural web’: endogeneity (akin to local embeddedness), novelty, social capital, market governance, new institutional arrangements, and sustainability. We would argue that a careful combination of the eco-economy’s concern for detailed explications of local and regional interlinkages of firms and consumers, embedded within local ecologies and supra-local governance systems, and the more synoptic perspective of EEG, provide a powerful means for charting multi-scalar processes of rural and agrarian change.

An early criticism of post-productivism centred on its terminology, which conveyed an overly linear interpretation of the trajectory of rural change. The Antipodean experience suggests that the successor form of productivism has in some areas not been multifunctionality via a PPT but rather ‘competitive productivism’, intensifying agriculture being perhaps more resilient to alternative agriculture discourses than critics might have assumed and enabling it to run counter to multifunctionalism. To this may be added some new categories of ‘hyper-productivism’ (Dibden et al., 2009; Wilson, 2010) and ‘super-productivism’, which has been used by Wilson (2010) and Woods (2012), and most recently neo-productivism (Burton and Wilson, 2012). The original PPT concepts emerged at a time when political economy had hegemonic status in agricultural and rural geography. This is no longer the case, as is exemplified by the interest in an evolutionary rural geography in Australia (Tonts et al., 2012) and exploration of a post-structural political economy in New Zealand (Le Heron, 2007). This is also a reminder that Australia and New Zealand are not straightforward extensions of the Global North to where concepts can seamlessly travel and ideas be simply tested in a new, slightly different empirical reality. To avoid a rerun of the issues discussed by Mather et al., (2006), but consistent with the development of the scalar-sensitive framework outlined above, some terminological clarification over competitive productivism, hyper-productivism and super-productivism is required.

Holmes (2006) referred to monofunctionalism as the inverse to multifunctionalism. He sourced the term to a personal communication with New Zealand geographer Richard Le Heron and credited him with coining the phrase in response to reading a draft of Holmes (2006). The term subsequently appears in Wilson (2010: 365), where it exists as a counterpoint in the context of a discussion which shatters the assumed homogeneity of multifunctional spaces. Le Heron’s original comment was to the effect that ‘our particular mid-20th century lens is an experience of near monofunctionality’ (Le Heron in Holmes, 2006: 145). This merits further examination.

First, the mid-20th-century monofunctional landscape referred to is productivist in character. Le Heron’s (1993) span in Globalized Agriculture included New Zealand, Australia, and the USA and drew on food regime concepts. Second, monofunctionalism by implication preceded multifunctionalism. Third, monofunctionalism is easier to conceive of in regions where there has been some territorial separation between productivist and conservationist land uses. Wilson and Memon (2005) highlight the importance of tenurial arrangements at the forestry-farming interface in New Zealand, though without evoking monofunctional-multifunctional terminology. Primdhal and Swaffield (2004), however, recognize how the gazetting, reallocation and redistribution of Crown land produced a situation where specific, often single-purpose, land uses were designated by the settler state. This can be seen in the demarcation of national parks and lands for settlement in discrete contiguous and often rectilinear areas, rather than as intermingled organically bounded territories. This stands in contrast to the complex mosaic of land use patterns that exist in the UK, shaped instead by centuries of occupation. Fourth, monofunctionality as land use does not illuminate the processes at work. At an admittedly grand analytical scale, a late 20th-century transition from monofunctional to multifunctional land uses describes aspects of rural land use change in New Zealand at least. Fifth, shifting back from observable patterns of land use to underlying processes, one of the problems posed by the entire productivist/post-productivist debate was that the appearance of the landscape was used to infer the existence of productivist/post-productivist drivers. Le Heron (1988: 410) wrote of ‘positions which demand greater discussion of the “social structure and mechanisms” behind landscape change’ in identifying capitalist processes underlining monofunctional agriculture/rurality.

Perhaps the contemporary starting point is ‘competitive productivism’ (Dibden et al., 2009), which is used to describe the present form of productivism in Australia (and would likely also apply to New Zealand) in contrast to the degree of subsidy and regulation that still supports and directs productivist rural land use in the UK. One task is to decide what sort of adjective is appropriate for contemporary rural and agricultural productivism in the UK – ‘protectionist productivism’ can be extrapolated from Dibden et al. (2009), but this is perhaps best answered by those familiar with the local circumstances. From a distance, though, it would seem that a distinction also needs to be made between the current UK equivalent of ‘competitive productivism’ and the more intensive form of super-productivism.

Halfacree (2006: 56–7) characterizes super-productivism in the UK as a form of post-productivist space which ‘re-states the spatiality of production, but this time in a much less moderated form, shorn of its moral dimensions. The capitalist “logic” of abstract space is fully released’. He sees evidence of it in the expansion of agribusiness, in the genetic modification of plants, and biotechnologies more generally. However, while attuned to the particularities of the UK case, Halfacree stresses the importance of applying theoretical ideas more generally. As a counterbalance to the considerable amount of attention being paid to consumption and amenity landscapes as well as to alternative food production networks, there is a need to give some attention to super-productivism if only because of its claimed and real importance to overall food production. Burton and Wilson (2012) offer a useful partial typology in which they pose questions about whether cooperative productivism in New Zealand can be applied in the UK, but potentially their more important point is that global food system crises put pressure on multifunctionalism. Further empirical work will ‘prove’ the robustness of Burton and Wilson’s typology. These considerations further reinforce our interest in promoting renewed work on and clarification around productivism.

V Conclusion

Productivism has found wider and more enduring acceptance amongst Antipodean rural geographers than post-productivism ever did, something that was not especially apparent when these concepts were debated in the early 2000s. Indeed, productivism has been inflected with some new dimensions, in the form of competitive productivism, hyper-productivism, and super-productivism, which all merit further analytical and empirical attention. The proposition that these are, in a linear sense, the post-transition forms of productivism as much as multifunctional rural occupance now warrants investigation. Finally, the juxtaposing of monofunctionality and multifunctionality may also help further recharge continuing conceptualization about the nature of multifunctionality, especially as it relates to landscapes. The context in which productivism in its older and emergent forms is placed has also changed since 2000, being now as much about neoliberalism and governance as about rural change.

Multifunctionality was seized on by a growing number of researchers uncomfortable with the binary structure of productivism/post-productivism. As a corrective to that dichotomous idea, multifunctionality highlighted the fact that the forces of production, consumption and protection could, and in fact did, co-exist, the relative strength of each force dictating the overall trajectory of that rural space (Holmes, 2006). Yet, if that is the case now, in the era ‘after-productivism’, surely it was the case prior to the 1970s when, at least throughout most of Australia and New Zealand, mixed farming, conducted dominantly by families, held sway. In other words, should we not regard multifunctionality as a more or less omnipresent character of agricultural and rural landscapes, but one which allows for greater or lesser degrees of influence for the ‘three forces’? If that is accepted, then terms like productivism and super- and hyper-productivism can be accommodated within the ‘commodious vessel’ of multifunctionality, but presumably at the expense, relatively, of consumption and protection (e.g. amenity uses and ecological health may suffer). Having re-examined productivism in Australia and New Zealand, our closing point stresses the timeliness of further conceptual advancement and clarification around productivism as it now exists in the rural geography literature, particularly as the productivism of the 2010s is not the productivism of the late 1990s.