Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The author presents a comparative study of neoliberalism in two Mexican localities, Monterrey and Oaxaca, using the analytical lens of a ‘topography’. Although in theory a common set of ideas underpins neoliberal ideology and policy, in practice the way in which neoliberal projects are materialized in specific locations is differentiated, segmented, and highly uneven. Reflecting this, neoliberalism appears to have exacerbated regional differences in Mexico. An emphasis on topography draws attention to the political–economic processes that produce such difference. This destabilizes commonsensical representations of regional difference in Mexico, which pit a modern, industrialized, and increasingly democratic North against an impoverished, traditional, and authoritarian South. Furthermore, drawing analytical linkages across place allows the production of situated political responses to neoliberalism to be brought into coalition.

Peru has been transformed over the course of the past decade into a neoliberal, mineral-based, export-oriented, country. The author evaluates the neoliberal transformation of the country in three parts. First he examines the economic and political transformation of the country in the early 1990s, particularly in terms of how the Peruvian state and economy were rapidly restructured according to neoliberal principles. He then illustrates how, both through privatization and through transnationalization, the mining sector has become a key element for future development opportunities. This discussion is then contextualised by an examination of how mining activities are affecting land-tenure patterns and livelihoods in the Cajamarca region of Peru. In particular, drawing upon case-study research, the author evaluates how Minera Yanacocha's transnational gold-mining operations are transforming land-tenure institutions, land values, and the spatial distribution of land-use patterns throughout the region. In addition, he evaluates how livelihoods are being transformed in response to Minera Yanacocha's activities through an examination of changing household access to natural, human, social, and economic resources.

The 1990s was the decade of neoliberalism in Brazil. During the successive administrations of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003), public enterprises were privatized, import tariffs were slashed, regional free-trade markets were established, and fiscal discipline was prioritized in an attempt to control a massive public debt. As his first term progressed, however, Cardoso was forced to respond to the insistent popular demand for reform of the country's inequitable land-tenure structure. The issue became increasingly visible in the 1990s because of the strength of a grassroots social movement, the Movement of Landless Workers (MST). In response to the demands for agrarian reform, the government offered its support for an essentially neoliberal, market-based alternative to state-led distribution—an alternative favored by official development organizations throughout the Third World at this time. In this paper, I argue that the support for a market-led agrarian reform privileged the agrarian elite in Brazil and delegitimated the MST's struggle, not only because it reinforced the elite's claim to land but also because it legitimated the elite's particular interpretation of productivity and property rights. The claims put forward both by the agrarian elite and by the MST members in the southern state of Santa Catarina derive from what can usefully be considered ‘agrarian moral economies’.

Recent attempts to grant private concessions to water in Bolivia raise questions regarding the effects of the state's neoliberal restructuring on environmental governance. Like other Latin American states, Bolivia has enacted sweeping neoliberal reforms during the past two decades, including privatization of public sector industries, reduction of state services, and administrative decentralization. These reforms have been accompanied by constitutional reforms that recognized certain resource and political rights on the part of Bolivia's indigenous and campesino peoples. This paper examines the reregulation and rescaling of rural water management in Bolivia, and associated processes of mobilization on the part of peasant irrigators aimed at countering state reforms. Although traditional resource rights of peasant irrigators are strengthened by cultural aspects of constitutional reforms, rural livelihoods are undermined by economic liberalization. The paper examines the implications and contradictions of neoliberal reforms for rural water management in highland Bolivia. These processes are illustrated through a brief analysis of current organizational efforts on the part of peasant irrigators.

Neoliberal reforms throughout Latin America are intended to promote development by opening up economies and encouraging market-oriented practices. These reforms have deeply affected the lives of indigenous peoples and their relationship with extralocal actors. Today, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, some indigenous peoples participate in oil-extraction negotiations, tourism, and intensive cattle ranching and agriculture as part of increased market integration. In the midst of these changes, questions about what ‘indigeneity’ means, both in integrating into and in resisting neoliberal reforms, are increasingly important for understanding social justice and environmental conservation issues in the Amazon region. The author explores how engagement with neoliberal practices and ways of knowing the world has opened up spaces for questioning fixed notions of indigenous identities and their role in representing, imagining, and developing indigenous alliances and rights claims in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Based on qualitative research conducted in 1999 and 2001 with a group of single mothers in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, this paper examines the contradictory impacts of neoliberalism on work, based on the understanding that economic restructuring can generate both crisis and a space for changes in gender identities. By focusing on the broader picture of women's work and on the intersections between paid and unpaid work, it discusses what happens to these intersections in times of intense political and economic change. Despite the hardships caused by neoliberalism, it appears that work is a site in which gender ideologies can be challenged. The paper has four main sections. First, it explores the ways in which certain cultural processes are intensified under neoliberalism which affects the relationship between constructions of masculinity and femininity. Second, it assesses the impact of neoliberalism on domestic work and the implications of this for GAD (gender and development) understandings of the double burden and of how the balance of women's paid and unpaid work changes under neoliberalism. Third, it examines the ways in which hegemonic understandings of femininities and motherhood and revolutionary legacies can be resistant to the neoliberal present. Finally, it discusses how work under neoliberalism can be a site of female empowerment or self-esteem.

The large and growing literature on industrial clustering suggests that firms seek locations that provide localization economies (benefits from having common buyers and suppliers, a specialized or skilled labor pool, and informal knowledge transfers). This study of manufacturing industry clusters in three Indian metropolises suggests instead that industry location decisions are guided by market imperfections, specifically rigidities in the land market caused by state action (segregationist or environmental policies, the absence of exit policies, and activist industrial promotion policies). For the investigation the authors use geographically disaggregated industry location and size data from Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, to analyze eight industrial sectors (food and beverages, textiles, leather, printing and publishing, chemicals, metals, machinery, and electrical and electronics). The authors test for evidence of global and local clustering and distinguish between and test for coclustering and colocation of industries. The results are indicative rather than absolute and suggest that for location decisions general urbanization economies are more important than are localization economies.

Urban form is changing in Britain, with new patterns of development reflecting economic, technological, and transportation conditions in an increasingly competitive framework. Changes in urban form have implications for the environmental sustainability, integration and cohesion, and longer term quality of life in and around cities. Britain has a comprehensive planning system with a strong rhetoric of policies towards these goals. In this paper the authors draw on evidence from recent research, primarily in central Scotland, to assess how far planning actually does make a difference to urban form rather than simply passively responding to demand. They consider some of the systematic tendencies in decentralised planning decisionmaking, some selected evidence of development outcomes, and some insights from major development case studies. The conclusions highlight the differential influence of planning between different development sectors and the obstacles to achieving a more sustainable pattern.