Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper analyzes the role of the hydrosocial cycle in producing and sustaining uneven geographies of capitalist agriculture in the Ceres Valley, a major center of South Africa's high-value deciduous fruit industry I explore ways in which the mobilization, appropriation, and transformation of water resources become intertwined with and reinforce the radicalized capitalist relations that have characterized the local political economy of export fruit production since the 19th century These relations have solidified over time as they have been able to adapt to shifting political–economic and political–ecological dynamics. Focusing on the postapartheid period, I examine how white agrarian capital has been able to maintain and even strengthen its dominance over the regional economy despite the dramatic shuffling of political and economic priorities. I pay particular attention to how the fatal combination of the liberalization of agricultural markets and the financialization of water supply becomes articulated through interconnected sociospatial processes of dispossession, devaluation, and disinvestment. I argue that questions of access to and control over the hydrosocial cycle not only reveal how marginalized and radicalized social actors—farm workers, small-scale farmers, township residents—become differentially articulated with and disarticulated from existing and emerging circuits of capital accumulation. It also opens promising analytical and political avenues through which to illuminate and confront uneven geographies of capitalist development in ways that highlight the linked sociospatial processes of production and social reproduction.

This paper explores the role of Fairtrade certification in mediating banana production relations in Urabá, Colombia. While the country has long been incorporated into the world banana economy, the region's fraught history of dispossession, exploitation, and resistance make it a useful site through which to consider its more recent articulation into the Fairtrade banana commodity chain. In some respects, the emergence of Fairtrade in Urabá could be framed as a win–win. Banana growers have enrolled in certified commodity chains as a way to add value, stabilize their position in a volatile global market, and bring additional resources to workers. However, Fairtrade's role in reframing Urabá as a site of ethical banana production has been contingent upon multiple forms of marginalization and devaluation, expressed in their most extreme form through an armed conflict that swept the region during the last two decades of the 20th century. Fieldwork conducted with banana workers and growers in Urabá suggests that Fairtrade programs resonate with the local industry's longer term strategy to promote voluntarism as the appropriate mechanism for alleviating poverty and inequality. In addition, by creating disparities in the material resources and structures of negotiation available to banana workers, Fairtrade has produced new uneven geographies within the regional banana production complex. These developments are particularly problematic given their potential to undermine labor solidarity in the face of an erosion of labor standards in the global banana economy and the reassertion of elite control in the region.

In the early 2000s the coffee crisis emerged as a central object of study for commodity chain scholars. In this paper I revisit the scene of the coffee crisis in Nicaragua to understand violent processes of devaluation and disinvestment that devastated the countryside for more than five years (2000–05). Employing a commodity disarticulations approach, I argue that conventional explanations of the coffee crisis as one of overproduction and devaluation generally failed to unravel the layered spatiality of dispossession that enables coffee chain formations. Digging below the surface text of the crisis narrative, I illustrate how the coffee crisis in the central highlands was exacerbated by an aggressive land grab by a consortium of agroindustrial capitalists called CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI that had dispossessed farmworkers of land rights and accumulated the spoils of the Sandinista-led agrarian reform over the previous decade. When CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI folded in 2000, an unemployed farmworkers movement surged to reclaim land promised to farmworkers in the popular revolution. Using this alternative reading of the crisis in Nicaragua, I aim to bring into focus the ongoing processes of dispossession that render coffee workers vulnerable to hunger, exploitation, and abuse.

Recently, researchers have drawn attention to an inclusionary bias in commodity chain research and proposed a ‘dis/articulations’ project aimed at drawing out how things included in, as well as excluded or expulsed from, production processes mutually, and often simultaneously, constitute commodity chains. The purpose of this paper is to situate the dis/articulations project in debates and policy proposals that identify ‘upgrading’ within a commodity chain as a pathway to development. We draw on foundational uses of the term ‘articulation’ in historical materialism to complicate linear notions of ‘upgrading as development’ before developing a framework for capturing the nonlinear dynamics of upgrading in a particular commodity chain. Our case study explains how small states that interact with the tuna commodity chain rise and fall (individually and in relation to each other), and have remained surprisingly relevant, though often at high cost, in competitive standardized manufacture. We suggest that, with careful attention to method in concept building, researchers can develop the dis/articulations project to create space for systematic assessment of the inclusionary bias in upgrading debates and policy formulations.

This paper engages the dis/articulations perspective to analyze everyday processes of upgrading in the Sri Lankan apparel industry Using feminist ethnographic methods that see management discourses as tools of interpellation that partially configure systems of power, I examine how managers are rearticulating worker subjectivities, restructuring the labor process to organize consent, and selectively mobilizing ‘Sri Lankan’ culture to legitimate a shift to flexible production. I argue that value is not only produced through interfirm or firm–state relations, but is also determined by the labor process as it is shaped by legacies of colonialism, persisting hierarchies, and the everyday reproduction of social difference. This research suggests that upgrading cannot be reduced to an economic logic and that it does not guarantee sustained global competitiveness or more egalitarian development. These findings call for more attention to be paid to the ways in which upgrading is a complex process of disarticulation and rearticulation that is occurring through an embodied, global labor-management process.

Using an ongoing land conflict in Ciudad Juárez as a case study, I seek to show how maquiladora decision makers stabilize a regional development model even at times of extreme social and economic crisis. I argue that the current killings associated with drug trafficking play an ambivalent role in the reproduction of order in Juárez. At first sight, the violence is represented as a threat, unmasking as it does a regional development model as failure. Decision makers accordingly respond by doing everything possible to distance the maquiladora industry from the violence. On the one hand, this is being done by familiar means, not unlike in previous moments of crises. But on the other hand the events around Lomas del Poleo additionally assume a new quality, as maquiladorization goes hand in hand with an explicit strategy of spatial distanciation, integrating places and people that have hitherto been linked only marginally to the industry. And it is here that the narco-related violence plays different roles: As a convenient veil that allows what might be termed ‘ordinary’ assertions of brute force to be used under the cover of extraordinary, excessive, violence; and as a welcome excuse in moments of emergency that legitimize violent measures for the sake of a greater good.

In the last decade a growing number of efforts have been made to insure the weather-related production risks of rural agricultural households in the Global South via microinsurance contracts linked to environmental indices. Such index insurance products are increasingly championed for their ostensible capacity to decrease vulnerability, ‘crowd in’ rural credit, and increase productive risk taking. This paper presents an empirical and theoretical framework for understanding the explosion of these projects, demonstrating that the formation of financial consumer subjects who are themselves agricultural producers is an emerging and consequential process within the dynamics of (dis)articulation. Rather than being hindered by the absence of the real subsumption of land or labor to capital, the derivative nature of the index insurance form—offering only the possibility of remuneration instead of indemnification of loss—makes it especially well suited to operating in precisely such conditions on the edges of (non)market relations.

When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: Exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter in the production of the commodity. We argue that a particular mode of value-generating life predominates in each commodity circuit: in exotic pet trade, an individualized, ‘encounterable’ life; in ecosystem services, an aggregate, reproductive life. Second, we find that hierarchies between humans and other beings are highly generative in the formation and effects of lively commodities. On one hand, these hierarchies cast nonhumans in a disposable state that is integral to the functioning of exotic pet trade; on the other hand, these hierarchies are partly what ecosystem services are designed to address. Nevertheless, we find that reproduction of uneven species geographies is at work in both economies. The degree and nature of effect on the material conditions of nonhuman lives is, however, distinct, and our conclusion calls for greater attention to these differences.

Since the occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, state-endorsed planning policies of restriction and demolition have had a profound oppressive effect on Palestinian urban development and political activity in the city. While the effects of this oppression have been widely discussed, this paper offers a closer look at ‘ground-level’ planning processes. The analysis of independent local zoning plans submitted by Palestinians to legalize and expand their houses reveals a wider range of activity, negotiations, and inconsistencies. I argue that the practice of the independent plans, as small-scale yet unmediated acts operating from within the institutional planning system, presents a form of encroachment on the bureaucratic apparatus. While the ‘spot-zoning’ amendment to the planning and building law originally resulted from pressures to promote free-market logic in urban planning practices, it unwittingly opened up the possibility for excluded and subordinated residents to pursue a new course of action. Thus, the concurrent tendencies of the Israeli planning system towards ethnonational goals, rational–comprehensive planning episteme, and the neoliberal logic have led to unexpected, at times contradictory, results. I claim that by dwelling on the inherent tensions between these tendencies, the independent plans work towards transforming the urban context into an arena for negotiating rights and positing demands that cannot be articulated in the political sphere.

This paper explores some of the perverse effects of climate change adaptation policies and financing in the Republic of Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Central Pacific. I examine how encounters between financiers and government officials might produce vulnerability to climate change. I draw throughout from field research conducted in Kiribati, an archetypical ‘vulnerable-to-climate-change’ place, and a preeminent site for experimentation in climate change adaptation. By discussing several instances where Government of Kiribati elites are required to enact vulnerability in order to secure climate change adaptation financing, I demonstrate that such encounters are performative. This research contributes to theories of performativity in showing that the matrix conditioning and compelling such performative enactments of vulnerability is socionatural, consisting of a collective of climate change impacts, adaptation-finance technocrats, and many others. Thus, I demonstrate that vulnerability is not a latent condition, but, rather, an emergent effect of an assemblage of facts, expert actors, and objects.

Transnational certification and ecolabeling programs have become an important new site of environmental governance, as well as an emerging arena for action and conflict in international trade. This paper explores the implementation of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification in salmon fisheries in the US state of Alaska in the early 2000s, the growing opposition within the industry to MSC certification through periods of reassessment, and the emergence of an alternative Alaska certification initiative in 2011. It suggests that these shifts were rooted in struggles over understudied third-party certification and labeling processes that we conceptualize as marketized governance. The paper further shows how certification and labeling can obscure and expose competing industry interests and power relations, provoke struggles over fisheries' social representation, and open up novel avenues for cooperation and change, indicating ambiguity in the social and cultural implications of neoliberal modes of governance. Finally, the paper suggests that the ascendancy of the MSC has sparked the emergence of new political and economic geographies of certification and ecolabeling in Alaska and other jurisdictions where place-specific and other initiatives vie for governance and market legitimacy.

This paper tests for excessive employment agglomeration among twenty southern California manufacturing industry clusters using two methods claiming to control for the natural and planned geography constraining industrial location generally. We find broad consistency across the alternative tests; although fewer industry clusters test statistically significant for agglomeration or dispersion using the weighted kernel density estimator than when we use the more established weighted case-control approach. Similarly, the observed values for the former statistic test significant over a subset of the spatial scales over which the case-control method tests significant.

How children travel to school is at the centre of a complex set of interrelated issues with significant policy implications. This paper reviews the relation of patterns of travel to school to concerns about public health, school choice, urban form, and residential housing markets. The spatial relations between pupils' homes and the schools that they attend provides the basis of an analytical framework that links local neighbourhood characteristics, school performance, and house prices to the distance and mode of travel to school and the level of ‘excess commuting’ in the urban system. A unique analysis of several integrated micro-datasets from Sheffield, UK, suggests that, while there are high levels of excess commuting, there remains a complex interrelationship between housing and neighbourhood characteristics, school performance, and commuting patterns. There are differences between the pictures for primary schools and secondary schools. Policies aimed at promoting transport efficiency and those promoting school choice are likely to remain in tension.