Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The paper provides an introduction to a theme issue devoted to the influence—and the potential—of the work of Karl Polanyi in the field of economic geography. Polanyi has been an inspirational figure in the heterodox field of ‘socioeconomics’, where the inseparability of the economic and the social is taken to be axiomatic. He has also made recurrent appearances in economic geography since the early 1990s, as a progenitor of the ‘networks and embeddedness’ approach and in his role as a prescient critic of market fundamentalism. But the potential of Polanyian approaches in economic geography has only been fitfully explored. In this context, the contributions to this theme issue make the case for a more sustained—but also open, critical, and creative—engagement with Polanyi's legacy.

Karl Polanyi has been an influential but also somewhat elusive figure in economic geography. Best known for his evocative notion of social embeddedness, it is perhaps fitting that Polanyi's presence has been more metaphorical than substantive. The paper asks what a more engaged Polanyian economic geography might look like. Focusing on methodological affinities, a response is developed in terms of a commitment to the substantivist (as opposed to formal) analysis of actually existing economic formations, together with a more purposive embrace of institutionalism, holism, and comparativism.

Now is an important moment to be thinking and talking about a critical and normative green political economy. Whether via attempts to develop effective and socially just climate policies at multiple scales of governance [including REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) schemes], or to develop proliferating and controversial neoliberal instruments for dealing with undesirable environmental change, environmental governance, and environmental change in the context of contemporary global capitalism are on the agenda. What would a critical and normative green political economy for the current moment look like? This paper draws on Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation as a resource for answering that question. In particular, Polanyi's discussion of problematic and dualistic notions of nature and society in early political economy and the role he accords social struggles over land in developing his theory of fictitious commodities, embeddedness and the double movement are revisited. The paper stresses how Polanyi's ideas, at once conceptual and polemical, draw centrally on Marx's theorization of primitive accumulation as an inherent, ‘extra-economic’ facet of historical—geographical capitalism, a differentiated unity linking the commodification and objectification of human and nonhuman natures as exchange-values. In this respect, Polanyi offers (or seems to offer) a potential reconciliation of a politics of nonhuman and human nature through his emphasis on primitive accumulation as a site of both political struggle and epistemic transformation.

This paper explores the dynamics of institutional change in periods of instability in the global capitalist system. Two recent bodies of literature—actor-centered institutionalism and the ‘policy mobilities’ approach—emphasize how contextual and historical specificities drive transformation as institutions move across space. However, scholars in both traditions give less attention to the systematic patterns of social conflict that influence how policies move and mutate. Drawing on the case of a standards war in the global cotton trade from 1870 to 1945, I build on these literatures by linking them to a neo-Polanyian theory of social conflict within periods of market-led development. From this view, we must understand institutions, their mobilities, and mutations as constituted by and constitutive of struggles over how the global capitalist system should be organized and in whose interests. This requires building on, but also deepening Polanyi's analysis. While Polanyi emphasized the destructive effects of liberal market projects that generate social conflict, the ‘push-backs’ against liberal market projects are more diverse than Polanyi suggested, and social conflict can also emerge out of the creative moments of liberal market expansion.

This paper proposes a neo-Polanyian framework of neoliberalization-as-marketization for understanding geohistorically embedded marketization based on five interlinked theoretical conceptualizations: embedded marketization, hybrid integration, double movement, active society, and qualitative state. I argue that this framework can be useful to supplement existing theorizing of neoliberalism, and to facilitate comparative case studies across vastly differently contexts. This framework is then taken to analyze China's post-Mao transition to a market economy. I argue that China's gradualist transition from a centrally planned economy to a mixed economy has been maneuvered by a self-regulating party-state (dis)embedded in a deactivated (active) society. Due to the existence of multiple veto players and intraparty ‘double movement’, the marketization was able to be mostly socially progressive until 1993. However, it was no longer the case when the ‘socialist market economy’ was enshrined and, without political liberalization, the Chinese version of neoliberalization has become even bleaker than elsewhere.

In light of the spread of markets across the globe and deeper into daily life, this paper argues for a more robust analysis and application of Karl Polanyi's conception of (dis)embedded markets coupled with the performativity thesis authored mainly by Michel Callon. It suggests that while disembeddedness as a concept is necessary for an analysis of contemporary financial markets that are increasingly self-referential, it is not sufficient. Despite the suggestion of a gulf between Polanyian and Callonian economics, there are important similarities in the two frameworks. The similarities are considered along with the considerable difference, all in an attempt to develop a more robust methodological framework for analyzing financial markets. Performativity, it is argued, can help fill the gaps in Polanyi's embeddedness framework, albeit only when that concept's tendency to produce aspatial and apolitical arguments are taken seriously. The paper uses an abbreviated case study of the development of US financial derivative markets in the 1970s and 1980s to argue that markets must be considered in light of both their institutional and geographic entanglements as well as their (dis)embeddedness in systems of calculativeness and mathematical modeling. Specifically the paper analyzes the tension between the derivative origin story authored by Donald MacKenzie, which focuses on neoclassical pricing models like the Black—Scholes—Merton option pricing formula, and my own empirical research, which suggests the urban-economic geography of Chicago played a key role in the development of these instruments.

In this paper, informed by more-than-human and biosecurity literatures, I attend a neglected nonhuman considered a serious agricultural pest: the fruit fly. In addressing what it takes to live without fruit flies, biosecurity is theorised as ongoing, enacted achievement sustained (or not) by everyday and eventful interactions of heterogeneous spaces, strategies, and participants—human and nonhuman. Relations of fruits, flies, and people are explored through one vital attempt to biosecure life: Australia's Fruit Fly Exclusion Zone (FFEZ), a tristate pest-free area established to protect commercial horticulture from the fruit fly. Fruit flies become problematised as their appetites and mobilities confound fruit production and marketing, and affiliated biosecurity controls. Making fruit safe enrolls policy and agricultural sectors, but also more dispersed agents (travellers, residents, trees) and management sites (primarily off-farm). Since its introduction, the FFEZ's ongoing biosecuring normalised, with only occasional outbreak events. However, recent unprecedented outbreaks evoke questions about the FFEZ's future status. In such eventful times, it is worth reflecting on what kinds of living are possible in biosecurity zones—for flies, for resident human communities, and for agrifood networks.

It is a truism that environmental management has experienced a significant change in the locus of governing, in which centralised forms of steering have been gradually replaced by more collaborative management approaches organised at the ecosystem scale. Whereas much research capital has been expended on informing their design and promoting their uptake, surprisingly little systematic comparative empirical research exists on the precise nature and extent of what is often described as a ‘paradigm shift’ in governing. We address this gap by examining how one issue often deemed to require deeper ‘collaboration’, namely, catchment management, has been addressed in three comparable federal political systems: the European Union; the USA; and Australia. On the basis of a fresh and more comparable account of the forms and modalities of collaboration, we reveal that, although collaboration has undoubtedly grown in recent decades, its depth and extent remains highly variable both across and within the three cases. We also examine what these subtly different geographical ‘contours of collaboration’ imply for future research and practice.

The issue of how to address geographical incompatibility between aggregate statistical data sources is one affecting researchers in many countries. The increased amount of data from recent British Population Censuses has been accompanied by considerable changes in both administrative and electoral boundaries as well as those of areas specifically defined for census data collection and statistical output purposes. This paper reviews the extent of geographical inconsistency at different spatial scales and outlines the development of a web-based interface that implements an intelligent areal interpolation (dasymetric mapping) algorithm that enables estimates of census counts to be obtained for consistent spatial units across pairs of recent British censuses (1981, 1991, and 2001). A limited-access user trial has been carried out and the paper illustrates a typical user query that seeks to estimate 1981 population counts in 1991 enumeration district boundaries. The paper concludes by considering further development of the interface, its incorporation into the services provided by existing census data units in the UK, and its wider potential for addressing the issues of geographical incompatibility.

This paper examines the extent to which theory emerges in practice within the context of museum curatorship and the public discourses surrounding it. The theoretical context is the legacy of Edward W Said's canonical study, Orientalism and its call for ‘Western’ reflexivity in the politics of representation of the Islamic Near East. We argue that Said's study has, in its own right, engendered a field of professional academic discourse in the areas of cultural studies and postcolonial studies. We, however, begin to ask about the extent to which its arguments and insights explicitly inform the work of representation and interpretation of the material culture of the Near East in ‘Western’ institutions. This exploratory study draws on four cases of exhibitions on Iranian, Turkish, and the broader field of Islamic art in nationally funded or endorsed museums and galleries in the United Kingdom. All of the exhibitions took place after 2001 amongst cultural and political discourses concerning Islam during the so-called ‘War on Terror’. This convergence of an established ‘Saidian’ theoretical legacy and recent geopolitical events that once again raise questions about the relationship between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ allows these exhibitions and the discourses surrounding them to be historically emplotted in quite specific ways. Analysis of exhibition catalogues, consultants' impact reports, and interviews with curatorial staff leads us to conclude that, while a specific engagement with Said's work may not be in evidence, institutions and their staff do inhabit and act upon a discursive field that corresponds to that book's priorities and agenda. This invites further investigation into the form and process within which critical theory makes the transition from citation and discussion in strictly academic discourse to actual implementation in historically situated organisational practice.

The changing structure of international trade offers new opportunities for Africa, and some believe that new information communication technologies (ICTs)—especially mobile phones, the Internet, and computers—can accelerate and deepen the region's integration into the world economy. This paper evaluates such claims through an in-depth empirical analysis of ICT use and its contribution to small, medium, and microscale enterprises (SMMEs) and industrial development in Tanzania's wood products and furniture sector. Drawing on concepts from time geography and sociotechnical transition theory, the analysis determines whether, how, and why (not) ICTs are enabling SMMEs to overcome constraints on their activities and whether the industrial regime governing and guiding the activities of firms is being transformed through ICT-driven changes in communication and information management practices. The findings detail the ways in which ICTs are (not) becoming integrated into the everyday industrial practices, highlight the implications of this integration for the industry's development, and demonstrate how research into ICT for development can benefit from a deeper and more critical understanding of the contexts in which technological diffusion occurs—conceptualized here as activity constraints and sociotechnical regimes.