Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

This paper has evolved out of a growing dissatisfaction with the relatively uncritical acceptance in contemporary debates that agriculture in advanced societies has moved from ‘productivism’ to ‘post‐productivism’. A brief review of current conceptualizations of productivist and post‐productivist agricultural regimes reveals inconsistencies in current understandings these dualistic terms. The problem has partly been that the conceptual literature on post‐productivism has largely failed to take into account the wealth of actor‐oriented and behaviourally grounded research. Productivist and post‐productivist agricultural regimes have also been conceptualized from a UK‐centric perspective that has largely failed to discuss whether the concept has wider applicability within Europe and beyond. The paper discusses the time‐lag and spatial inconsistencies in the adoption of post‐productivist action and thought, and emphasizes that different localities are positioned at different points in a temporal, spatial and conceptual transition from ‘pre‐productivist’ to ‘post‐productivist’ agricultural regimes. The notion of the ‘territorialization’ of productivist and post‐productivist actor spaces highlights the wide‐ranging diversity that exists within the productivist/post‐productivist spectrum, and that productivist and post‐productivist action and thought occurs in multidimensional coexistence leads one to question the implied directionality of the traditional productivist/post‐productivist debate. It is suggested that the notion of a ‘multifunctional agricultural regime’ better encapsulates the diversity, non‐linearity and spatial heterogeneity that can currently be observed in modern agriculture and rural society.

Place‐making – the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live – is an important but oft‐neglected part of political theory. Place‐making is an inherently networked process, constituted by the socio‐spatial relationships that link individuals together through a common place‐frame. While place‐oriented scholars have long acknowledged the importance of interaction and communication in place‐making, the mutual integration of network concepts, political theorisations and place conceptualisations has been relatively weak. We use case studies in Bolivia’s forests and Athens, USA to explore how integrating these concepts can guide empirical research. This article argues that a more robust and explicit notion of ‘relational place‐making’– the networked, political processes of place‐framing – positions the concept of place in a way that offers new analytical utility for political and urban geographic scholars.

The development of markets in water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration signals a new intensification and financialisation in the encounter between nature and late capitalism. Following Neil Smith’s observations on this transformation, I argue that the commodification of such ‘ecosystem services’ is not merely an expansion of capital toward the acquisition or industrialisation of new resources, but the making of a new social world comparable to the transformation by which individual human labours became social labour under capitalism. Technologies of measurement developed by ecosystem scientists describe nature as exchange values, as something always already encountered in the commodity form. Examining these developments through specific cases in US water policy, I propose that examining this transformation can provide political ecology and the study of ‘neoliberal natures’ with a thematic unity that has been absent. I understand capital’s encounter with nature as a process of creating socially‐necessary abstractions that are adequate to bear value in capitalist circulation. Such an argument supersedes the issue of nature’s materiality and points toward a common language for the analysis of both humans and nature as two participants in the labour process. Political ecologists struggling with the commodification of nature have tended to overlook the social constitution of nature’s value in favour of explicit or implicit physical theories of value, often as more‐or‐less latent realisms. I suggest that critical approaches to nature must retain and elaborate a critical value theory, to understand both the imperatives and the silences in the current campaign to define the world as an immense collection of service commodities.

Community is a fundamental modality for the conduct of modern politics. This paper explores the antinomies of community in an oil nation: Nigeria. Oil states stand in relation to a particular sort of capitalism (what I call petro‐capitalism) in which a key resource (petroleum) and a logic of extraction figure centrally in the making and breaking of community. I pose the following questions: how are communities imagined (or not), territorialized (or not), identified (or not) and ruled (or not) at a multiplicity of scales and in relation to a particular natural resource, namely oil? Each community is imagined, so to say, through and with oil – the communities are ‘naturalized’ in relation to the effects, social, environmental, political, of oil exploration and production – but produces forms of rule and identity that are often fragmented, unruly and violent. The communities I address are, in a sense, all oil‐producing communities but of rather different qualities: namely, the chieftainship as a local form of customary community rule at the level of the village; the ethnic or indigenous community at the level of the region; and the nation, or more properly the nation‐state known as Nigeria. And standing at the heart of each community is a fundamental contradiction. Nigerian petro‐capitalism operates through a particular sort of ‘oil complex’ (a configuration of firm, state and community) that generates or refigures differing sorts of community, what I shall refer to as governable spaces, in which differing sorts of identities, forms of rule and territory come into play. These sorts of community emerge from oil extraction, but the dynamics of petro‐capitalism and the oil complex contribute to, and are constitutive of, a deep crisis of secular nationalist development. Imperial oil and its concessionary political economy can be read as a sort of enclosure or dispossession and it is out of this development crisis in Nigeria that particular senses of community are being constituted – with and through oil.

This paper elaborates the argument that domestic space should be considered as the product of relations that extend beyond the home. It examines one common domestic object – family photographs – and explores how the particularity of this photography and the specificity of its display by white middle‐class mothers with young children in South‐east England produce just such an extended domestic space. The stretched space co‐produced by these mothers and photographs is also a form of stretched time, and it is integrative in complex ways; it contains different kinds of absences which disturb but do not break its cohesion. The paper also discusses why the display of family photographs is done almost exclusively by women.

Complexity science has attracted considerable attention in a number of disciplines. However, this perspective on scientific understanding remains ill defined. In this paper, ideas and approaches from complexity science are reviewed. It appears that complexity science fundamentally is driven by ontological decisions on the part of the investigator. This is a result of the epistemological approach fundamental to complexity as it is currently studied, which is based on the construction of computer simulation models of reality. This methodology requires that researchers decide what exists and is important enough to represent in a simulation, and also what to leave out. Although this points to serious difficulties with complexity science, it is argued that the approach nevertheless has much to offer human geography. Drawing on complexity science, renewed engagements between physical and human geography, and between both and geographical information science seem possible, based on clearly shared concerns with the representation of geographical phenomena. In conclusion, it is suggested that seeing models as a source of geographical narratives may be a useful way to promote constructive engagement between different perspectives in the discipline.

Australia’s rangelands are experiencing a post–productivist transition at a tempo comparable to Western Europe’s, but in contexts that ensure marked divergence in impulses, actors, processes and outcomes. In Australia’s most marginal lands, a flimsy mode of pastoral occupance is being displaced by renewed indigenous occupance, conservation and tourism, with significant changes in land ownership, property rights, investment sources and power relations, but also with structural problems arising from fugitive income streams. The sharp delineation between structurally coherent commodity–oriented regions and emerging amenity–oriented regions can provisionally be mapped at a national scale. A comparison of Australia with Western Europe indicates that three distinct but interconnected driving forces are propelling the rural transition, namely: agricultural overcapacity; the emergence of amenity–oriented uses; and changing societal values.

Scholars have argued that transitions to more sustainable and just mobilities require moving beyond technocentrism to rethink the very meaning of mobility in cities, communities, and societies. This paper demonstrates that such rethinking is inherently political. In particular, we focus on recent theorisations of commoning practices that have gained traction in geographic literatures. Drawing on our global comparative research of low‐carbon mobility transitions, we argue that critical mobilities scholars can rethink and expand the understanding of mobility through engagement with commons–enclosure thinking. We present a new concept, “commoning mobility,” a theorisation that both envisions and shapes practices that develop fairer and greener mobilities and more inclusive, collaboratively governed societies. Our analysis introduces three “logics” of mobility transition projects. First, the paper discusses how a logic of scarcity has been a driver for mobility planning as the scarcity of oil, finance, space, and time are invoked across the world as stimuli for aspiring to greener, “smarter,” and cheaper mobilities. The paper then identifies two responses to the logic of scarcity: the logics of austerity and the logics of commoning. Austere mobilities are examined to problematise the distribution of responsibility for emissions and ensuing injustices and exclusion in low‐carbon transitions. The logics of commoning shows a potential to reassess mobility not only as an individual freedom but also as a collective good, paving the way for fairer mobility transitions and a collaborative tackling of sustainable mobility challenges.