Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
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Measurement and alienation: making a world of ecosystem services 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.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 37 Số 3 - Trang 386-401 - 2012
Mapping intergenerationalities: the formation of youthful religiosities Recent geographical work has pointed to the complex and negotiated nature, and spatiality, of intergenerational relations. In this paper, we draw on research with young Scottish Christians and their guardians to explore the influence of intergenerationality on their religious identities, beliefs and practices. Our interest is to ask what these recent developments in the way we approach geographies of youth and age can tell us about the changing geographies of religion and vice versa. Much previous research has assumed a process of simple transmission, a static notion that is countered by interview data we present here. The diverse influences on the religiosity of young people – from institutions, religious leaders, culture, peers as well as the family – mean that intergenerational relations involve multiple and complex subject positions. We explore some of these positions, characterising them as correspondent, compliant, challenging and conflicting. We argue that intergenerational relations need to be understood as part of the site‐based practices that are central to the development and experience of young people’s religious identities.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 36 Số 2 - Trang 314-327 - 2011
Multifunctional ‘quality’ and rural community resilience
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 35 Số 3 - Trang 364-381
Governmentality and the conduct of water: China's South–North Water Transfer Project Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer (SNWT ) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through a governmentality lens. It aims to examine the SNWT project's machinery, mentality and spatiality, including its narrative, its constitution of objects and subjects in space, its multiple techniques of government, and its physical and administrative assemblages. In decentring the problem of the state in relation to the SNWT project we can learn much about both the politics of water and the nature of Chinese governmentalities. This article shows how the SNWT naturalises water scarcity, normalises the pre‐eminence of North China, sustains engineering over regulatory solutions and reconfigures hydrosocial relations, while also outlining the limits to and endemic conflicts within this vast programme of government.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 41 Số 4 - Trang 429-441 - 2016
Tales of an island‐laboratory: defining the field in geography and science studies This paper investigates the ways in which field sites are defined in both science and science studies. Drawing on the example of how Iceland became a laboratory for both genetic science and science studies, it suggested that the spaces of science social scientists critique are also, to some extent, endorsed and reproduced through their own critical representations and practices. It is argued that this complicity between science studies and science both poses challenges and offers opportunities for geographers studying the relationship between life sciences, science studies and space.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 31 Số 2 - Trang 224-237 - 2006
Social Constructions of Nature: A Case Study of Conflicts over the Development of Rainham Marshes
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 19 Số 3 - Trang 291 - 1994
From productivism to post‐productivism … and back again? Exploring the (un)changed natural and mental landscapes of European agriculture 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.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 26 Số 1 - Trang 77-102 - 2001
Diversity and change in Australia’s rangelands: a post–productivist transition with a difference? 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.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 27 Số 3 - Trang 362-384 - 2002
Complexity science and human geography 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.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 29 Số 3 - Trang 282-295 - 2004
Commoning mobility: Towards a new politics of mobility transitions 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.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers - Tập 44 Số 2 - Trang 346-360 - 2019
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