Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences

by Heynen; Nik Prof

• ISBN13: 9780415771498
• ISBN10: 0415771498
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-08-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Over the past few decades, the governance of nature has taken its most radical turn. The most influential change in economic and social regulation has seen a dramatic reprise of liberal faith in less regulated markets and minimalist states, underpinned by advocacy for extending exclusive property rights to nearly everything imaginable. This complex turn, with its countless yet uncharted implications for environmental quality and governance, is captured by the contentious concept of neoliberalism. Today, neoliberalism provides the context and direction for how humans affect and interact with the non-human world and with one another. But what does this mean for nature? This volume brings together specific case studies that span more than two decades of experience and evidence linking neoliberalism with concrete environmental changes, politics, and outcomes in diverse, international contexts. It evaluates specific political ecologies and dynamics, and the implications of particular neoliberal reformsand enforcements, while collectively affording new contributors and readers the possibility of thinking comparatively across sectors and geographic contexts. Such specificity and comparative potential serves important analytical functions because it allows the authors and editors to craft stronger, more credible answers to the central questions of what neoliberalism is and what it entails in specific sorts of circumstances.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. viii
Notes on contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xii
Introduction: false promises	p. 1
Enclosure and privatization	p. 23
The last enclosure: resisting privatization of wildlife in the western United States	p. 25
Privatizing conditions of production: trade agreements as neoliberal environmental governance	p. 38
Dispossessing H[subscript 2]O: the contested terrain of water privatization	p. 51
Neoliberalism in the oceans: "rationalization," property rights, and the commons question	p. 63
Acts of enclosure: claim staking and land conversion in Guyana's gold fields	p. 74
Commentary
Enclosure and privatization of neoliberal environments	p. 89
Neoliberal primitive accumulation	p. 94
Commodification and marketization	p. 99
Neoliberalizing nature? Market environmentalism in water supply in England and Wales	p. 101
The neoliberalization of ecosystem services: wetland mitigation banking and the problem of measurement	p. 114
Weak or strong multifunctionality? Agri-environmental resistance to neoliberal trade policies	p. 126
Re-regulating the urban water regime in neoliberal Toronto	p. 139
Commentary
Neoliberalism and the regulation of "environment"	p. 153
Devolution and neoliberal governmentalities	p. 161
Poisoning the well: neoliberalism and the contamination of municipal water in Walkerton, Ontario	p. 163
Un-real estate: proprietary space and public gardening	p. 177
Scalar dialectics in green: urban private property and the contradictions of the neoliberaiization of nature	p. 190
Neoliberalism and environmental justice policy	p. 202
Commentary
Neoliberal governmentalities	p. 217
Neoliberal environments, technologies of governance and governance of technologies	p. 221
Resistance	p. 229
A "continuous and ample supply": sustained yield timber production in northern New Mexico	p. 231
Neoliberalism and the struggle for land in Brazil	p. 243
Enclosure and economic identity in New England fisheries	p. 255
Commentary
Researching resistance in a time of neoliberal entanglements	p. 269
What might resistance to neoliberalism consist of?	p. 273
Conclusion	p. 279
Neoliberal ecologies	p. 281
Conclusion: unnatural consequences	p. 287
Index	p. 292
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