final - springer birch macleavy - book proposal handbook of neoliberalism

Book Proposal Springer et al.

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I. Proposed Title & Editor Information Handbook of Neoliberalism Dr. Simon Springer, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Geography, University of Victoria Victoria, BC, Canada [email protected] Dr. Kean Birch, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Social Science, York University Toronto, ON, Canada [email protected] Dr. Julie MacLeavy, PhD Senior Lecturer School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol Bristol, United Kingdom [email protected] II. Description & Rationale The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and institutional frameworks. Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses to emerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is astonishing. Even more surprising though is that there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which neoliberalism has evolved. The Handbook of Neoliberalism accordingly serves as an essential guide to this vast intellectual landscape. With proposed contributions from over 50 leading authors, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a systematic overview of neoliberalisms origins, political implications, social tensions, spaces, natures and environments, and aftermaths in addressing ongoing and emerging debates. Numerous books have been published on neoliberalism, including important edited volumes, but none of these contributions have attempted to bring the diverse scope and wide-ranging coverage that we plan to incorporate here. Most of the edited volumes and monographs on neoliberalism that have been published to date have a very specific thematic focus, either on particular empirical case studies, or alternatively attempt to wrestle with a specific theoretical concern. In contrast, the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of the field. With authors working at institutions around the world, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a thorough examination of how neoliberalism is understood by social scientists


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working from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Our goal is to advance the established and emergent debates in a field that has grown exponentially over the past two decades, coinciding with the meteoric rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, state form, policy and program, and governmentality. In short, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will intervene by both outlining how theorizations of neoliberalism have evolved and by exploring new research agendas that we hope will inform policy making and activism. The Handbook of Neoliberalism will include a substantive introductory chapter and seven main thematic sections. By presenting a comprehensive examination of the field, this edited volume will serve as an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and professional scholars alike. We envision the book as both a teaching guide and a reference for human geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, heterodox economists, and others working on questions of neoliberalism and its multifarious effects. III. Timeline for Delivery of Completed Manuscript This is large-scale project that will take considerable time to pull together based on the number of potential authors involved, securing commitments from them to write chapters, and the typical delays that come with attempting to get very busy people to adhere to deadlines. Contingent upon our efficiency in recruiting authors, we expect that December 2014 would be an approximate timeline of when we would expect chapters to be returned to us for comments prior to external peer review. We anticipate that the final volume will be submitted for review in the summer of 2015. IV. Table of Contents Introduction Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy ORIGINS 1. Historicising the Neoliberal Spirit of Capitalism Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (SOAS, University of London) - [email protected] Neoliberalism is often read as the latest revision or revival of the liberal tradition. Yet plotting what is new within neoliberalism, however precisely defined, is riven with conceptual and methodological problems. Inspired by Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), this chapter offers a particular framing of neoliberalism as the latest ideological spirit in the history of capitalism. This spirit encompasses relatively stable schemas of justification, including patterns of thought that are grounded in lived experiences beyond the world of technical experts. The chapter charts and clarifies this terrain in two ways. First, it discusses how many rationalities associated with neoliberalism can be tied to three master themes in the history of liberal thought: (1) individualism, whereby the individual is granted moral, ontological priority over the collective; (2) universalism, such as seen in the expansionary tendencies towards a world market; and (3) meliorism, whereby humans are claimed to have the potential to improve and remake themselves. While acknowledging that these themes have contemporary imprints on ideas and policies linked with neoliberalism, the second part of the chapter urges caution with imputing that neoliberalism has some bounded, historical


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coherence. In doing so, the argument dissects how each of these themes can also feature contradictions between theory and practice. It will also be suggested that such practical tensions partly account for the regenerative capacity of contemporary neoliberalism to legitimise itself and contain rival critiques that may aim to undermine processes of accumulation. 2. The Ascendency of Chicago Neoliberalism Edward Nik-Khah (Roanoke College) and Rob van Horn (University of Rhode Island) - [email protected], [email protected] The Chicago School of Economics was one of the primary formations in the post-World War II US economics profession, ascending in a little over three decades from a position of relative weakness to become Americas most powerful economic program. During this time, the formation of the Chicago School was conditioned by its status as the primary American outpost of the Mont Pe lerin Society. This chapter examines the relationship between these two institutions. We emphasize in the rich interplay between the distinct intellectual and institutional programs of the three most crucial figures at ChicagoMilton Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stiglerand their work locations, the Department of Economics, the Law School, and the Graduate School of Business respectively. Our analysis devotes special attention to their views about knowledge, democracy, and the appropriate role of the economist. In particular, we examine Chicago scholars engagement in economics imperialism, in redirecting state activities, and in reengineering science. We conclude with some observations about the status of the Chicago School today. 3. Neoliberalism and the Transnational Capitalist Class William K. Carroll (University of Victoria) - [email protected] Although a literature on the transnational capitalist class (TCC) began to form in the 1970s, along with the first stirrings of neoliberal public policy, both of these intersecting phenomena have deeper lineages in elite capitalist networks, transnationalizing investment, and the interaction between the two. This chapter traces the development of capitalist internationalism, initially within the International Chamber of Commerce (established in 1919), then within the Mont Pelerin Society (established in 1947) and later within such peak elite organizations as the World Economic Forum. These think tanks and elite forums have provided crucial sites for hammering out what became a neoliberal consensus in a transnational process of policy-planning, linked informally to states and to intergovernmental bodies. In the late 20th Century, as corporate capital became increasingly transnational, an international elite network took shape, linking together leading corporate capitalists and neoliberal policy groups and affording the TCC some capacity to act in the global political field as a class-for-itself. However, the TCC is not an economically and politically homogeneous entity, and neoliberalism itself is a variegated and evolving project. The chapter takes up the relationship between class fractions of the TCC and variants of neoliberal doctrine, as presented in research by Van der Pijl and Robinson and Harris, as well as recent developments in neoliberalism and the TCC, particularly the emergence of climate capitalism and the green economy. 4. Theorizing Neoliberalizations Kevin Ward (University of Manchester) and Kim England (University of Washington) - [email protected], [email protected]


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This chapter takes stock of the various attempts across the social sciences over the last fifteen years to theorize neo-liberalism. This period saw it face unprecedented analytical scrutiny from a range of theoretical positions. A rather crude characterization is that in exploring the process of neo-liberalization, political economists saw patterns, points of connection and programmatic features. Alternatively, post-structuralists saw contingency, difference and discreteness. The chapter reviews these caricatures, but also examines the points of agreement and overlap amongst those who have sought to theorize neo-liberalization head-on. In addition, the chapter considers the challenges that the post-2007 financial crisis has posed to earlier attempts to theorize neoliberalization. The chapter includes a discussion of what sorts of explanations we are currently left with when much of the industrialized Global North continues to suffer economically but the neo-liberal models that created the pre-conditions for the crisis seem to remain largely unchallenged. 5. Hegemony Dieter Plehwe (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) - [email protected] Neoliberalism emerged in the course of the 1930s in confrontations with economic planning perspectives advanced by socialist and Keynesian as well as populist and fascist thinkers. Neoliberals confronted at the time what they considered an anti-liberal, collectivist hegemonic constellation. The post WW II configuration in turn consolidated welfare economics, welfare state capitalism and state interventionism in the Western capitalist world in addition to the fortification of planned economies under the guard of the Soviet Union. Neoliberals advocating market economic principles, competition, individualism and limited statehood thus continued to face a hostile environment in most Western countries with the notable exception of the Federal Republic of Germany (Social Market Economy) and to a lesser extent the United States during the McCarthy years. Philosophically and academically, let alone politically, neoliberal intellectuals were on the defense. The founding of the Mont Plerin Society by F.A. von Hayek, Wilhelm Rpke and Albert Hunold among others in 1947 can therefore be considered a counter-hegemonic effort, and clearly was so understood by F.A. von Hayek in particular. His essay "Intellectuals and Socialism advocated a long term hegemonic strategy based on considerable academic research and debate as well as non-academic networking and dissemination efforts. Modelled after the Fabian Society, Hayek and his disciples constructed what is best understood as an anti-passive revolution strategy in critical distance to the realities of capitalist transformation in the age of Fordism (welfare state capitalism). When the crisis of the 1970s (stagflation) unfolded, organized neoliberals were well positioned and increasingly well-funded to expand their influence within and beyond the academic sphere. The era of social liberal hegemony arguably came to an end ushering in the era of neoliberal hegemonic constellations. While the collapse of the Soviet Union and socialist planning in the second world and the so-called Washington Consensus in development politics reinforced neoliberal hegemony, the various financial and economic crisis of the 1990s and 2000s and the global financial and economic crisis since 2008 challenge the continuing viability of neoliberal approaches to economic and in the meantime social, environmental etc. policy making. While a Gramscian understanding of hegemony does not require a near complete consensus with regard to key policy issues as sometimes suggested, neoliberal hegemonic constellations appear to be less able to secure the stable functioning of institutions around the world, and to sufficiently integrate marginalized and oppositional forces into the historical bloc. It is nevertheless too early to speak of a post-neoliberal age considering the strength and force of neoliberal leadership in


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areas like the European Union (austerity), or the deepening of transatlantic integration (TTIP) vis--vis Russia and China in particular. The present transformation of capitalism can be considered oscillating between the poles of a post-neoliberal Green New Deal on the one hand, and authoritarian versions of neoliberalism. 6. Governmentality at Work in Shaping a Critical Geographical Politics Nick Lewis (University of Auckland) - [email protected] Foucaults concept of governmentality has been widely deployed in geography to connect the political and the cultural, the material and the discursive, the ideological and the technological, and the politics of the subject and the politics of the state. Over a period of thought dominated by critique of neoliberalism, the coupling neoliberal governmentalities has become a prominent critical refrain, albeit often consolatory. How effective the coupling has proven in connecting these different knowledge terrains to establish a space for developing critical geographical insights is uncertain. In this paper, I trace the ways in which governmentality has been deployed to shape a post-structuralist political economy (PSPE) in economic geography, and how in doing so it has opened up less consolatory and more generative critiques of neoliberalism. As a project of knowledge production PSPE has a particular geography associated with a long-term critical engagement with the changing nature, form and work of neoliberal governmentalities in the New Zealand context. It also has an historicity that has given it a prominence in economic geographys attempts to grapple with neoliberalism as multiple, grounded, and simultaneously an ideology, a political programme, and a subjectifying governmental technology. The paper will examine a genealogy of PSPE to explore possibilities for academic geographers to practice a critical politics under neoliberalism. 7. Neoliberalism in Question Sally Weller (Monash University) and Phillip ONeil (University of Western Sydney) - [email protected], [email protected]

This chapter offers a critique of the construction of neoliberalism as a variegated, hybrid yet hegemonic global imaginary, as an idea capable of enrolling all manner of political-economic change into its purview. We draw on a range of authors to make three arguments. First, that the necessary fluidity of the definitions of neoliberalism to enable them to incorporate a range of policy actions and outcomes acts to dull academic argument. Second, that the lazy use of neoliberalism as a descriptor of observed changes has too often replaced close study of the relationships among state policies, economies, societies and developmental trajectories at the national and regional scales. Third, that the political utility of the idea of neoliberalism as a means of uniting progressive politics is highly questionable. Our title, which echoes the title of Andrew Sayers 1989 critique of post-Fordism, draws attention the fact that the idea of neoliberalism is both overly flexible and insufficiently specialised, and that it feeds the tendency for dualistic thinking, with debates about neoliberalism versus post-neoliberalism the latest example. Our argument is that as a direct consequence of the misuse of the notion of neoliberalism, the important detail of political-economic change is too often overlooked. We advocate more robust debate about the nature of contemporary socioeconomic change and the perennial issues at stake in explaining continuity and change. We conclude that removing the word neoliberalism from our analyses would force us all to produce more careful explanations.


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8. Neoliberalism: From Cultural Phenomenon to Multi-sided Social Fact Stephanie Mudge (University of California, Davis) - [email protected] Albeit contentious and politically loaded, neoliberalism is now a fairly well established term in the human sciences. Neoliberalism refers to a utopian project of European and American intellectuals from the late 1930s who considered themselves the bearers of liberal virtues, and who eventually built a network of academic centers, research institutes, and educational foundations centered in North America and the United Kingdom. Neoliberalism is, in this sense, above all a cultural phenomenon: a set of truth claims and an institution-building project driven by charismatic leaders and rooted in a particular concept of the market as an organic, natural realm of individual freedom and in which, by contrast, politics, bureaucracies, and states are threats to be contained. More than a cultural phenomenon, however, from the late 1960s forward the neoliberal project developed variable linkages to cross-national struggles over governments and policies, political representation and party politics, class power, and economic profit. Neoliberalism thus acquired a multi-sided character that went well beyond its origins. Understanding the specificities of neoliberalism as a multi-sided social fact and yet avoiding conspiracy theory and eschewing simplistic conflationsfor instance, treating neoliberalism as a proxy for neoclassical economics, American hegemony, or political rightnessremains a main challenge for scholarship on neoliberalism today. POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS 9. Neoliberal Geopolitics Sue Roberts (University of Kentucky) - [email protected] This chapter reviews the main ways geographers and others have considered the relations between neoliberalism and geopolitics. The review is structured around the ideas of neoliberalism, geo-economics, and geopolitics. Key works discussed include those by Luttwak, Silen, Sparke, Coleman, Springer, Cowen and Smith. In addition to providing a critical review of the relevant literature, the chapter considers the recent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and on-going use of drone strikes by the US as examples of neoliberal geopolitics. Broadly speaking, the emphasis is on the relations between the generalization of the logics of the market (neoliberalism) and ways of viewing and engaging the world premised on the use of force. As a rhetoric claiming the desirability of a flat world, neoliberalism would seem to be a kind of anti-geopolitics; relegating considerations of inter-state rivalry to the sidelines, while an unfettered capitalism takes center stage, integrating and enriching all who participate. However, this chapter argues that neoliberalism and geopolitics have proven quite compatible. Recalling Shakespeares phrase Why, then the worlds mine oyster we might do well to consider Pistols subsequent line in the play. It is, Which I with sword will open. 10. Neoliberal Transformations of State and Sovereignty: On the Dynamics of Revival and Reconfiguration Brenda Chalfin (University of Florida) - [email protected] If the formal origins of neoliberalism can be traced to the convergent crises and solutions of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the Global North, thirty-years hence neoliberalism as a philosophy, policy agenda and catch-all explanation of the condition of the present has


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become a world-wide phenomenon. Among neoliberalisms twists, turns and unintended consequences is the fate of the sovereign state. Originally slated for radical surgery, these reforms including the abolition of social service provision, state-owned industries, and most dramatically, the dismantling of the regulatory edifice that was the hallmark of liberal democratic regimes of the twentieth century. Caught in neoliberalisms path of creative destruction, state institutional forms across the globe have survived the neoliberal onslaught to be configured anew. This essay addresses three aspects of this dynamic emerging during the past decades of high neoliberalism: the rebuilding of state authority in alliance with supra- and international organizations; the merging of state agendas with the imperatives of finance capital ; and the refiguring of the nation-state imaginary in the neoliberal mold, rendering sovereignty a marketable commodity. These processes are explored from the perspective of polities of the Global North and South as well as the broad swath of transitioning states in between. A central concern will be to capture diversity as well as identify cross-cutting trends that mark late-modern statehood world-wide. 11. Neoliberalism and Relational Citizenship: Speed, Subjectivity, and Space Kathryn Mitchell (University of Washington) - [email protected] Citizenship is a process that is formative and relational. The speed associated with fast and mobile citizenship often entails the slow-down or stoppage of movement for others. The formation of certain kinds of positive emotions and identities of belonging vis--vis urban, national, or supranational citizenship frequently corresponds with feelings of exclusion for the remaining population. Healthy bodies and well-educated minds for some citizens are achieved through the ill health and ignorance of others. Space is formative in all of these relational processesthrough enclaving, targeting, deterritorialization, and other geographical forms of inclusion and separation. In this chapter I identify and discuss the ways in which the spatial effects of neoliberalization impact citizenship formation and the relations between individuals and populations around the globe. 12. Development and Neoliberalism David Craig (University of Otago) - [email protected] International development agencies have been core to global neoliberalisation processes since the early 1980s, when Regan- appointed World Bank president Alden Clausen turned the Bank from poverty alleviation towards policy based lending, better known as Structural Adjustment. Drawing lessons from early reform in Chile, and working in concert with a wider Washington consensus of Regan- Bush- Clinton administration agencies, the Bretton Woods organisations continued to lead neoliberal development well into the early 21st century. Sidestepping democratic processes and imbuing a sense of crisis, early shock therapy structural adjustment enacted a core stabilize, liberalize, privatize adjustment mantra, mainly by reforms orchestrated from central agencies (Treasury, Finance ministries), often supported by US trained economists (Chicago Boys) or technopoliticians. Stabilisation meant austerity, and popular reaction to cuts and re-pricings of staple goods were often violent. Politicians and subsequently Bretton Woods lenders acted to mitigate deflationary effects through a range of measures: social funds, fast dispersing loans, engaging NGOs as subcontractors. After a lost decade of negative growth in sub Saharan African countries, the evident failures of Structural Adjustment led to a series of move to rehabilitate its primary sponsors and policy settings. The role for the state and its institutions was


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revised, and reforms were re-branded around the more inclusive neoliberal Poverty Reduction consensus. This, in concert with a revived development security nexus, set Developments agenda through the 2000s. This chapter charts the rise and partial demise of neoliberalism in international development, and offers an assessment of its legacy and prospects. 13. Free Trade and the End of Democracy Jason Hickel (London School of Economics) - [email protected] Free trade agreements have proliferated across the globe since the early 1990s. Despite their name, most of these agreements have very little to do with meaningful human freedom, and rather a lot to do with corporate freedom. In exchange for much-needed access to the markets of rich countries, poor countries are compelled to accept damaging neoliberal reforms related to labor standards, pollution laws, public services, and corporate taxes. Ironically, in the rhetoric of "free trade" the very things that promote real human freedoms - such as the right of workers to organise, equal access to decent public services, and safeguards for a healthy environment are cast as somehow anti-democratic, or even totalitarian. These freedoms are reframed as "red tape", or as "barriers to investment", even when they have been won by popular grassroots movements exercising democratic franchise. In this paradigm, democracy itself is cast as anti-democratic, inasmuch as it grants voters control over the economic policies that affect their lives. We can see this happening very clearly in two new free trade deals: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will govern trade between the US and the European Union, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which will govern trade between the US and a number of Pacific nations. These agreements include "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms that grant corporations the power to sue sovereign nations for laws that reduce their profits. In other words, corporations will be empowered to regulate democratic states, rather than the other way around. These trade deals also pre-emptively prevent states from making certain laws that regulate finance and fossil fuels, effectively stripping elected representatives of their power to protect citizens from economic crisis and climate change. This is the most far-reaching assault on the ideas of sovereignty and democracy that has ever been attempted in history. And it is being conducted under the banner of "freedom". 14. The Violence of Neoliberalism Simon Springer (University of Victoria) - [email protected] As austerity measures intensity in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis, it is becoming ever more clear that neoliberalization exhibits a distinct relational connection with violence. This is not an admonishment of the protests that continue to swell, but rather a recognition that these movements are in fact pushing back against the violent measures that have frustrated and demoralized everyday existence under neoliberalism. There is now considerable room for skepticism with regard to the rising tides lifts all boats discourse that is perpetuated by proponents of neoliberal ideology, as the free market has categorically failed at producing a harmonious global village. Promises of utopia are confronted with the stark dystopian realities that exist in a growing number of countries where neoliberalization has not resulted in greater peace and prosperity, but in a profound and unmistakable encounter with violence. This chapter questions how and why neoliberalizing processes


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often result in conflict, arguing that neoliberalism itself might be productively understood as a particular form of violence.

15. Neoliberalism and the Biopolitical Imagination Nicholas Kiersey (Ohio University) - [email protected]

Understood perhaps most fundamentally as a critic of liberal government, Foucaults thoughts on the place of economic thought in our lives are often overlooked. Nevertheless, it is clear that he attached particular importance to the role of economic imagination in shaping contemporary imperatives of rule, a process which he termed biopolitics. This chapter starts with a survey of what is popularly understood by the term biopolitics, and the various debates it has promoted. It notes the significant influence of the work of Giorgio Agamben in these debates, especially in the context of the War on Terror. However, as I suggest, those who follow Agamben appear to ignore key aspects of Foucaults arguments about power, and the power of the state specifically, and the fact that he attributed a critical role to modern economic discourse in catalyzing the liberal imagination. Crucially, a growing number of works are now giving attention to this latter point, and exploring the various ways in which biopolitics must itself be situated in ongoing processes of sociological transformation. Some, for example, focus on the unevenness of global liberalism, and on this basis cast doubt on notions of 'global governmentality.' Others focus on the crisis-ridden terrain of existing western capitalism, drawing attention to the significance of biopolitical imperatives for everyday life. To explore these issues, the chapter contends, we should bring an innovative attitude to our reading of Foucaults few rudimentary remarks on neoliberal capitalist subjectivity, integrating more fine-grained methods of postliberal economic analysis from Autonomist Marxism, among other sources. 16. Neoliberalism and Media Convergence Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh) and Kevin Glynn (Massey University) - [email protected], [email protected] Neoliberalism (along with its multiple contestations) defines the current global conjuncture, but so too does the emergence of a highly elaborated and complex convergent media environment marked by rapid technological development, digitalization, miniaturization and mobilization. This chapter will explore the clash between top-down and bottom-up forces within this complex conjunctural moment. Citizens, activists and conventionally marginalized populations are forging new modes of media consumption/production and devising more democratic ways to communicate, express their views and challenge hegemonic and neoliberal structures of power. For example, media prosumers use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Internet forums and crowd-sourced and volunteered geographic information to respond to political events, government policies, for-profit corporations and mainstream media texts. In many cases, government agencies, corporations and mainstream media are forced to respond to this bottom-up media activity. Within what Mark Andrejevic calls the digital enclosure, our participatory media activities are however being appropriated by states and corporations in the form of big data that can be harnessed toward the advancement of neoliberal agendas. While corporations strive to ever more precisely chart consumer profiles and preferences by exhaustively mining social media sites, the NSA and other agencies subject citizen activists to extensive surveillance and criminalization. Thus, although the Internet empowers us with access to once unimaginable volumes of information and forms of connectivity, it simultaneously renders us vulnerable to


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algorithmic control exerted by the forces of commodification and securitization. SOCIAL TENSIONS 17. The Co-constitution of Race and Neoliberalism: More than Just a Racist Eruption David Roberts (University of Toronto) - [email protected] In 2010, Minelle Mahtani and I published an article challenging scholars of neoliberalism, especially within geography, to approach the connection between race and neoliberalism in a more sophisticated manner. The scholarship on race and neoliberalism, at the time, tended to focus on racialized outcomes of neoliberal reforms the racist eruptions of neoliberalization. We argued that it was problematic to understand and theorize these as two separate social entities that sometimes intersect. Instead, we demanded an understanding of race and neoliberalism as co-constitutive. Following Giroux (2005) we argued that while neoliberalism is saturated with race, it also modifies that way that race and racism is understood and experienced in contemporary society. Since publication, the article has had significant influence on the theorization of race and neoliberalism garnering nearly fifty citations. This chapter revisits the original argument and then proceeds to analyze how these arguments have been taken up by other scholars through a literature review of articles and book chapter that have cited the 2010 piece. Towards a conclusion, I work to plot a course as to what I believe should be the future directions in which the scholarship theorizing race and neoliberalism may want to go. 18. Young Women as Ideal Neoliberal Subjects: Better to be Sick than Angry Christina Scharff (Kings College London) - [email protected] Gender intersects with neoliberalism in various ways. A discussion of these complex entanglements would depend on our understanding of gender and neoliberalism, which are concepts that have been defined and used differently, depending on disciplinary orientation, political outlook, and spatial and temporal context, to name just a few. Instead of attempting to provide an overview of the various ways in which gender and neoliberalism have been analysed and theorised, this chapter will hone in on recent feminist research on contemporary Western societies. This body of work has suggested that women, and in particular young women, have been constructed as ideal neoliberal subjects. By adopting a Foucauldian approach to neoliberalism, feminist research has shown that public, media and policy discourses have positioned young women as subjects of capacity who can lead responsibilised and self-managed lives through self-application and self-transformation. Based on empirical research, I will explore these subjectivities. In particular, the chapter will draw on over sixty in-depth interviews with young, female classical musicians who, due to their positioning as both young women and cultural workers, may be neoliberal subjects par excellence. By focusing on the ways in which the research participants negotiated playing-related injuries, which were prevalent but often hidden, the chapter will shed light on some of the contradictions, exclusions and politics of neoliberal, gendered subjectivity.


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19. Neoliberal Paradoxes of Sexuality Sea Ling Cheng (Chinese University of Hong Kong) [email protected] What kind of sexuality does neoliberalism endorse, let be, or penalize? What kind of sexual subjects are compatible with the free, self-sufficient, and self-advancing subjects of neoliberalism? How is sexuality mobilized in neoliberal political, economic, social, and cultural projects? What are the sexual limits of neoliberalism? Sexuality stands at the intersection of the political, economic, and cultural reconfiguration of relationships between the state and the individuals in neoliberal transformations. While scholars generally agree that neoliberalism varies across locations, examining sexuality as a dense transfer point for relations of power (Foucault 1978) illuminate the paradoxes and contradictions of neoliberalism. Socially, the retreat of the state from the social sphere is accompanied by a reification of the nuclear family and relational sexuality. This buttresses a class-based view of sexuality as a means of individual identity and emotional expression, a private matter that must be distinguished from the public and therefore commercial realm. Embedded as such as part of a narrative about self, authenticity, and nationhood, sexuality has been further deployed for the securitization of state and national borders. This entry discusses how neoliberal governance and subject-making are contested in the realm of sexuality, providing an overview of the culture wars and policy debates around sex, ranging from gay marriage to sex trafficking to reproductive technology. 20. Health and Neoliberalism: Biopolitics, Biocapital and the New Washington Consensus Matt Sparke (University of Washington) - [email protected] This chapter surveys the way in which both macro forms of neoliberal governance and micro practices of neoliberal governmentality come together in context-contingent ways to shape health policies, health systems and embodied health outcomes. Changing forms of biopolitics in the era of biotech molecularization are important considerations in this respect, and a key argument of the chapter is that neoliberalization is leading to extremely unequal but interconnected regimes of biopolitics and necropolitics globally. To understand the connections, it is argued, we have to come to terms - inter alia - with how these divergent biopolitical regimes are tied together by biocapital. Their starkly divergent consequences in terms of risk management and precarity therefore need to be considered in relation to one another, both on a global and local scale. This approach to neoliberalism therefore takes us beyond static statistical accounts of how inequality maps on to ill-health in particular data-set defined populations. Instead, it opens up the possibility of mapping geographies of global structural violence. By doing so it also offer sobering lessons about the ways in which even efforts to reduce the violence and repair the world remain structured by an emergent new Washington Consensus on neoliberal market fostercare. 21. Welfare and Neoliberalism Julie MacLeavy (University of Bristol) - [email protected] This chapter examines the (often counter-productive) neoliberal impulses underlying the restructuring of contemporary welfare states. Its particular focus is on how a neoliberalised approach to the broader political economy has been translated in an age of austerity and used to legitimate further cuts to central and local government budgets, welfare services and benefits, and the privatisation of public resources resulting in job losses. Employing a critical


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gender analysis of contemporary welfare policies in different national contexts, it will argue that the discourse of austerity re-constructs and re-embeds negative attitudes towards welfare, which have made possible a process of welfare reform, as attitudes have shifted from a general consensus that welfare exists as a safety net for people with no or low incomes, towards a more punitive policy approach which emphasises self-sufficiency and individual requirements to work. In doing so, it will explore the consequences of welfare restructuring for different social groups. 22. Labour and Neoliberalism Ben Jackson (University of Oxford) - [email protected] Labour has been central to the concerns of neo-liberalism from its ideological inception to the roll out of neo-liberal policies in government in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter surveys how neo-liberals have analysed this concept, focusing in particular on the way in which neo-liberal theory has sought to treat labour as a commodity to be bought and sold like any other on the market. A distinctive feature of neo-liberal thinking is the view that there is no such thing as market-based coercion in labour relations, only coercive interventions into the market sponsored by the state and by powerful, state-backed unions. This has led neo-liberals to adopt a sceptical pose towards labour market regulation and collective bargaining. The chapter investigates the ideological foundations and policy implications of this stance and discusses the key neo-liberal writings on labour by such authors as W. H. Hutt, Henry Simons, F. A. Hayek and Gary Becker. 23. The Commons Against Neoliberalism, the Commons of Neoliberalism, the Commons Beyond Neoliberalism Max Haiven (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) - [email protected] In this chapter I briefly explore the relationship of the commons to neoliberalism in three registers. First, I offer a brief historical overview of the commons as both actuality and idea, with a focus on the celebratory concept of the commons as it has risen to prominence amidst the neoliberal period. I trace both neoliberalism and the idea of the commons as stemming from the crisis of post-war Keynesianism. This section is organized around the contrast between the neoliberal agenda of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the common-ist agenda of the Zapatistas. The second section of this chapter examines the ways in which, over the past twenty years, neoliberalism has come to adopt and co-opt certain aspects of the reality and the idea of the commons. It begins by addressing the curious success of Nobel (Memorial) Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and other mainstream economists and concludes with a discussion of the rise, in the past few years, of the rhetoric (and reality) of the "sharing economy." These, I suggest, are examples of how neoliberal capitalism increasingly relies on the commons (in idea and in fact) to reproduce itself. In the final section, I take up a new generation of radical theorizations (and practices) of the commons that are less celebratory and utopian, notably Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's concept of the "undercommons" and Silvia Federici's historically-informed conceptualization of the commons as the fabric of a struggle over social reproduction. Here I follow George Caffentzis in retaining the conceptual and actual power of the commons to resist and confront neoliberalism, but in ways that attend to the potential for co-optation and the need to retain a broader analysis of capitalism.


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24. Neoliberalism and Social Economy Peter Graefe (McMaster University) - [email protected] Early analyses of neoliberalism, adopting an alarmist tone, emphasized the retrenchment of state social provision to make space for market regulation. With time, these added the nuance that programmes were not just retrenched, but also redeployed. It was not just a question of changing the balance of state and market, but of transforming the logics and re-orienting the goals of state provision, and of attempting to transform the subjectivities and identities of citizens. Analysis of the social economy and neoliberalism has followed a similar arc. At first, the question was one of the social economy as a site for privatization and state offloading. Then, as a site of institutional and policy experimentation, it has sustained the interest of those analyzing neoliberalism more dynamically. For more Foucauldian analyses, there is interest in the technologies that align non-state service providers with governmental programmes, as well as the manner in which social economy organizations govern clients. For analysts more versed in the tradition of the regulation school, the interest has been tied more to how this innovation relates to the temporality of neoliberalism. Are we witnessing the roll-out of new institutions and governmentalities so as to extend market metrics deeper into social provisions, and indeed into organizations previously marked by non-market cultures and rationalities, or is the attention to the social economy more akin to creating flanking mechanisms to compensate for problems in social reproduction that might hobble the neoliberal project. Both the Foucauldian and the regulationist accounts provide useful critical entres to understanding the development of the social economy, but they share similar structuralist shortcomings. In looking for how the social economy translates or relates to a broader neoliberal project or programme, there is a tendency to overstate processes that reproduce neoliberalism, and to ignores the potentials for the social economy to serve as an element of a settlement that might break with neoliberalism. This is not so much a strategy of introducing agency so as to then adopt an excessive voluntarism, as one of keeping an analytical door open to possibilities of change. KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTIONS 25. Education, Neoliberalism, Human Capital: Prudential Rationality and Homo Economicus as Entrepreneur of Himself Michael Peters (University of Waikato) - [email protected] Neoliberalism is a changing dynamic phenomenon crystalising as an idea and insipient ideology in the prewar period, becoming internationalized and institutionalized as a credo for the Mt Pelerin Society (was to be Acton-Tocqueville society) in 1947, and a set of policies in the service of economic liberalism with the ascendancy to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1979-1980 (Peters, 2011). One of the main forms of economic liberalism analyzed by Michel Foucault (2008) in his historical treatment of the birth of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics was American neoliberalism represented especially by the late Gary Becker (1962) who on the basis of Schultz work and others introduced the concept and theory of human capital into political economy privileging education in his analysis. This chapter traces the inception of human capital theory and analyses it in terms of Foucaults analysis that Becker developed an approach that is not a conception of labour power so much as a capital-ability that Foucault captures in the following comment: the


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replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings. 26. The Rise of Neoliberal Reasoning in Universities: Subjects, Objects and Globalized Academic Knowledge Production. Lawrence Berg (University of British Columbia, Okanagan) - [email protected] The chapter will examine the rise of neoliberal reasoning in universities, as a system of ideologies and policies designed to govern academia, and as a form of governmentality that produces neoliberalizing subjects in the academy. The chapter will then go on to examine the implications that such neoliberal policies, ideologies and governmentalities have for the production of both knowing subjects, and the knowledge that they produce. 27. The Pedagogy of Neoliberalism Sheila Macrine (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth) - [email protected]

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the Pedagogy of Neoliberalism. First, it provides an analytical framework for understanding how the pedagogy of neoliberalism is a pervasive educational tool mediating a construction of consent and coercion between centers of power and the common citizen. Further the chapter takes up this notion of the pedagogy of neoliberalism and allows us to step back from the onslaught of its predatory practices and examine how the hegemony of neoliberalisms pedagogy teaches us to accept our oppression. Giroux (2004, p. 106) succinctly declares neoliberalism as a culture of corporate public pedagogy that cancels out or devalues gender, class-specific, and racial injustices of the existing social order by absorbing the democratic impulses and practices of civil society within narrow economic relations. This construction of consent legitimizes the widespread dismantling of welfare state policies and validates the neoliberal rhetoric of individual freedoms and personal responsibility through meritocracy. Understanding the pedagogy of neoliberalism helps illuminate how neoliberal governments psychologically police citizens to become enterprising-selves irrespective of class barriers (Rose, 1990). Under the guise of the pedagogy of neoliberalism, individuals are told to either work harder or suffer the consequences of failure with no one to blame but themselves. Here the Pedagogy of Neoliberalism is seen as a hegemonic system that involves the uncritical promotion of values of enterprise and entrepreneurship in developing the ideological apparatus of neoliberalism across the world (McCafferty, 2010). To challenge this Pedagogy of Neoliberalism, this chapter argues for the development of a critical counter-hegemonic pedagogy in order to explore and create alternative pedagogical sites to supplant neoliberalisms savage capitalism. 28. Neoliberalism, business schools and financial economics: Legitimating corporate monopoly? Kean Birch (York University) [email protected] Neoliberalism is seen as a market-centred order in which markets are characterized as the key ordering mechanism for economy, society and polity. What this description belies, however, is the rise and importance of corporate monopoly since the 1970s. This presents a problem for how we understand neoliberalism since markets and monopoly sit uneasily together; it might even suggest that neoliberalism is not a market-based order after all. With


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this in mind, it is important to examine how business and corporate forms and governance have evolved during the so-called neoliberal era. What this illustrates is the importance of two things to the reproduction of neoliberal order: on the one hand, new business and financial knowledges that legitimate the expansion of corporate monopoly through the reworking of the firm as a nexus of contracts; and, on the other hand, business schools as centres of the production of these new business and financial knowledges. 29. Neoliberalism Everywhere: Mobile Neoliberal Policy Russell Prince (Massey University) - [email protected] One of the remarkable features of neoliberalism is its ubiquity: it seems to be everywhere (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 380). It manifests in policy at all levels, from the local to the supranational, and across international space, from the richest global cities of Europe and America to the poorest communities of the developing world. From a certain point of view, this convergence means the neoliberalisation of our global economy and society. But when we look closely, there is remarkable diversity across time and space between policy programmes that are otherwise reasonably described as neoliberal. By tracing the connections between geographically separate neoliberal policy programmes and focusing on how they get transferred across space we can grasp how this variegated neoliberalisation proceeds. These transfers can be effected in a variety of ways, from deliberate strategy on the part of neoliberal policy actors who often harness the power of governmental institutions to construct fast policy networks that sell neoliberal ideas of crisis and solution, to the softer inculcation of policy-makers with neoliberal common sense through the circulation of certain technocratic knowledges and experts. But the politics of these transfers means that the policies mutate as they move and circulate in order to be made to fit different contexts and conditions. The dynamic ability of neoliberalism to change and adapt can be observed in these transfers, and this helps explain its ubiquity. 30. Science, Innovation and Neoliberalism David Tyfield (Lancaster University) - [email protected]

Science and innovation (S&I) have been tasked with kick-starting the moribund global economy, underpinning a new techno-economic paradigm, while also tackling multiple, overlapping global challenges, such as climate change, food security or energy security. But the cultural and political role of science and the political economy of its funding in the form of its ongoing commercialization, and its disruption by fiscal crisis and austerity of public support (at least in the global north), continuing globalisation and the emergence of web 2.0-enabled open science are currently in a state of unprecedented upheaval. Both of these phenomena the intensified and particularly challenging demands placed on S&I, and its transforming political economy are intimately related to neoliberalism. Indeed, conceiving of neoliberalism as a political project founded upon a fundamentalism of the market as the optimal epistemic device, S&I and the transformation of their political economy in recent decades provides a singular window into the trajectory of neoliberalism both past and regarding the emerging present. In particular, on the one hand, by exploring how a neoliberal-conditioned system of knowledge production generates intensifying crises in this key aspect of contemporary political economy, crucial tensions and even limits to neoliberalism that are currently being played out are illuminated. While, on the other, trends in the further transformation of knowledge production, from contemporary efforts to


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circumnavigate these problems, afford informed speculation regarding emerging political economic models and projects that may be designated post-neoliberal. 31. Performing Neoliberalism: Practices, Power and Subject Formation Michael Glass (University of Pittsburgh) - [email protected] This chapter provides a critical perspective on neoliberalism rooted in theories of performativitya term in contemporary social theory that argues the use of language is a form of social action with material consequences. Neoliberalism is considered a defining feature of late capitalist society, serving as a political-economic concept that explains effects through policies and practices on specific scales from the individual body to the supra-national. A performative perspective holds that as with any concept, neoliberalism was neither discovered as a fully-formed subject for geographic analysis, nor can neoliberalism do anything without actants. There are multiple actants at play here who produce and perform neoliberalism, including those who define and carry out the political and economic policies considered neoliberal, those recipients of policy who must determine how to respond, and those who assess the influences of neoliberalism and make claims about its value. These sets of actants are discussed with reference to three key issues used by geographers in research on neoliberalism: practices, power, and subject formation. Through this survey, I emphasize how the concept of neoliberalism is produced in scholarly and policy discourse and is transferred and resisted in specific contexts. The conclusion argues this production can never be completed, creating the space for resistance. 32. Neoliberalism as Austerity: The Theory, Practice, and Purpose of Fiscal Restraint Since the 1970s Heather Whiteside (University of British Columbia) - [email protected] Austerity through fiscal restraint government debt reduction and deficit elimination is en vogue once again. As of 2012, all but four members of the G-20 have declared this to be a leading policy priority and one which is scheduled to take precedence well into the current decade. Far from technocratic, the politics of austerity are entrenching, reasserting, and unrolling processes of neoliberalization at global, national, and urban scales, much as they did during earlier iterations of fiscal restraint beginning in the 1970s. In this sense, the history and hegemony of neoliberalism is intrinsically intertwined with that of austerity, and the recent return of fiscal consolidation is a contemporary manifestation of a longer historical trend. Austerity is a signature of the neoliberal era much as neoliberalism can be understood as austerity. This paper examines the connection between neoliberalism and austerity since the late 1970s in terms of their discursive, institutional, and material attributes. Attention will be paid to temporal dynamics (the appeal of and to austerity over time), spatial effects (the scalar impact of austerity, particularly downloading onto municipal or local authorities), and socio-institutional reforms (policies and programs). Neoliberal-era fiscal restraint works in lockstep with other key aspects of the neoliberal political economy such as financialization, privatization, and marketization, and these connections will also be highlighted. As an overview analysis, the discussion aims for wide applicability although examples will be drawn on from the global North and South where appropriate.


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33. Think Tanks, Neoliberalism, and the Production of Ignorance Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh) - [email protected] This chapter explores and analyses the role of right wing think tanks in processes of neoliberalisation. Think tanks lie at the intersection of academic, journalistic, policy and economic fields, and they play a substantial role in buttressing the crafting, mutation and expansion of the neoliberal state. As non-state agencies, they purport to be 'independent', but they rely on generous donations from corporations, institutions and individuals with clear political agendas, resulting in profound state effects. Neoliberal politicians rarely consult published academic research unless it supports the policies they want to pursue; instead, they deploy neat sound bites, accessible catchphrases and statistical nuggets from think tank surveys that measure nothing more than the worldview of the think tank that commissions them. As an illustration of this practice, I explore the methods and influence of two right-wing think tanks in the UK, Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Justice, which have been highly influential in housing and welfare policies respectively. Their glossy and authoritative publications, their fast channels of access to authority and opinion-makers, and their speechwriters and researchers have provided the 'evidence base' for the mobilization of state power in the extension of conservative dogma; they actively produce ignorance to appease their funders, shielding politicians and their audiences from viable alternatives, and inoculating them against the critique of autonomous scholarship. I argue that the dominance of neoliberalism can be explained partly by the right wing think tank mastery of decision-based evidence making, which requires exposure and critical analysis. SPACES 34. Urban Neoliberalism Roger Keil (York University) - [email protected]

This chapter will trace the histories of the intersection of urbanization and neoliberalization. It will demonstrate that the current urban age often portrayed as an almost natural demographic, morphological and economic force -- has in many ways been a product of, and has been productive of neoliberalization. While urbanism and neoliberalism are mostly open-ended ideological formations, urbanization and neoliberalization are material and discursive processes that lead to real (and imagined) constellations through which modern capitalist societies are being reproduced. I will look at roll-back-, roll-out-, and roll-with-it neoliberalization through urbanization and will discuss the ways in which those have led to what Brenner, Peck and Theodore, among others, have called variegated forms of neoliberalization. For illustration, I will look specifically at the neoliberalization of urban peripheries as the prime landscapes of neoliberal urbanism. I will also look at the pitfalls and possibilities in post-neoliberal urbanization as I contemplate the political opportunities springing from the horizontalization of the urban polity in the period of (post)neoliberalism. 35. Neoliberalism and Rural Change Cristobal Kay (SOAS, University of London) - [email protected] This chapter analyses the key features of neoliberalism as related to the rural spaces. During the 1970s the statist development paradigm followed by most developing countries became increasingly under fire from neoliberal thinkers. The statist development strategy prioritized


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industrialization based on import-substitution and the urban areas often neglecting the development of agriculture and the rural areas. The debt crisis of the 1980s provided the opportunity for multilateral institutions like the World Bank to push for the adoption of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in developing countries as a condition for receiving loans and development aid. The SAPs contained the key elements of the neoliberal policy proposals aimed at reducing the role of the State in the economy and giving free reign to market forces, especially by removing protectionist measures and opening the economy to the competitive forces of the world market. Later during the 1990s the so-called Washington Consensus emerged which further emphasized aspects of the neoliberal paradigm. The liberalization policies profoundly restructured the rural spaces and the agricultural sector as exports based on natural resources gained new prominence. The salient features of the great transformation in the countryside are discussed such as (a) the shift from traditional commodity exports to non-traditional agricultural exports; (b) the concentration of natural resources, land and capital; (c) the dominance of agribusiness and transnational enterprises; (d) the shift to temporary, casual and flexible working conditions and the feminization of the workforce; (e) poverty and income inequality; (f) the increasing rural-urban linkages and reconfiguration of rural spaces; and (g) the growing reach of the global corporate food regime. Due to rising poverty and inequality the neoliberal paradigm was contested by scholars, activists, NGOs, peasant organizations and landless rural workers. Some key debates are discussed focusing on issues like land reform, food sovereignty, agribusiness versus peasant farming, agroecology and land grabbing. 36. The Heartlands of Neoliberalism Bob Jessop (Lancaster University) - [email protected] This chapter adopts a regulation- and state-theoretical variegated capitalism approach to the genealogy and subsequent development of neoliberalism. It distinguishes four kinds of neoliberal project: post-socialist system transformation, principled neoliberal regime shifts, pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustment, and neoliberal structural adjustment regimes. The heartlands of neoliberalism are characterized by principled neoliberal regime shifts, typified by the USA and UK but with variations in Canada, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland. I consider the periodization of neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK and comment on similarities and differences with other cases. I then consider the extent to which pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustments can cumulate, over time, through ratchet-like effects, to produce de facto rather than principled neoliberal regime shifts. Here I also consider two cases the Federal Republic of Germany, in which neoliberal policy adjustments serve a neo-mercantilist economic strategy but have consolidated into a more neoliberal regime shift, and Sweden, where a glass half-full, glass half-empty ambivalence exists as a result of the steady cumulation of neoliberal policy adjustments but much of the Swedish social democratic model has been retained. Finally, I consider the implications of neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands in terms of (1) core-periphery relations within the heartlands themselves, associated with intensified uneven development and (2) the repercussions of neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands for the overall dynamic of a world market organized in the shadow of neoliberalism. 37. The Peripheries of Neoliberalism Warwick Murray and Jon Overton (Victoria University of Wellington) - [email protected], [email protected]


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Peripheries of the global economy have been deeply engaged in, and affected by, neoliberalism. Politically, neoliberal reforms were encouraged and often forced on countries removed from the centres of global power. This occurred both in peripheral developing economies, as in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America through the mechanism of structural adjustment programmes, and in more affluent New World economies, such as Australia and New Zealand. The result was change that was usually more severe and deep-seated than elsewhere. Such extremes of neoliberal policy continue to the present, as in the stringent conditions forced upon latecomers to WTO accession. Political change has been followed by economic perturbations through neoliberalism. Opened to the global economy, resource peripheries have faced both enhanced opportunities for trade and growth, as during the commodity boom of the early 2000s, and marked economic contraction when commodity prices fell following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Yet, although peripheries appear to be mere appendages of the global economy and subject to neoliberal pressures beyond their control, there are signs that forms of resistance to neoliberalism, or at least attempts to steer and limit its effects, are evident and growing in peripheral regions. 38. Neoliberal Migrations Maureen Hickey (National University of Singapore) - [email protected] It is difficult to overstate the impact that neoliberalism has hand on human mobility over the past half-century. During this period all forms of migration, but particularly labor migration, have intensified and diversified worldwide; a phenomenon that cross-cuts geographic scales and has led some scholars to declare that we are entering a new age of global migration. This chapter provides a brief critical overview of the relationship between neoliberalism and migration in three key areas. First, it examines the restructuring of global markets and the emergence of the New International Division of Labor (NIDL). Transnational Corporations (TNCs) were able to leverage spatial inequalities, particularly at the international scale, in order to relocate production to take advantage of cheaper labor and less stringent regulations in many countries in Less Developed countries (LDCs). This shift, epitomized by new forms of spatial organization such as Export Process Zones (EPZs), has led to the emergence of new migration trajectories both within and between countries. Second, we explore how successive waves of global economic crises, together with the neoliberal policy responses of international financial institutions and development agencies which have consistently promoted restructuring packages based on fiscal austerity, deregulation and trade liberalization have shaped current international migration streams, most notably the increasing flows of less-skilled labor from the Global South to the Global North. Finally, new forms of enclosure and dispossession under neoliberal regimes, including privitisation, deregulation, intensive resource extraction and environmental degradation (including climate change), have led to new and growing streams of involuntary migration; a trend that is poised to grow in importance in the decades ahead. 39. Neoliberal Re-regulation: The Simultaneous Opening and Hardening of National Territorial Boundaries Joseph Nevins (Vassar College) - [email protected] As many analysts have noted, the age of globalization was supposed to be a time of disappearing territorial boundaries, but, instead, they are proliferating. Indeed, territorial boundary control regimes around the world have become considerably more formidable over the last two decades. Since 1998, for example, boundary walls or fences have arisen in


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almost thirty binational borderlands where they had not previously existed according to geographer Reece Jones. If neoliberalism is, among other things, a regime characterized by the liberalization and de-regulation of national economies and increasing flows of capital and commodities between them, it is also marked by intensifying regulation of immigration and boundary controls. This is particularly true in the borderlands that divide and bring together the relatively rich and poor, privileged and disadvantaged, white and nonwhite. Thus, while the neoliberal era has seen a marked increase in transboundary mobility by the relatively affluent, it has also seen a simultaneous hardening of territorial boundaries for those deemed less than desirable migrants by receiving countries. As geographer David Delaney observes, territories both reflect and produce the social orders to which they are tied. In this regard, the growing filter-like aspect of national territorial boundaries is inextricably tied to the neoliberal era. This chapter explores these matters via a focus on the boundary and immigration control regimes of the United States and the European Union. 40. Home: Object and Technology of Neoliberal Governmentalities Rae Dufty-Jones (University of Western Sydney) - [email protected] For some time housing has been an object of government and governance. It is not surprising therefore that housing is an important focus for analyses of neoliberalisation, particularly the socio-spatial implications of neoliberal policies, programs and processes. Indeed, neoliberalism has become a key explanatory tool when examining the changes to how housing is produced and consumed and the policy settings guiding this economic activity in the twenty-first century. From analyses of privatisation processes of social housing to tracing the antecedents and fall-out of the Global Financial Crisis the connections between neoliberalisation and housing are now well-established. This chapter examines the myriad of links between neoliberalisation and housing. In particularly it seeks to show the way in which housing is not only an object of neoliberal governance but is also an important technology employed in the pursuit of various neoliberal governmentalities. The chapter reviews the neoliberalisation of housing at a variety of scales from the neighbourhood (e.g. master-planned estates, policies of social-mix) to the nation-state (e.g. processes of domicide). The chapter concludes with a reflection on how housing is not just a static tool in neoliberal governing strategies but also key to producing mobile behaviours. 41. Space, Place, and the Cultural Landscapes of Neoliberalism Reuben Rose-Redwood (University of Victoria) and Maral Sotoudehnia (University of Victoria)- [email protected], [email protected] This chapter examines how neoliberal modes of governance are reshaping the spatial imaginaries of place through the refashioning of cultural landscapes into branded and commodified spaces. We begin by providing an overview of key debates associated with the rise of place branding and the performative enactment of place-images as marketing devices within the context of the shift towards entrepreneurial governance regimes. Next, we explore the internal contradictions of neoliberal rationalities that underpin both the marketing of place-images as distinct brands, on the one hand, and the commodification of place-identities, on the other hand. These political-economic practices are often viewed interchangeably yet they can also work at cross-purposes, particularly when the corporate branding of place-identities detracts from efforts to produce a unique place-image or place-brand. We therefore consider how the contradictory strategies of neoliberal place-making


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have opened new terrains within which the value of space and place is contested. The chapter then concludes by highlighting the limits of neoliberal spatial imaginaries as well as the prospects for working towards a politics of place that revalorizes the cultural landscape as a political arena of spatial justice. NATURES AND ENVIRONMENTS 42. Neoliberal Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene Jessica Dempsey (University of Victoria) and Rosemary-Claire Collard - [email protected], [email protected] The project of governing the environment is increasingly complex. How is rule achieved? What actors, processes and dynamics must we account for to understand environmental governance, today? Are the interventions into environments changing under neoliberalism? How? This essay will focus on reviewing neoliberal environmental governance literature in geography to understand the various approaches to the question of governing nature. We pay particular attention to the stakes and effects of neoliberal environmental rule. How are distinctively neoliberal political-economies remaking socioecologies? And what evidence do we have for this? In this analysis, it is important to recall that neoliberal environments diverge and also build from historical liberal, capitalist environments. Thus while there is value to the terminology neoliberalism, our primary interest in this paper is to draw out consistencies and divergences in the project of Western environmental governance and environmentalism. We identify logics of calculation, domination, quantification and accumulation that persist across liberal-neoliberal regimes, logics long involved in the production of socioecologies. Finally, we will link the debates and tensions in the environmental governance literature to discussions around the governing in the so-called Anthropocene. Bold popular and academic claims of the age of humans and the environment is what we make it are resonating in many ways with neoliberalisms instrumentalist and entrepreneurial zeal, and also with the modus operandi of rational, scientific management. Such intersections bear scrutiny by critics of neoliberal natures. 43. Neoliberalisms Climate Larry Lohmann (The Corner House) - [email protected] Popular unrest over climate change is a threat to capital accumulation in that it implicitly challenges the amplified labour exploitation and speedier circulation that became possible in the 19th century through thermodynamic energy and fossil fuels. The cobbled-together official responses to this challenge that have emerged in the past two decades pre-eminently, national and international carbon markets partake of virtually all of the characteristic elements of neoliberalism. They assume that tackling social issues is largely a matter of discovering prices inhering in new commodities developed for the purpose (in this case pollution allowances and offsets). The commodities themselves are treated, via a typically neoliberal fetish, as if they created and produced themselves automatically (or as if they were unproblematic translations of ecological or social goods into a quantifiable and circulatable form), while at the same time the most strenuous and violent efforts are devoted to constructing the institutions needed to define, maintain and defend them through dispossession and exploitation. Given the role of the state in creating demand, guaranteeing


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supply, and underwriting the profits of a galaxy of private-sector partners, contractors, consultants and technocrats who carry out most of the work of producing, circulating, standardizing and regulating the new commodities, conventional dualisms opposing state and market have become of as little use in analyzing climate policy as they are in understanding other areas of neoliberal policy. Not least, the new markets follow the general thrust of neoliberalism in that they help both state and corporate actors evade much of the burden of addressing the social problems that the markets are advertised as cheaply solving, while simultaneously holding out the promise of expanding and deepening opportunities for capital accumulation at a time of deep crisis and sclerosis.

44. Neoliberal Energies: Crisis, Governance, and Hegemony Matt Huber (Syracuse University) - [email protected] The shift to neoliberalism has also correlated with profound shifts in the political economy of energy. This chapter is meant to provide an overview of the different ways to conceptualize the relations between energy and neoliberalism. First, energy is central to the historical emergence of neoliberal hegemony in the 1970s. The energy crisis did not only overlap with wider ideological shifts toward neoliberalism; it reinforced such shifts and provided empirical case studies for wider logics and arguments about the government inefficiency and market distortions (e.g. price controls, OPEC, Big Oil). Second, neoliberal policies were in large part implemented in the field of energy governance. After a wave of resource nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, energy price collapse and neoliberal policy forced many developing nations to implement policies meant to attract foreign energy capital (low taxes/royalty rates, privatization of national oil companies, state security, and accumulation by dispossession of local communities). Third, while neoliberalism is often envisioned as applying to specific empirical slices of policy reality (e.g., environment, housing, energy, or whatever), it is less common to theorize the social and ecological relations of neoliberal hegemony itself. In this regard, everyday lived practices of energy consumption - specifically in relation to the privatization of housing and automobility can be seen as underpinning a variety of populist neoliberal logics (e.g., hostility to taxes). I argue that the geography of life in (often suburban contexts) reinforced what Foucault isolated as the core of the neoliberal project the enterprise form. Thus, we need not only think of the neoliberalism of energy, but also how energy fuels neoliberalism. 45. Water and Neoliberalism Alex Loftus (Kings College) and Jessica Budds (University of East Anglia) - [email protected], [email protected] Water is both a lens through which we might gain a better understanding of the shifts in state-society relations associated with neoliberalism and also an elemental material through which those shifts have been made possible. This chapter will begin by tracing the emergence of neoliberalism back to the Chicago Boys Chilean laboratory, before demonstrating how the development of water markets in the Chilean context were crucial to a range of neoliberal environmental strategies. The second part of the chapter will look in more detail at the intimate relationships established between new forms of water governance, domestic water technologies and shifting subjectivities, understood in relation to water provision. We will argue that the shifting citizen-consumer nexus, so often associated with neoliberal governance strategies, is most clearly exemplified in changing relationships to water established through forms of compulsory metering, privatization and


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financialisation. The household and the body have become central to both the production of the neoliberal subject and the accumulation strategies that seek to displace our most recent financial crisis. The journey embarked on in this chapter will trace the translation of neoliberal water governance strategies from Chile to Europe and South Africa, enabling both South-South and South-North comparative research. 46. The Neoliberalization of Agriculture: Regimes, Resistance, and Resilience Jamey Essex (University of Windsor) - [email protected] Neoliberalism has profoundly altered agricultural practices and systems since the late 1970s. From the production of food and fiber in innumerable diffuse sites around the world to the highly uneven and unequal systems of trade, speculation, and consumption through which the world's population feeds and clothes itself, agriculture has proven a vital but highly contentious arena of neoliberalization. This chapter covers the neoliberalization of agriculture with an emphasis on how neoliberalism has entered into the metabolic relations and processes of agroecological production, and attempted to bend these to the needs of speculative global capital. Of particular focus is the food regime approach to understanding the neoliberalization of global agriculture, as well as the debate this approach has sparked in critical assessments of neoliberalism. The food regime approach stems from regulation theory, and concentrates on global systems and historic shifts in the regulation of capitalism. In doing so, it provides powerful insight into the development of a corporate-dominated and market-oriented neoliberal system of agricultural production, trade, and consumption. Critics contend, however, that it also limits our ability to examine the variegated and often haphazard nature of agroecological adaptation and crisis under neoliberalism, as well as the diverse forms of compromise, resistance, and resilience that have developed among agrarian movements and alternative forms of agriculture. This chapter this highlights this theoretical and practical diversity and the limits of neoliberal agriculture. 47. Sustainability and Neoliberalism Byron Miller (University of Calgary) - [email protected] While neoliberalism might be succinctly defined as market fundamentalism, sustainability is a far more amorphous concept. Definitions of sustainability abound, but most commonly address inter-generational equity, e.g., the Brundtland Reports definition, and a tri-partite notion of what is to be sustained: the natural environment, economic growth, and social equity. Produced in the wake of the economic, environmental, and social crises of late/post-Fordist capitalism, discourses of sustainability have resonated broadly in virtually all sectors of society, with critiques rarely found. While the problems sustainability references are real, the concept provides virtually no road map of the processes and power relations that produced them, perhaps explaining its appeal to widely divergent interest groups. Central to the concept of sustainability is the notion of global biophysical limits that must be respected. These limits, in turn, mean that there must be ways of rationing the consumption of resources and controlling the production of waste. Lacking an analysis of the power relations and dynamics of capitalism, sustainability policies and programs readily fall back upon capitalist market mechanisms as their primary means of limiting consumption and controlling environmental impacts. Markets, indeed, can be an effective means of creating/regulating scarcity while providing new opportunities for capital accumulation. While et. al. (2004) and Gibbs and Krueger (2007) have argued that sustainability fixes


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have become a fundamental component of contemporary capital accumulation strategies. But reliance on market mechanisms gives short shrift to the social dimension of sustainability and fails to address the fundamental question of sustainability for whom? Rising prices and scarcity disproportionately affect those with little purchasing power, leaving the wealthy to continue unsustainable practices. An uncritical reliance on market mechanisms, moreover, implies the rejection of democratic alternatives that would not necessarily favour the most economically privileged. Neoliberal policies have had some success moderating environmental externalities and furthering capital accumulation, while leaving in place the core mechanisms that produce the problems of social, environmental, and economic sustainability. 48. Property, Object and Labour: Commodification in the Bioeconomy Maria Fannin (University of Bristol) - [email protected] This essay reviews scholarship on bodily commodification in light of new technologies in the biosciences. Much of the work analysing late 20th century developments in the life sciences and medicine highlight their increasingly marketised character: the blurring of boundaries between publicly funded and for-profit research, the inducement to scientists to approach their work as entrepreneurs and to patients to approach their healthcare as consumers. These developments are underwritten by the conjunction of market-oriented political economic structures with scientific epistemologies that emphasise the flexible, competitive, and promissory nature of biological processes. This essay revisits theories of commodification in light of these developments, highlighting how new technologies in the biosciences rework notions of objectification, fetishism, and the making of living bodies and body parts into property. It draws on three cases as illustration. The first examines the practices of dispossession that underwrite regimes of intellectual property, most markedly in relation to indigenous populations. The second explores the collection, use, storage and exchange of bodily tissues for research and potential therapy and the increasing scale and scope of biobanking as a key site for the making of new kinds of bodily commodities. Finally, the essay considers recent feminist theorisations of the political economies of reproductive technologies in which the social dynamics of technologically-mediated reproduction complicate conventional critiques of commodification. This work also highlights how the bodys biological processes are put to work in experimental settings, in which what is commodified is access to the body and its 'living labour.' 49. The Global Division of Labour/Nature under Neoliberalism: Extractivism and Productivism Sonja Killoran-McKibbin (York University) and Anna Zalik (York University) and - [email protected], [email protected]

The new millennium has seen an enormous growth in the global reach and intensity of extractive activities. This growth has been associated with intensified geopolitical maneuvering for mineral resource access since 9/11 and, following the 2008 financial crash, a move into commodities over finance as an outlet for accumulated capital. The extensification and intensification of extraction has provoked increasing localized conflicts at sites of industrial activity. Concurrently the organization of extraction globally demonstrates the persistence of divisions between Global North and South as well rapid shifts in the extractive economy associated with both financialization and the rise of the BRICS. The chapter explores two mutually constituted process which manifest how the global division of


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nature is persistent in the organization of economies viewed as relatively productivist and relatively extractivist: 1) the relationship between the organization of productive processes (including labour/nature) in creating more or less amenable extractive environments via more or less sovereigntist regulatory and fiscal structures; and conversely 2) the extent to which typically productive enterprises ranging from agriculture to textiles take on an extractive character under neoliberalism. We argue for greater attention to a specifically extractive form of neoliberalism and for a broader understanding of extraction as it relates to human labour and the environment as co-constituted categories. Indeed, the extractive frontier in many ways embodies practices of neoliberalization as it is a powerful force of commodification of the natural environment and in its enclosure of territory and association with financialization, exemplifies characteristics of what some understand as contemporary accumulation by dispossession. AFTERMATHS 50. The Crisis of Neoliberalism Grard Dumnil (University of Paris West) and Dominique Lvy (Paris School of Economics) - [email protected], [email protected] The new phase in which capitalism entered at the beginning of the 1980s has been the object of various diverging interpretations. The emphasis was, notably, placed on the opposition between governments and markets, or a specific model of accumulation where demand is stimulated by the wealth of the richest fractions of the population. There is obviously a neoliberal ideology and a role played by governments in its establishment, both matching the features of the new social order. Neoliberalism is not, however, a mere ideology of free markets or a new governmental rationality in the Foucaldian sense of the term. In the mid-1990s we gave a class interpretation of neoliberalism as a social order, whose basic feature is the restoration of the power and income of capitalist classes in alliance with the classes of managers. Following the neoliberal (counter)revolution, sharp transformations in the functioning of capitalism were observed, with the new discipline imposed on workers, the new forms of management targeted to the maximizing of stock-market indices, the advance of financial mechanisms (the power of financial institutions), free trade and the free movements of capital (as in globalization), and the corresponding rise of the in

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