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This paper rethinks the relationships between capitalist development in indigenous places and the fabric of local differences and specificities. It first develops a critical appraisal of the celebration of ethnic identities, local agency and indigenous knowledge in existing literatures. It suggests that, based on such insights, we can further envision the possibility of questioning and problematising the ontology and concept of the capitalist economy. Above all, this paper is interested in non‐capitalist factors percolating into capitalist economies and creating fissures in their logical and ontological coherence. It examines how capitalist economies depend on local specificities to achieve particular configurations. We elucidate this argument with a case study of indigenous development in Lugu Lake, Southwest China, which is inhabited by the ethnic Mosuo people. Through the dual lenses of land and labour, we pay special attention to the transition from grassroots development initiatives to heavy dependence on exogenous capital and entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years ago, Bob Jessop (1998) published a defining piece on the "rise of governance" and the "risks of failure", using the example of economic development to frame concerns with the state of capitalism at that time. This charted the rise of governance, outlined key governance practices, and offered preliminary reflections on the nature, forms, and logic of governance failure ‒ given that whilst there are already extensive literatures on market failure and state failure, governance failure required focused concern and thematic analysis. This paper, 20 years post‐Jessop on governance rise and risks, tells the tale of how governance in Britain (and England specifically) has marched on and, building on Jessop, has indeed failed, repeatedly and spectacularly. The paper reveals Jessop's governance dilemmas in action and specifically how the contradictions and crises tendencies of capitalism have both necessitated the use of, and been played out in and through, geographical space. The paper reveals an economic governance landscape of unresolved crises and contradictions, which is linked to problems of state rationality and legitimation, exhibited by the Brexit debacle in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post‐development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post‐development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it remains the most popular critical approach to development and is reemerging in decolonial and pluriversal guises. This paper contends that the post‐development critique of mainstream development has run its course and deserves a fresh round of criticism. We argue that those committed to struggles for social justice must critically reassess the premises of post‐development and especially wrestle with the problem of representation. We contend that Gayatri Spivak's work is particularly important to this project. We review some of Spivak's key texts on capitalism, difference, and development to clarify the virtues of her approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Contract farming (CF) has generally been understood as, essentially, a market institution—by both (approving) “mainstream” and (critical) “radical” perspectives. Analyses of relations of production have, meanwhile, tended towards a problematic “peasantist” frame, where contracts undermine farmer “autonomy” in processes of “flexible” corporate agro‐industrial restructuring. This paper argues that a materialist analysis of CF from within capital–labour relations offers a stronger conceptual foundation for re‐synthesizing questions of market‐power. It first argues that radical notions of “peasant subsumation” conceptually mirror Marx's “formal subsumption of capital” but underplay dynamics of “real subsumption” accompanying capitalism's wider development. Drawing on the “petty commodity production” concept, it then argues that CF's “flexibility” rests in its differential content. CF's fungibility to contradictory movements of “integration” and “dispersion” enables it to emphasize different methods of surplus appropriation under shifting conditions; each corresponding to a different dominant social tendency. On the one hand, conditions of market expansion inspire integration for relative surplus appropriation through raised productivity, and CF tends to act as a “tool of proletarianization” in the wider centralization of capital. On the other, conditions of contraction motivate the dispersal of unvalorized capital, prompting efforts to raise absolute surplus appropriation, and CF tends to act as a “tool of differentiation” to concentrate agricultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Korea, once a representative East Asian developmental state, has state characteristics that amount to 'neoliberal developmentalism', which is a combination of the government's neoliberal political rationality and the developmental state's governmentality. To elucidate this, the case of Korea's recent green growth policymaking process is analysed. The government based the policy on its neoliberal political rationality. This featured the utilisation of neoliberalism to achieve the government's specific aims in the international, political and socio-economic spheres. Furthermore, the government revealed the developmental state's governmentality, focusing on the maintenance of the developmental state's policy autonomy and capacity. Based on the findings, this paper teases out the academic implications of the post-developmental state and the policy implications regarding policymaking in the context of neoliberal developmentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed that there is no alternative to capitalism. Over the last two decades however, the critical geography literature on diverse economies has demonstrated the existence of alternatives to capitalism by revealing the persistence of non-capitalist forms of work and organisation. The aim in this paper is to question the validity and usefulness of continuing to frame these non-capitalist practices as 'alternatives'. Positioning non-capitalist economic practices as 'alternatives' fails to capture not only the ubiquity of such practices in everyday life, but also how those engaging in them do not see them as 'alternatives' in the sense of a second choice, or less desirable option, to capitalist practices. The intention in doing so is to reveal that it is not non-capitalist practices that are 'alternative' but rather, capitalist practices themselves, thus opening up the future to the possibility of a non-capitalist world more fully than has so far been the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a synthesis of the empirical scholarship on England and Germany, this paper demonstrates that in both regions, rural socio-economic developments from c.1200 to c.1800 are similar: this period witnesses the rise to numerical predominance and growing economic significance of the 'sub-peasant classes', which had a growing impact on the market as a result of their increasing market dependence, and from which - towards the end of the period - a rural proletariat emerged. Against the influential theory of Robert Brenner, it is argued that the period c.1200- c.1400 cannot really be categorized as 'feudal' according to Brenner's definition; and 'agrarian capitalism' does not adequately describe the socio-economic system that obtained by the end of the sixteenth century. A genuine transition to capitalism is only evident from after c.1750, and can be found in Germany as well as in England; it is predicated both on ideological shifts and on the evolution of the rural proletariat, which is only found in large numbers by or after c.1800. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]