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Despite theoretical developments in conceptualising alterity, what counts as 'alternative' in unconventional systems of food provision remains contested. This paper argues that the literature has reached an impasse. I argue that overly 'alternative' readings conceptualise Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as a more embedded form of economic exchange, while neoliberal readings represent them as a case of marketisation. This paper systematically reviews AFNs literature and contends that a deeper engagement with Polanyian geographies enables a more nuanced approach to evaluating alternatives and their socio-political significance. Analytically and normatively, 'alternatives' need not be radically 'other', nor seen as having been co-opted by the neoliberal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the notion of the entrepreneurial city, this paper examines recent scholarship about China's urban governance. Despite prevailing marketisation, the role of the state is visible in neighbourhood, cities and city-regions. The state necessarily deals with a fast changing society and deploys market-like instruments to achieve its development objectives. Through multi-scalar governance, the state involves social and market actors but at the same time maintains strategic intervention capacity. China's contextualised scholarship provides a more nuanced understanding beyond the entrepreneurial city thesis, which is more state-centred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the rise of the behavioural sciences within the design and implementation of public policy, this paper introduces the concept of neuroliberalism and suggests that it could offer a creative context within which to interpret related governmental developments. Understanding neuroliberalism as a system of government that targets the more-than-rational aspects of human behaviour, this paper considers the particular contribution that geographical theories of context and spatial representation can make to a critical analysis of this evolving governmental project [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report takes as its prompt John K. Wright's 1925 'plea for the history of geography' - an early call for an inclusive account of geographical thought and practice, embracing both professional and amateur ways of knowing. In reflecting on the extent to which contemporary histories of geography realize the scope of Wright's ambition, the paper considers how external pressures, such as neoliberalism and academia's audit culture, function to shape and constrain the writing of those histories. The paper argues for the value of 'slow' scholarship as an act of political resistance and as a sine qua non of nuanced and comprehensive historiography. The report concludes by examining how biographical and genealogical approaches to narrating geography's histories have important implications for the decisions made about inclusion and exclusion, about what and who counts in geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims about neoliberalism and its geographies frequently involve assumptions about the affective life of neoliberalism and/or neoliberal societies. However, existing cultural approaches to neoliberalism as a discursive formation, an ideology or governmentality collapse a concern with affect into a focus on the operation of signifying-subjectfying processes that make ‘neoliberal subjects’. Political economy approaches only make implicit claims about the ‘mood’ of neoliberal societies. In this paper, I argue that collective affects are part of the conditions of formation for particular neoliberalisms and therefore understanding the affective life of neoliberalism is critical to explaining how it emerges, forms and changes. Through examples including The Mont Pelerin Society, the Chicago School of Economics and Thatcherism, I propose a vocabulary that supplements existing approaches by focusing on the affective conditions for neoliberalism, specifically the atmospheres that are part of the formation of neoliberal reason and the structures of feeling that condition how particular neoliberalisms actualize in the midst of other things. The result is a way of discerning neoliberalisms as both conditioned by affects and ‘actually existing’ affectively – as dispersed affective ‘qualities’ or ‘senses’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households. In seeking to explain change within contemporary society, financialization has circulated less widely than similar and related concepts such as neoliberalization. While financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields, thereby building critical mass and recognition within social studies of money and finance, we argue that research has been insufficiently attentive to space and place, both in terms of processes and effects. Financialization is a profoundly spatial phenomenon, representing as it does the search for a spatial-temporal fix, or quasi-resolution of the crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization, focusing in particular on the idea of financial ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) serve as a neoliberal performative act, in which idealized conditions are re-constituted by well-resourced and networked epistemic communities with the objective of bringing a distinctly instrumental and utilitarian relationality between humans and nature into existence. We illustrate the performative agency of hegemonic epistemic communities advocating (P)ES imaginaries to differentiate between the cultural construction of an ideal reality, which can and always will fail, and an external reality of actually produced effects. In doing so, we explore human agency to disobey performative acts to craft embodied and life-affirming relationships with nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic geographers have recently taken up the study of markets after a long period of inattention. This growing literature has highlighted the diverse spaces, scales, and fields where markets are present, as well as the ways in which markets vary in form. However, the study of markets in economic geography still exists in tension between neoclassical and Marxist conceptions of markets as predictable and approaches like the social studies of economization/marketization which emphasize their contingency. This paper argues that work of Polyani and Gramsci can provide a way forward for the subfield through conceptualizing markets as sites of social struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geographers, and collaborators in cognate disciplines, have taken the lead in critiquing a wave of optimistic thinking about the relationship between migration and development that has emerged over the past two decades. This paper reviews and synthesizes recent human geographical and related critiques, arguing that they constitute a ‘new migration-and-development pessimism’, the main contentions of which are: (1) that the new optimism is not really new; (2) that it is partially driven by hidden political and economic agendas; and (3) that it is distorted by simplification and exaggeration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographies of food banks have focused predominantly on issues of neoliberal political-economy and food insecurity. In this paper, we trace alternative understandings of food banking – as spaces of care, and as liminal spaces of encounter capable of incubating political and ethical values, practices and subjectivities that challenge neoliberal austerity. Our aim is to develop a conceptual approach to voluntary welfare capable both of holding in tension the ambivalent and contradictory dynamics of care and welfare in the meantime(s), and of underlining some of the more hopeful and progressive possibilities that can arise in and through such spaces of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I build on Paul Cloke's (2002) provocative argument about the necessity of developing an ethical stance in human geography. I do this, however, through an assessment of the implications of a number of changes - in the nature of the labour market in Great Britain, in the assumptions that lie behind welfare provision under New Labour and in the position of women and men in Britain - rather than through an emphasis on the Christian values that infused Cloke's argument. I show how the dominance of an individualistic ethos pervades both the labour market and the welfare state, undermining notions of collective welfare and an ethic of care, within the wider context of the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology in global as well as national politics. If an ethic of care is to be (re)instituted, it will demand wide-reaching changes in the ways in which organizations and institutions operate at a range of spatial scales as well as new sets of responsibilities towards co-workers, member˜5Ê [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of ‘food deserts’, neighborhoods in which healthy food is expensive and/or difficult to find, have received much recent political attention. These studies reflect the popularity of a social ecology in public health, rising concerns over an obesity ‘epidemic’, and the increasing ease of spatial analysis using geographic information systems (GIS). This paper critically examines these areas, arguing that work on food deserts is a spatialized form of neoliberal paternalism that bounds health problems within low-income communities. Alternative analyses of the urban food landscape, based on work in political ecology and critical GIS, may suggest more equitable paths forward. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we critically engage with the notion of a ‘post-neoliberal turn’ in Latin America. The analysis interrogates the existence and characteristics of post-neoliberalism as a mode of regulation, and explores the contributions (and limits) of the concept as a means of theorizing political and economic restructuring. We critically synthesize the literature, articulating commonly cited principles and practices of post-neoliberalism according to different political, ideological, and geographical contexts. To generate productive engagement across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, we draw on perspectives from Latin America and on concepts of ‘variegated neoliberalization’ and ‘counter-neoliberalization’ (thereby abstracting from, rather than about, Latin America). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent times have witnessed a growing belief in urban spaces as ‘assemblages’ produced through interwoven and spatially differentiated forces that converge at particular sites. There is also continuing interest in the nature of neoliberal tendencies and the rise of post-politics and democracy in urban governance. These accounts typically lack attention towards the comprehensive conceptualization of the heterogeneous logics and mechanics of relations and negotiations between actors. This paper seeks to advance these perspectives by exploring the potential contribution of French pragmatism thinking to how social life is produced through practical dialogue between actors through critique, argumentation and justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geoweb represents a profound shift within regimes of the production, dissemination, and institutionalization of geographic information. Going beyond early geographic accounts of the geoweb that engage it as an extension of Web 2.0, this paper situates the emergence of the geoweb within the neoliberal political economic restructuring of the state. Drawing upon evidence of state, market, and citizen practices around Web-based spatial media and geoinformation, I argue that as the state is ‘rolling back’ from public aspects of the cartographic project, market regimes of governance are simultaneously ‘rolling out’, subsuming the mapping enterprise to the imperatives of technoscientific capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent critiques of geographical scholarship on ‘neoliberal natures’. The analysis juxtaposes distinct (and at times divergent) conceptualizations of neoliberalism — as political doctrine, as economic project, as regulatory practice, or as process of governmentalization — and also of nature — as primary commodity, as resource, as ecosystem service, or as socio-natural assemblage. Strategies for developing a more systematic account of the variegation of neoliberal natures are discussed, with the goal of provoking scholars of neoliberal natures to reflect upon their core conceptual and methodological commitments, while contributing to broader debates over neoliberalism and the ‘nature of nature’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although markets are at centre stage in capitalist processes of circulation and exchange, they have rarely been made an object of study. In this paper we distinguish three heterodox approaches. (1) Socioeconomics points out that concrete markets cannot be separated from their social context. Markets are dissolved in social networks and socialized. (2) Political economy investigates how the market model is confused for real markets by market participants. The market is represented as a destructive force. (3) Cultural economists point to the practical self-realization of economic knowledge and argue that the abstract market model is performative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent emergence of global justice networks (GJNs) to counter neoliberal globalization has been an important political and geographical phenomenon. Much has been written about the emergence of a new global civil society, centred upon a new 'network' ontology. In engaging with these debates in this paper, our purpose is to develop a more critical spatial perspective. We argue that issues of space and place are critical in understanding the operation of GJNs and their potential to contribute to an alternative global politics. Spatially, the global linkages of GJNs can be seen as creating cultural and spatial configurations that connect places with each other in opposition to neoliberalism. However, the individual movements that comprise networks, while not necessarily place-restricted, remain heavily territorialized in their struggles. Additionally, networks evolve unevenly over space. Some groups and actors within them are able to develop extensive translocal connections and associations whereas others remain relatively more localized. Potential conflicts arise from such complex geographies, which only become evident through analysing the operation and evolution of different networks. This leads us to focus not solely on the transnational character of networks but also upon how the global is enacted through the localized practices of movements within them, in considering the potential for GJNs to form more sustainable political alternatives to neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Only ideas can overcome ideas', Ludwig von Mises once remarked. Exploring this contention in relation to the long and winding ascendancy of neoliberalism, the paper presents a spatialized genealogy of the free-market ideational programme. From its multiple beginnings, in a series of situated, sympathetic critiques of nineteenth-century laissez-faire, neoliberalism has always been an open-ended, plural and adaptable project. The prehistories of neoliberalism are messy and nonlinear; there was no straight-line evolution from ideas to implementation, from blueprint to ballot box, or philosophy to practice. Rather like the various state projects of neoliberalization that have followed in its wake, the ideational project of neoliberalism was clearly a constructed one. There was nothing spontaneous about neoliberalism; it was speculatively planned, it was opportunistically built and it has been repeatedly reconstructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Harvey's adaptation and redeployment of Marx's notion of 'primitive accumulation' – under the heading of 'accumulation by dispossession' – has reignited interest in the concept among geographers. This adaptation of the concept of primitive accumulation to different contexts than those Marx analyzed raises a variety of theoretical and practical issues. In this paper, I review recent uses and transformations of the notion of primitive accumulation that focus on its persistence within the Global North, addressing especially the political implications that attend different readings of primitive accumulation in the era of neoliberal globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manuel Castells' (1983) groundbreaking investigation of urban social movements traced 'the decisive input of purposive social action' through case studies over five centuries, culminating in the 1960s social revolts in US cities. This paper continues the narrative forward by examining the changing dynamics of community development politics in US cities since 1968. Structural transformations under neoliberalism marked the end of the democratic/redistributive phase of community development, radically altered the material, strategic and institutional terrain of community development politics, and opened a space for new forms of purposive social action aimed at enduring goals of social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A renewal of academic interest in agricultural restructuring in western Europe raises questions about causality, processes and outcomes. In particular, the relationship between deep-set structural tendencies and policy trends and the way these are constituted in relation to, and mediated through, the agency of individual land managers and other actors is emerging as a central research concern of rural social scientists. In this paper we focus on the first part of this equation, arguing that international and European agricultural restructuring needs to be rediscovered as an essentially sociopolitical project, the outcome of a struggle for influence and power between different class fractions of capital during a long and contested transition to a post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Rather than witnessing the shift towards a postproductivist agriculture anticipated by some recent commentators, we argue that the dominant framing is in favour of a neoliberal regime of market productivism, leading to the further integration of large parts of European agriculture into agro-food circuits of capital. While the neoliberal discourse which provides the intellectual justification for this process is heavily contested by advocates of a long standing form of neomercantilism and by a more recently invented discourse of agricultural multifunctionality, the entrenched position of neoliberal ideas and framings within the World Trade Organization (WTO) means that the ideology of the free market is coming to define the terms of international, and thus European, agricultural policy reform. The recent history of reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and wider rural policy reform in the European Union (EU) nevertheless suggests that the European policy stance is one of partial resistance to unfettered liberalization, policy-makers apparently having embarked on an attempt to combine elements of the neoliberal programme with continued commitment to state assistance in various forms. This sets the frame for the regulation of an increasingly bimodal agricultural industry, in which spaces for postproductivism and rural development are being defined and defended in public interest and public good terms but where there are few opportunities to question the enforced segregation and commodification of rural space and environmental provision that this implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among scholars of globalization and neoliberalism, there has been a marked turn away from the national as a relevant scale in today's world, with researchers arguing that the national is being 'rescaled' to local, regional and global scales. This paper argues that we need to move beyond this rescaling argument to recognize that the national still is relevant in contemporary political economy. Seeing the national not as a discrete scale but as a dimension of political economic practice is an alternative analytical approach that treats the national as constitutively implicated in other scaled activities. Distinctions between one scale and another are not so clear. This approach enhances our understanding of contemporary patterns and processes because, instead of focusing on one set of scales or another, analysis can reveal relations among multiple scales. This approach also moves us beyond the historical periodization posited in the rescaling literature. Instead of providing descriptions of contemporary change in which the dominant national is giving way to a messier configuration of global and local scales, the idea of scales-as-dimensions offers a way of analysing scalar relations more generally. This can then be used in both contemporary and historical analysis. The rescaling argument treats the national largely as residual, which serves to draw our attention away from complex scalar practices without offering a truly different way of thinking about scalar relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1990s, a number of governments in the global South have instituted programmes which provide regular cash grants to poor people. The results of cash transfer programmes have impressed those searching for ways to improve welfare: the depth of poverty has been reduced, more children are being educated and vaccinated, and the poor are more likely to get jobs and start enterprises. Advocates of social democracy are hopeful that this heralds the possibility of comprehensive social protection. Experiments in welfare in the global South do not, however, inevitably signal an epochal shift to a postneoliberal era. They form part of an increasingly heterodox approach which combines an enduring emphasis on liberalized economic growth with bolder biopolitical interventions for the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As geographers interested in issues of identity, we need to be concerned with the subject effects of our own positioning in the world. I argue here that we need to be especially cognizant of the impact that neoliberalization has had on our own subjectivities as critical geographers, and how the consequent subject-positions produced in a neoliberalizing geography efface our roles in the reproduction of white supremacy in geography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois's considerable contributions were actively diminished during his life and remain marginal in geography. This is unfortunate for urban geography, particularly its political economy wing, because his empirical and theoretical work offer an illuminating internal critique of modern debates in the field. This review essay attempts to initiate a wider dialogue about the potential value of Du Bois to the influential urban political economy paradigm in geography. Specifically, I adapt and apply Du Boisian definitions of racism to two literatures: the rise of neoliberalism and the significance of gentrification in Black spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to outline a geographical research agenda for studying the marketization of childcare in Western neoliberal contexts. While childcare has been a key site of interrogation for feminist geographers, highlighting the profound inequities of marketized care for many who work in and use childcare, the contours of the childcare market as a situated and constructed economic entity has remained under-examined. I suggest that at a time when more families than ever rely on extra-familial childcare, an appreciation of how childcare markets function is urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a device for cohort building and professionalization, and as a means of interrogating the disciplinary present – but also how it is challenged by neoliberal educational policies, competing priorities in curriculum design, and sub-disciplinary divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racism cannot be treated as a spatially homogeneous phenomenon. This review reports on the merits of a localized approach to anti-racism, and delivers a frank assessment of the challenges faced when developing local responses to racism in a neoliberal era. Under neoliberalism, local actors are responsibilized, and for anti-racism this means action can potentially be closely aligned to local inflexions of racism. But localized responses to racism under neoliberalism are associated with deracialized and depoliticized policies on interethnic community relations. Neoliberal anti-racism promotes competition among local agencies rather than coalition building, and is associated with spatially uneven and non-strategic action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the environmental dimensions of rescaling. Specifically, it explores debates around centralization and decentralization, introduces a key distinction between rescaling to jurisdictional spaces and ecosystem spaces, and suggests three future research trajectories: (1) analytical clarification of the differences between rescaling to natural versus jurisdictional scales; (2) examination of rescaling in light of its attendant process of creating new objects of governance; and (3) investigation of rescaling processes through a temporal lens, with the suggestion that rescaled environmental governance may be the site of some of the first and last manifestations of neoliberal governance reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report is a plea for ‘geographies of marketization’, a perspective that rests on the assumption that a world ‘after markets’ will only emerge on the terrain of ‘markets’ themselves. To sustain this claim we speculate about the role of economics in the breakdown and stabilization of neoliberal marketization. In an attempt to re-establish their discipline at a time of crisis and a loss of faith in information-efficient markets, economists increasingly turn to behavioural economics. Starting with the observation that people do not act as neoclassical theory says they do, behaviouralism allows mainstream economics to keep the core foundational principles intact. With an assemblage of ‘reinforcement learning’ and well-timed ‘nudges’ the choice architects of libertarian paternalism once again try to conform individual behaviour to the assumptions of the neoclassical laboratory. In so doing neoliberalism may have entered a new stage we tentatively call ‘neoliberalism after markets’, an era where radical market orientation has not come to an end but where the belief in the forces of free markets is restabilized by a shift of regulation. Emphasis is moved from the context of regulation/deregulation of markets to regulating human behaviour through ‘technologies of calculation’ that render the self an effect of sociotechnically distributed rational action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Across the world, governments, NGOs, scientists, policy-makers, and resource managers are learning to speak in the language of ecosystem services. It is a concept that seems to belong to what many geographers call neoliberal-style environmental policies. However, the policies and practices around the ecosystem service concept deviate considerably from neoliberal doctrine. Our primary aim is to open up space for informed conversation about ecosystem services in geography by exploring the internal heterogeneity and tensions within the world of ecosystem service policies. In describing these debates on their own terms, we find a diverse and wide-ranging set of actors and viewpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article critically engages with the 'varieties of capitalism' school, which since its origins in the early 1990s has been consolidated into one of the most influential strands in comparative and heterodox political economy. While the 'varieties' approach can be credited with the development of several of the most evocative stylized facts in heterodox political economy, having served as a potent foil against the orthodox globalization thesis, its alternative vision of a bipolar global economy comprising two competing capitalisms is found to be wanting. The approach is limited by its methodological nationalism, a tendency towards static analysis and latent institutional functionalism, and by an inability to adequately balance national specifi city and path-dependency on the one hand with common underlying tendencies in capitalist restructuring on the other. Nevertheless, the varieties approach has spawned an influential account of the spatiality of advanced capitalism from which economic geography can certainly learn, and to which it has much to contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between globalization and governance in the U.S. The author specifically explores the political geographies of control and neoliberalism that form the relationship. Neoliberalism has become an increasingly umbrella term for the diverse ideologies, policies and practices associated with liberalizing global markets. In geography, there has been widespread attention paid to the spaces of neoliberalism, the scales of neoliberalism, the urban regimes of neoliberalism, the natures of neoliberalism and the governmentalities of neoliberalism. The work that has mapped the political geography of neoliberalization at and across a whole variety of scales is highlighted.