Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Neoliberal environmental governance, then, involves the reconfi guration of the
institutional arrangements involved in managing nature and natural resources in
such a way as to favor market-based actors and practices. This commonly involves
the simultaneous rescaling of these institutions, as new actors and organisational
forms are favored over others. As Bakker (2002; 2007) points out, the institutional
realignment towards market principles also necessitates not just transformations in
social relations and material practices, but also in the ways that natural resources
themselves are conceptualised and discursively represented (see also Swyngedouw,
2005). Resources such as water are no longer conceived of as public goods that
individuals have rights to as citizens, but rather as scarce commodities to which
consumers have access via the allocative mechanism of the market.
The application of market principles to resource governance involves a funda-
mental shift towards private sector norms and institutions such as competition,
markets, and effi ciency indicators. The privatisation of (formerly) publicly con-
trolled natural resources represents one such institutional reconfi guration, what
Harvey (2003) terms 'accumulation by dispossession.' Harvey maintains that the
mechanisms Marx (1967[1867]) described in his discussion of primitive accumula-
tion have in recent years been refi ned through labour and social policy reform, trade
agreements, resource privatisation, and economic and political restructuring, all of
which have facilitated renewed rounds of accumulation. Rather than viewing such
processes, with Marx, as the 'original sin of capitalism,' - a one-time, original
enclosure of common property - Harvey views these processes as continual, and
functional to - even necessary for - continued accumulation. While strategies for
accumulation by dispossession have been a standard practice since the advent of
capitalism, they have been facilitated and indeed encouraged by neoliberal restruc-
turing, and attendant multi-scalar, diversifi ed institutional frameworks for environ-
mental regulation (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004).
For instance, Swyngedouw (2005) argues that recent efforts to privatise drinking
water systems represent a common and particularly pernicious form of accumula-
tion by dispossession. Geographical work on these processes has been valuable in
explicating the institutional processes and multi-scalar politics involved in neoliberal
environmental governance. Bakker (2002; 2007) illustrates how the neoliberalisa-
tion of water management occurs along one or both of two axes: privatisation and
commercialisation. Privatisation involves an organisational transfer of ownership
from public to private control, while commercialisation involves an institutional
transformation, as effi ciency measures, market mechanisms, and principles of com-
petition gain primacy in resource management. The complexity and multiplicity of
neoliberal institutional forms is similarly noted by Budds and McGranahan (2003),
who argue that what is commonly referred to (and decried) as water 'privatisation'
in fact involves a variety of institutional and organisational arrangements, lying on
a continuum from state control and non-market, to wholly private and market-
based. These authors highlight the continued necessity of an activist state under
neoliberalism, in establishing, regulating, and participating in markets, an irony that
belies the neoliberal conceit of self-regulating markets.
At its core, environmental governance in a neoliberal era is concerned with the
twin concepts of property and privatisation, and much recent geographical work
has been focused on the contradictions and complexities involved in defi ning prop-
erty and forming markets for resources and environments where none had previ-
ously existed (see, for instance, Mansfi eld, 2004a,b; Robertson, 2004). These are
