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Manchester Papers in Political Economy is the working papers series of the Centre for the Study of Political Economy at the University of Manchester. It aims to provide a forum for preliminary dissemination, discussion and debate of work in progress across the field of political economy, and welcomes submission from scholars both at Manchester and outside. Submissions will be subject to a light-touch refereeing process to ensure their suitability for the series and to maintain quality. All enquiries about the series should be directed to its editor (keir.martin@manchester.ac.uk). Keir Martin October 2007

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Manchester Papers in Political Economy

Noel Castree Neoliberal environments: a framework for analysis.

Working paper no. 04/07

10 December 2007

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Neoliberal environments: a framework for analysis

Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University, Manchester, England, M13 9PL noel.castree@man.ac.uk

Abstract: Our understanding of ‘neoliberal environments’ is currently incomplete, theoretically and

empirically. On the one side, there exist many incisive studies of neoliberalism which examine now-familiar

topics like trade policy, employment policy and macro-economic policy – but which do so with little or no

reference to the implications of all these for the governance of the non-human world. On the other side, there

is an emerging body of empirical work focussing on precisely these biophysical issues, but which is topically

diverse and currently quite piecemeal. What is required is an understanding of ‘neoliberal environments’ in

both senses of the term: that is, the ambient policy environment (which goes beyond environmental policy

simpliciter) as it influences, and is influenced by, the fortunes of the non-human world. This essay works

towards such a holistic understanding at the theoretical level, in the hope that this can, in due course, yield

empirical insights through application and further development. The theory proposed is Marxian-Polanyian in

character, and of potentially wide relevance to critics of actually-existing neoliberalism. By synthesising

existing conceptual insights it is, the author hopes, more than the sum of its parts.

Keywords: neoliberalism; neoliberalisation; nature; meta-theory; holism; political economy; Marxism; Karl

Polanyi

I. Introduction

This essay has a simple objective, the realisation of which is by no means straightforward. I want

to provide a framework for analysing – in a comprehensive and hopefully robust manner – the

multifaceted relationships between neoliberalism and the biophysical world. The term

‘neoliberal environments’ thus has a double meaning here: it refers to the connections I intend to

explore between a profound shift in the intellectual and policy milieu worldwide this last 30

years or so, and the fortunes of the non-human realm. These connections go way beyond so-

called ‘free market environmentalism’ and its bed-fellows – that is, the use of economic

instruments to internalise diverse ecological ‘externalities’ or otherwise uncosted ecological

services. As with any political economic regime, the environmental aspects of neoliberalism

cannot be confined to an analysis of ‘environmental policy’ simpliciter (however expansively

defined). I will suggest a way of examining neoliberal environments that makes good use of

Marxian political economy, leavened by the insights of Karl Polanyi. My cognitive and

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normative stance on neoliberalism will, therefore, be a critical one (though not, I hope,

dogmatic) – placing me in the company of numerous analysts on the Left dismayed by what

Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001: 2) have memorably termed “the new planetary vulgate”.

Why is a Marxian-cum-Polanyian framework for the analysis of ‘neoliberal

environments’ worth constructing? Why, more generally, is it timely to fabricate an overarching

theory of how neoliberal political economy intersects with the biophysical world? I pose these

questions because it may seem to some readers that this essay will cover some already well-

trodden ground. Firstly, in the relatively brief period during which the term ‘neoliberalism’ has

become common currency in the social sciences, critical analyses of the political economic

regime so described have proliferated. Many of these critiques have drawn heavily on the rich

resources of the Marxian tradition, as well as a rediscovered and recuperated Polanyi – especially

his analysis of ‘classical liberalism’, The Great Transformation (1944). Secondly, notwithstanding

the critics’ preoccupation with hoary political economic issues like trade, employment and

welfare provision, a significant literature on neoliberalism’s environmental dimensions has also

emerged of late. This is well exemplified by a new edited collection from which I borrow my

essay title (Heynen et al., 2007a). This excellent book contains sixteen detailed empirical studies

of ‘neoliberal environments’ interlaced with commissioned commentaries and sandwiched

between authoritative editors’ contributions. Taken together the studies focus on the ‘first’,

‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds, examine a wide range of biophysical phenomena, and cover a broad

spectrum of interconnected actors (including business, workers, the state, quasi-state bodies, civil

societies, NGOs, NSMs and various weakly institutionalised protest groups).

The existence of a large critical literature on neoliberalism – much of it Marxian and

Polanyian in character and including several studies of its connections to the biophysical world –

may, then, appear to render pointless the present essay. But I want to argue otherwise. Our

current understanding of neoliberal environments – in both senses of that term – seems to me to

be far from complete and in an important respect bifurcated. On the one side, we have a set of

overarching accounts of neoliberalism and a larger number of sub-topical ones (focussing on

workfare, trade relations, financial deregulation and so on). What these studies, taken as a whole,

present us with is a thorough understanding of neoliberal environments in the first sense of this

term: that is, the political economic ‘common sense’ prevailing in many parts of the world

today. But few, if any, of these studies focus squarely on the biophysical dimensions of

neoliberalised societies, economies and polities. A representative example is Robert Pollin’s

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(2005) Contours of dissent. Pollin’s fine book connects the US political economy since the Nixon

administration with the drawn-out turn to neoliberalism transnationally up to the present

moment – but it deliberately and apologetically brackets-out environmental questions.

By contrast, and on the other side, we have many detailed studies of the non-human

world’s neoliberalisation this last thirty years in its diverse forms and locations. These studies

offer us important insights into neoliberalism’s environmental record, as well as the attendant

social costs and responses. However, because these studies are so topically and geographically

diverse – a heterogeneity ranging from deer farming in Montana and wetland banking in Illinois

to water privatisation in Cape Town, shrimp farming in Indonesia and the landless peoples’

movement in Brazil – it is no mean feat to parse them.1 When, by contrast, one encounters

synoptic assessments of our environmental predicament – like Jonathan Porritt’s (2006)

Capitalism as if the world matters – ‘neoliberalism’ is rarely thematised.2

What is currently lacking, in my view, is an approach to ‘neoliberal environments’ that

explores the connective imperative between both senses of this term. We would, therefore,

benefit from having an analytical framework as encompassing as neoliberalism aspires to be: that

is, one able to make sense of diverse instances of environmental use, conflict and change by

situating them in a comprehensive account of new liberalism’s many putatively ‘non-

environmental’ dimensions. Put simply, if we want to properly understand the dynamics of

neoliberal environments in a biophysical sense (and with the attendant social effects), we have to

understand the total intellectual and policy environment in which they unfold – one, as I have

said, that goes way beyond the formal application of neoliberal ideas to the non-human world a

la ‘free market environmentalism’.3

If all this sounds like an argument for ‘meta-theory’ that’s because it is. Within critical

social science meta-theory gained a pretty bad reputation during the late 1980s and through the

1Their collective focus on ‘neoliberalism’ and their common use of this word does not, in itself, help readers of these studies to identify the casual connections and substantive similarities between the diverse cases (or so I will argue). An effort of intellectual labour is required to detect the proverbial signals in all the noise. 2An even better example than Porritt’s best-selling book is Steven Bernstein’s (2000; 2002) writings on what he calls ‘liberal environmentalism’. Bernstein’s is a ‘global’ analysis, but only in the sense that he examines global environmental accords, statements and meetings. Not only does he not strongly thematise the ‘liberal’ in liberal environmentalism. He also ignores local, regional and national neoliberalisations of nature for the most part. Finally, he also puts to one side putatively ‘non-environmental’ organisations and accords like TRIPS – even though these are manifestly a part of his category of ‘liberal environmentalism’. 3To put all this in metaphorical terms, we already have many pieces of the intellectual jigsaw but have so far failed to connect them together in a way that represents the totality of relationships, tendencies and socio-ecological effects specific to a neoliberal political economy. Our understanding of neoliberal environments, in my sense of this term, is currently rather fragmented when it need not be – hence the rationale for the present essay.

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1990s. I have no intention of revisiting the often acrimonious debates between meta-theory’s

devotees and detractors – debates that laid bare the differences between ‘modern’ intellectual

worldviews and a range of ‘post-prefixed’ approaches whose impact was such that, for a time at

least, they defined the academic zeitgeist. However, in the first main section I will mount a

defence of a certain kind of meta-theory so that the rather grand ambitions of this essay are not

misinterpreted as throwback to the past – that is, as characteristically ‘modern’ over ambitions.

This defence will also involve me saying more about the already mentioned divide within the

now large critical literature on ‘neoliberal environments’. Section two builds on the scene-setting

and justificatory work of section one. In it I offer some programmatic observations about the

general characteristics of ‘neoliberalism’ and how they might be analysed given that, in the real

world, these ‘general’ features are anything but consistent and universal – Bourdieu and

Wacquant’s plenary observation notwithstanding.

From section three onwards – having defined and defended my terms and objectives – I

consider ‘environmental’ matters in both the biophysical and metaphorical senses of the word.

So unfolds my substantive Marxian-Polanyian argument about how to make sense – in a

synoptic way – of neoliberal environments. This argument begins with a general, ideal-typical

account of capitalism-nature relations. I then consider the ways that nature ‘matters’ to a range

of parties involved in the drama of capital accumulation, leading to a first-cut theory of

neoliberal environments. In section four I then outline a second-cut theory that can, I hope,

serve as an aide to the concrete understanding of nature’s neoliberalisation. Clearly, given the

essay’s ambitions, the account I provide can only be a beginning: a sketch rather than a detailed

theoretical picture. I offer it as an invitation for debate and a lure for others to do what I have

not the space to do here in more than elementary terms. Even so, the argument will necessarily

be quite protracted and some considerable patience will be required to stay the course. To aid

readability, I have chosen not to litter the text with copious references (hence the fairly short

bibliography). However, I want to acknowledge at the outset my indebtedness to several years’

engagement with Marxisant research into environmental issues.4

II. Understanding neoliberal environments: what kind of theory for what sort

of analysis?

4This engagement has produced a string of prior publications, including: xxxxxxx

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Connecting the ‘nature of neoliberalisation’ with the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’: the need for a

holistic framework

There is, I have asserted, an asymmetry and a patchy connection between critical literature

focussing on the ‘nature of neoliberalisation’ and that examining the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’

(to borrow Heynen et al.’s heuristically useful wordplay, ibid. 9). Let me now evidence and flesh-

out this assertion, before saying something about how to theorise neoliberal environments in a

joined-up fashion.

‘Neoliberalism’ has, of course, fast become a keyword in the lexicon of critical social

scientists – be they members of the ‘social left’ (e.g. many heterodox economists), the ‘cultural

left’ (e.g. many working in a field like cultural studies) or the ‘environmental left’ (e.g. those

philosophers who adumbrate principles of environmental justice). Defined simply, it describes a

transition in the political and moral economy of many present day societies towards ‘market

rule’: that is, the subjection of more-and-more areas of social and environmental life to the logics

of capital accumulation.5 Neo-liberalism is ‘neo’ because of its historical filiations with the long

era of ‘liberal capitalism’ centred on Western Europe and North America which ended in the

catastrophe of the second world war. In cognitive and normative terms, critics have used a range

of analytical templates to make sense of neoliberalism: feminist, ecocentric, Marxian,

Foucauldian, institutionalist and several others besides. For these critics, it is clear that the

‘neoliberalism’ in question is, in many or most cases, connected or synonymous with some other

well-known and closely related phenomena that have defined local and global realities this last 30

years – such as ‘globalization’, the ‘new imperialism’, ‘structural adjustment’ and ‘the

Washington consensus’. Equally clearly, inspection of their work shows that these analysts have

together examined the whole panoply of neoliberal ideas, policies and outcomes. These include

everything from financial deregulation, ‘free’ trade, and patterns of foreign direct investment to

new employment relations, the erosion of public services, and new geographies of commodity

production.

In sum, the critical literature on neoliberalism deploys a plurality of diagnostic-normative

frameworks, is voluminous, and – when considered as a whole – encompasses the totality of

5Throughout this essay when I use the term ‘the market’ I always do so on the basis that we are talking about money-mediated commodity transactions that are governed by the three main logics of capital accumulation: namely, the quest for profit, the search for competitive advantage by producers which, in turn, leads to the endless search for all sorts of socio-technical and institutional innovations within and surrounding commodity production. I will say more about all this in the section on Marx later in the essay.

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neoliberal precepts, policies and practices. However, intellectually rich though it is, this

literature is hardly problem-free when seen in the context of this essay’s major objective. First,

while issues of biophysical resources and environments have received a good deal of critical

attention – especially (though not only6) in the form of analyses of free market

environmentalism in its several permutations – in relative terms these issues have been under-

examined. I can illustrate this in two ways. First, if one looks at existing global assessments of

neoliberalism such as Pollin’s already mentioned book, David Harvey’s (2005) A brief history of

neoliberalism or Andrew Glyn’s (2006) Capitalism unleashed, they pay scant attention to

questions like climate change, water resource management, biodiversity loss and other

consequential biophysical issues. Instead, classic political economic topics like employment,

welfare provision and trade are the major focus. Second, if one goes beyond these macro-analyses

to consider all the other critical literature on neoliberalism (in the form of more specialised

books, journal papers, chapters and working papers) it is also disproportionately devoted to

issues other than environmental ones. For instance, a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge at the

time of writing reveals over 500 peer review publications containing the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a

title- or keyword. However, a search using additional terms such as agriculture, farming,

fisheries, forestry, water resources, mining and so on reveals that only about one fifth of these

writings focus on the relationship to the non-human world in some way, shape or form. A

similar result was found using some of the related search terms mentioned above – like structural

adjustment – and others such as ‘the market’ and laissez faire.

Added to this asymmetry of focus within the literature is a relatively patchy connection

between its ‘non-environmental’ and ‘environmental’ components. The critical literature on ‘the

neoliberalisation of nature’ – as showcased in Heynen et al.’s new book – is relatively small. It

has three signature characteristics that explain what I mean by the word ‘patchy’ (and here I am

inevitably glossing a rather diverse body of work that spans several disciplines and theoretical

outlooks). First, given the range of biophysical phenomena any political economic regime

inevitably impinges on (neoliberal or otherwise) it is no surprise to discover that the literature is

topically diverse. Second, and relatedly, this literature goes beyond an assessment of formal

attempts to protect ecosystems, resources and the like by using economic instruments. This is

6I am thinking here of the related arguments made under the banner of ‘ecological modernisation’ and ‘industrial ecology’. In both cases, and is with free market environmentalism, the operative philosophy is that a combination of economic sticks and carrots can produce technical, behavioural and institutional change leading to a capitalist form of ‘sustainable development’.

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important because, as I’ve already intimated, the neoliberalisation of nature need not (and

certainly does not) begin-and-end with attempts to make modern markets ‘eco-friendly’.7

Thirdly, this literature is very ‘grounded’, by which I mean it is highly empirical (though not

empiricist) with a predominantly local or regional focus. All three characteristics are very

evident in Neoliberal environments (2007), whose contents the editors describe as “a collection of

… rigorous, theoretically informed case studies” (Heynen et al. 2007b: 2).

Seen from one perspective these characteristics are undoubted strengths. The studies

assembled by Heynen et al. – and others not mentioned here – show us how the neoliberalisation

of nature in its diverse forms plays-out on the ground. This means that we on the Left have an

evidence-base that can get us beyond lazy polemics about neoliberalism’s actual (and likely

future) environmental record, with its associated winners and losers. However, the topical

diversity and groundedness of the literature means that comparing and relating its component

parts is by no means easy. As I noted above, there is (pace Pollin, Harvey and Glyn) currently no

grand analysis of neoliberalism that systematically incorporates the biophysical preconditions

and impacts of this political economic regime using appropriate concepts and data sources.

Symptomatically, specialised studies like those in Heynen et al.’s book rarely stray beyond the

immediate context of the case in question (water policy, agrarian policy, pollution policy etc. in

a particular location) – or if they do the larger ‘neoliberal environment’ is typically explored in a

brief, generic or selective way (see Castree, 2005).

In short, we currently lack a holistic framework for analysing ‘the neoliberalisation of

nature’ at any spatio-temporal scale (local or otherwise). As I said, this makes it quite difficult for

readers of specific studies to compare between or connect cases because these cases, even where

topically similar (e.g. two studies of water resource privatisation in two different ‘third world’

cities) and substantively related (e.g. by WTO rules or IMF loan conditions), are rarely analysed

with the same precise objective in mind. In some cases forms of resistance to neoliberal

environmental governance are the focus, in others new property rights regimes, and in still

others the environmental impacts of resource privatisation (to name but three foci). These and

other things are all, of course, key aspects of society-environment relations within neoliberalising

places, regions and countries. However, unless we have a way of bringing existing (and future)

studies together within a common frame of analysis we not only fail to respect the complex unity

7I am referring here to everything from ‘ecotourism’ to debt-for-nature swaps to carbon-offsets to polluter-pays/emissions capping policies.

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of actually-existing neoliberalism (of which more in the next section); we also, as a corollary,

have a fragmented sense of neoliberalism’s environmental record – by which I mean both the

biophysical impacts of this regime and the associated social impacts.

If a synthetic understanding of ‘neoliberal environments’ (in the double sense of the

term) can be achieved then a number of prospective benefits will follow. First, we will have a

more accurate sense of how and with what effects (actual and potential) human relations to

nature have been neoliberalised since the early-to-late 1970s. Second, future studies of nature’s

neoliberalisation can be situated within an intellectual framework that extends beyond the

specifics of the study in question, immediately increasing the potential significance of the

findings for a wider research programme into the biophysical impacts of market rule. But how

can such a framework be crafted?

One answer is to carefully work-over the sorts of studies assembled in Neoliberal

environments with a view to making connections that the authors of these studies did not make

when undertaking their own research. A second answer is more theoretical and less bottom-up:

to work ‘out and down’ from a conceptual representation of neoliberalism and to systematically

unfold an argument about the range of points – complex and contradictory, to be sure – where it

entrains the biophysical world and a whole set of social actors implicated in this entrainment,

directly and otherwise. Finally, one can draw upon the sort of macro-analyses presented by the

likes of Pollin, Harvey and Glyn and use their inquiries into actually-existing neoliberal

environments to deduce or infer the ramified connections that these policy environments have to

material environments (drawing upon various secondary data sets about environmental and

resource trends). At some point all three of these tactics ought to converge and mutually inform

one another in a spiral of learning. However, I will pursue the second tactic here for the simple

reason that few, if any, others have done so before me.

A ‘meta-theory’ of neoliberal environments?

To some readers, the comments contained in the previous paragraph may have set-off alarm

bells. They may sound uncomfortably close to the desire for a grand recits of the sort Jean-

Francois Lyotard (1979) famously decried in his book The postmodern condition. But that is not

my intention. I do not believe there is a single, definitive framework capable of analysing

neoliberalism or any other complex, multiscalar social or environmental phenomena. I do,

however, believe that a certain kind (or ‘style’) of ‘meta-theory’ retains cognitive and normative

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value – and that such a theory is, in fact, broadly consistent with the insights of several post-

prefixed approaches typically seen as hostile to it. Let me explain, drawing upon the work of a

determined defender of meta-theory’s enduring relevance, the already mentioned David Harvey.

Harvey is, of course, a Marxist – one whose work is for the most part grounded in a

direct reading of the late Marx rather than readings provided by any of Marx’s numerous

interpreters. He has been a consistent champion of the theoretical endeavour since Social Justice

and the City (1973) and, by his own admission (Harvey, 2002: 161), his favourite book is also his

most uncompromisingly conceptual: namely, The Limits to Capital (1982, reissued in 2006). In

that book Harvey describes the aim of theory thus: “…to create frameworks for understanding,

an elaborated conceptual apparatus, with which to grasp the most significant relationships at

work within the intricate dynamics of social [and environmental] transformation” (1982: 450-1).

In other words, for Harvey theory exists to help us substitute a complexity we do not

understand with one that we do. Harvey’s use of theory so defined – in both his conceptual and

more empirical works – has, as I’ve argued elsewhere (Castree 2006), yielded three advantages for

him and his readers. First, it has enabled them to see the proverbial wood for the trees: “the most

significant relationships at work” (or at least some of them). Second, it has made visible invisible

(and often large-scale) forces that in significant measure govern the historical geographies of

ordinary people and places (and indeed elites, who collectively seek to orchestrate these forces).

Thirdly, and relatedly, it has shown how ‘general’ processes operate in, on and through all sorts

of socio-spatial ‘differences’.

However, this trio of functions can be (and has been) easily misconstrued. In his most

famous and audacious book – The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) – Harvey confronted the

critique of a certain kind of theory by using that self-same theory to explain (and undercut) the

critique (something fellow Marxists Fredric Jameson [1990] and Alex Callinicos [1989] did

around the same time). That ‘certain kind’ was the meta-theory that Lyotard decried, along with

numerous critics writing subsequent to his landmark book of 1979. For them, meta-theory was

cognitively and normatively exorbitant: that is, too confident in the completeness and authority

of its knowledge-claims, be they Marxist or otherwise. Unfortunately, in the debates following

the publication of The Condition positions became polarised, with Harvey seen by his detractors

as just the sort of ‘modern’ intellectual many wanted so desperately to be ‘post’ (see, for instance,

Deutsche [1991] and Jones [1999]).

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Theory of the sort that Harvey has consistently produced and advocated for over 30

years is indeed ‘meta’ – that much his critics got right, and his admirers would certainly concede

the point. However, in my view such theory is not intended to serve as some sort of ‘total

explanation’ of the world – a master-frame to trump all others. So in what sense, it might be

asked, is it still meta-theory rather than what one commentator – influenced by the several

‘posts’ – has called “theory in a minor key” (Katz, 2006: 490)? There are a couple of points to

make here. First, Harvey has long made the un-controversial observation that we live in an

interdependent world structured by transnational forces. A theory of these forces is ‘meta’ in the

simple sense that it has global relevance geographically: it is not simply or only a ‘local theory’

whose claims relate to only one specific context (except insofar as it has been created by

individuals like Harvey who are inevitably educated and socialised in one or other place on the

earth’s surface). Secondly, the sort of theorising Harvey has long undertaken is also ‘meta’ in the

sense that it is interested in a combination of processes, relations, actors and events. It is, at least

in aspiration, holistic rather than narrowly specialised in its outlook because the world is seen to

be connected in some broadly consistent (rather than entirely random) ways. Note that in this

second sense meta-theory need not necessarily be global in its epistemic ambitions (meta in the

first sense): it would be perfectly possible to develop and use meta-theory to investigate the

weave of forces in a particular locality or region without reference to much else beyond – unless,

of course, the salient forces were transnational ones.

In a recent essay entitled ‘Towards a theory of uneven geographical development’,

Harvey (2005b) has explained things thus:

If theory is construed as a clean logical structure specified in direct propositional terms with law-

like statements neatly derived from fundamental abstract categories then the materials I assemble

here would be incapable of theorization. But I have a somewhat looser conception of theory in

mind: one that acknowledges the power and importance of certain processes that are specifiable

independently of one another but which can and must be brought together in a dynamic field of

interaction (pp. 60-61, emphasis added).

What we have here is a willingness to undertake ‘grand analysis’ and in a reasonably ‘muscular’

way too (“certain processes that are specifiable independently of one another but which can and

must be brought together in a dynamic field of interaction”). However, there is a clear

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recognition that theory, as Harvey long ago put it in The Limits, “cannot … hope to explain

everything there is” (1982: 450) – not least because most theorists (like Harvey himself) ‘cut’ into

the world’s complexity from one or other vantage point (in his case a Marxist one). Some

vantage points may be especially perspicuous (as Harvey believes Marxism still to be). But alone

– and even together – they cannot account for all the tides and eddies of social and

environmental life. Theory is whatever stripe is not created for this purpose and its epistemic

claims can never be entirely coincident with their ontological objects.

What I take from Harvey’s work, then, is an understanding of meta-theory’s nature and

value not inconsistent with the need – at once analytical and political – to respect the

complexity, dynamism and unpredictability of the world. The aspiration to theorise global

processes and in a way that searches-out the connections between apparently different

phenomena does not, in my view, amount to ‘meta-theory’ in the pejorative sense of that term.

Like Harvey, in this essay I seek to be meta-theoretical in a defensible and (hopefully) useful way

– a way that respects what Louis Althusser, after Freud, famously called ‘over-determination’,

while still insisting that the apparent ‘messiness’ of the world is not quite as befuddling as it may

seem. Further to this argument let me now offer some programmatic comments on the nature of

neoliberalism.

III. From neoliberalism to neoliberalisation

What is ‘neoliberalism’?

As I said earlier, defined in simple terms neoliberalism is a project to expand the scope of the

market – and I am, of course, referring to the sort of market where commodities are exchanged

using money (and where money itself is a commodity), rather than any of the other market-

forms existent past or present. The term ‘neoliberal’ is rarely used by neoliberals themselves.

Instead, it has entered the discourse of Left academics, intellectuals and activists where it

functions as something of a shibboleth: whatever our other differences, we on the Left know we

are somehow ‘against’ it. As such, neoliberalism has displaced some of the other key terms the

Left recently used to describe our contemporary situation – notably ‘globalization’, which was

surely the buzz-word of 1990s social science.8

8This raises the perennial question of where social scientific concepts come from: are they designed to capture real-world developments or do they, despite appearances, say more about the values and aspirations of the academics who deploy them?

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Currently, two critical approaches to understanding neoliberalism stand-out from all

others. There is a significant political economic literature about neoliberalism in which (as the

books by Pollin, Harvey and Glyn show) Marxist, neo-Marxist and post-Marxist accounts loom

large.9 There is also a large Foucauldian literature which – as the work of Nikolas Rose

demonstrates – focuses on neoliberal ‘governmentality’ (see, for instance, Economy and Society

[1993]). As will by now be abundantly clear, I wish to focus on the former literature – not only

because I regard myself as a political economist in the Marxian tradition, but also because much

of the current work on ‘the neoliberalisation of nature’ is political economic in character. This

literature typically situates neoliberalism within a wider account of the dynamics of capital

accumulation. For this reason, it regards the word ‘liberal’ in neoliberalism to refer principally

to economic rather than political or social liberty – especially that of capitalists and consumers.

Notwithstanding its non-trivial internal diversity, broadly speaking it defines neoliberalism as a

project comprised of the following seven processes (those readers familiar with these may wish to

skip ahead):

• Privatisation (i.e. assigning clear, legally enforceable, private property rights to hitherto

unowned, state owned or communally owned aspects of the social and natural worlds).

• Marketisation (i.e. rendering alienable and exchangeable things that might not previously

have been subject to a market calculus lubricated by monetary transactions within and

between nation states).10

• State roll back or deregulation (i.e. the withdrawal or diminution of state intervention in

certain areas of social and environmental life in order to enable firms and consumers to

exercise ‘freedom of choice’; and the creation of new quasi-state or state-sanctioned actors

to take-on functions that states themselves could otherwise perform in theory or

practice).

• Market-friendly reregulation (i.e. a reconfiguration of the state so as to extend the frontiers

of privatisation and marketisation. Here, then, the state in its various forms becomes

‘market manager’ and less of a ‘provider’ to the citizenry or ‘special interests’ therein: it

intervenes for the economy not, as it were, in it. This entails fiscal discipline, a focus on 9Other examples include Robinson (2006) and Comaroff & Comaroff (2000). 10It’s worth noting that, for many commentators, it is the conjunction of privatisation and marketisation that defines ‘commodification’. Needless to say, in practice both privatisation and marketisation take a number of concrete forms as befits the particular commodities, firms, consumers and other relevant parties in question.

16

supply side investments, entrepreneur- and consumer-friendly tax policies, firm-friendly

labour market policies, and measures to enable ‘free’ movements of money capital and

also other less ‘fluid’ commodities).

• Use of market proxies in the residual state sector (i.e. making remaining state services more

market-like in their operation through the use of measures like internal markets, cost-

recovery and budget-capping).11

• The strong encouragement of ‘flanking mechanisms’ in civil society (i.e. state-led measures to

promote the growth of (i) informal and social economies, and (ii) voluntary, charitable,

non-profit and community groups. Together these are intended to fill the vacuum created

by the absence/diminution of direct state-support in the social and environmental

domains).

• The creation of ‘self-sufficient’ individuals and communities (i.e. the cultivation of an ethic

among persons and communities that emphasises less, and ultimately limited, reliance on

public services for life’s necessities).

This is not the place to explore the roots of neoliberal thinking (the Mont Pelerin society, the

Chicago economics department, the Hayek-Keynes debate etc).12 Nor is it the place to examine

in detail where, how and why neoliberal ideas have become translated into policy and practice

since the early 1970s. Instead, I offer two observations followed by a programmatic comment.

Neoliberalism, as the name suggests, traces a thread of continuity back to the long period

Polanyi interrogated in The Great Transformation and during which Marx wrote Capital.13

However, what makes it ‘new’ is not simply its return after 60 years of ‘managed’ or ‘organized’

capitalism.14 According to some, it is also new in that “it breaks with the fundamental liberal

principle with which it started: mutual recognition of the separate spheres of state and market …

Not only is the state seen as having no goals or modus operandi different from those of market

actors, but it is seen to gain by subordinating its activities as much as possible to such actors”

(Crouch, 2004: 248; see also Gledhill, 2004). This means – as the seven-point definition makes

11In the West, the term ‘new public management’ has become a familiar descriptor for this process, which emphasises value-for-money, budget-capping, cost-recovery and an aversion to deficit spending where possible. 12For more on this see Peck’s (2007) magisterial essay (with its superb bibliography), and Mirowski & Plehwe’s (2008) new book. 13For this reason, and with not a little irony, it is sometimes called ‘advanced liberalism’. 14Sometimes also known as ‘embedded liberalism’ in order to contrast it with the relatively disembedded (classical) liberalism of the long nineteenth century. See Ruggie (1983).

17

clear – that critics see neoliberalism as more than just an expansion of the domain of the market:

in effect, it is an attempted colonisation of other spheres of human existence so that those spheres,

if not successfully internalised, become residualised. What is more, unlike ‘classical’ nineteenth

century liberalism, neoliberalism is also a purposively global project – one not confined, like its

forebear, to just a few key states.

But this use of the singular term ‘it’ leads me to my programmatic comment: ‘neoliberalism’,

as described in the seven points above, exists nowhere as such. This is not at all to deny the

actuality of various neoliberal reforms over the last three decades. All I am suggesting – as others

have done before me (e.g. Larner, 2003; Barnett, 2005; Castree, 2006) – is that if the septet above

represents the ‘neoliberal model’, then this model by definition is never realised in a ‘pure’ form

in the real world or, to put it differently, realised in a uniform way through time and across

geographical space. Jamie Peck (2004: 395) puts it like this: “While neoliberal discourses and

strategies … mobilized in … different settings share certain family resemblances, local [and

national] institutional context clearly (and really) matters in the style, substance, origins and

outcomes of reformist politics.”

I make this point for two reasons. First, the use of the term ‘neoliberalism’ in various

political economic analyses can easily make us forget that analysts are not always examining the

same precise thing – notwithstanding the common signifier. As Wendy Larner (2003: 509) has

argued, we need to recognise “the different variants of neoliberalism, … the hybrid nature of

contemporary policies and programmes, [and] … the multiple and contradictory aspects of

neoliberal spaces, techniques and subjects”. Secondly, the tendency of some on the Left to discuss

neoliberalism in grand and polemical terms can blind us to the issues of path dependency,

contingency and hybridity that Larner emphasises. For instance, Perry Anderson (2000: 17) –

who Michael Watts (2007: 275) describes as “the Left’s great pessimist” – has opined that

“neoliberal … principles rule … undivided across the world […], the most successful ideology in

world history”. To be sure, neoliberal ‘common sense’ has diffused-out from its ‘heartlands’

(notably the US and UK) this last 30 years – under the auspices of the IMF, World Bank and

WTO. But this is not the same as saying it is the only game in town. Aihwa Ong (2006: 14)

expresses it well: “neoliberalism migrates from site to site, interacting with various assemblages

that cannot be analytically reduced to cases of a uniform global condition …”. Aside from being

factually inaccurate, claims like Anderson’s are also politically paralysing. By depicting a

‘neoliberal grand slam’ they suggest that efforts to resist or rework new liberal policies are

18

somehow marginal or doomed to failure. The reality is surely more complex, and the theoretical

and empirical efforts of neoliberalism’s critics ought to be able to make this complexity plain and

explore its consequences for understanding and action (Gamble, 2001).

In short, we need to approach neoliberalism in a way that “makes meaningful part-whole

connections between localized and institutionally-specific instances of reform and the wider

discourses, ideologies and practices of neoliberalism. Otherwise the concept of neoliberalism has

little, if any, utility” (Peck, 2004: 396). What Brenner and Theodore (2002: 351) call “actually

existing neoliberalism” (a term I used in passing earlier) is, as Larner and Ong insist, an unevenly

implanted ‘glocal’ regime and to understand it we need to “walk … a line of sorts between

producing …over-generalized accounts of a monolithic and omnipresent neoliberalism … and

excessively concrete and contingent analyses … (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 381-2).

Neoliberalisation and uneven spatio-temporal development

‘Neoliberalism’, I am arguing, is really a set of differentiated yet substantively connected

neoliberalisations in the plural. This suggests, analytically, that we need to focus on combined

and uneven processess rather than on some notional ‘end state’ when neoliberal principles and

policies have somehow been made flesh in textbook fashion. As analysts we ought to be able

reckon with a range of actors and institutions who are operative at different geographical scales –

all the while attending to the myriad connections between markets, states, quasi-state actors, civil

society, workers, the natural environment and other things besides. We need to be alive to

contradictions, barriers to neoliberal statecraft, partial successes, forms of resistance and all those

elements of ‘non-neoliberal’ context that confront attempts to make that context otherwise.

Because ‘actually-existing neoliberalism’ encompasses politics, economics, cultural life and much

more besides, the analysis of it – in both theory and practice – cannot be confined to any one

dimension of the real. It is also too simplistic to suggest that the policies of global institutions

(like the WTO) uniformly overlay what might otherwise be national or local forms of

neoliberalism (in the US, Britain, New Zealand, Mexico and elsewhere). These institutions have

themselves evolved different kinds of neoliberal policies at different times, and their impacts ‘on

the ground’ are very much dependent on the local/national context in question. And then there

are various forms of, as it were, sui generis neoliberalisations where local and national actors have

not had to respond to ‘external forcings’ by the likes of the IMF but have, rather, neoliberalised

‘voluntarily’. Finally, in all cases, neoliberal transitions have to be understood against the

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background of pre-existing institutional arrangements and moral economies – many of which are

far removed from the new realities that neoliberal policies seek to create.

Clearly, then, undertaking a ‘proper’ account of neoliberalism is a tall order – as it ought

to be with any political economic regime. It is far easier to proliferate specialised studies of this

or that element of neoliberalism promoted by this or that institution in that or that place,

country or continent than it is to undertake a comprehensive and synthetic account of

neoliberalisation in its diverse local and transnational dimensions. Yet the latter task is not

impossible. The Pollin, Harvey and Glyn books are important attempts to pave the way here,

even though – as I said earlier – they ignore some important issues (such is the scale of the

analytical challenge they face). But so too is the work of Peck and Tickell (2002, 2003), which

attempts to provide a conceptual vocabulary for getting a handle on the last thirty years of

neoliberalism’s uneven implantation worldwide (see also Brenner and Theodore, 2002). I want to

briefly rehearse their arguments before bringing this extended discussion of neoliberal capitalism

to bear on biophysical questions in the remainder of this essay.15

Peck and Tickell contend that where Leftist accounts of neoliberalism have not been

Andersonesque polemics they have, instead, been “closely specified, institutionally contingent

accounts, typically focussed on concrete forms …, such as particular Thatcherite restructuring

strategies” (2002: 382). This latter claim, I have already suggested, applies to a good deal of the

existing work on the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’ (though this is not Peck and Tickell’s focus).

“Though conscious of the risks of overreaching”, Peck and Tickell (ibid.) write, “we seek … a

preliminary way to explore some of the more generic and abstract features of the

neoliberalization process”. Their aim, then, is to parse the insights of specific studies of

neoliberalization without reverting to the formalism and homogeneity of the seven-part

‘neoliberal model’ I presented earlier.

Focussing on the North Atlantic zone, Peck and Tickell periodize three decades of

neoliberal reform using a set of heuristically useful concepts. Like other political economic

commentators on the Left, Peck and Tickell identify the severe economic crisis of the early-to-

late-70s as the opening neoliberalism’s advocates had spent the best part of 40 years waiting for.

‘Proto-neoliberalism’ – the long period when neoliberal ideas were both adumbrated but also

confined within several think tanks, university economics departments and foundations – gave

15Other attempts to map the spatio-temporality of ‘neoliberalism’ include Overbeek (1993) and Soederberg et al. (2005).

20

way to ‘roll-back neoliberalism’. Building on the Chile experience, neoliberal ideas found a home

in two of the world’s most important nation states (the US and UK) where the Reagan and

Thatcher administrations launched an all-out assault on the institutions and mores of the Fordist-

Keynesian compromise. The period of roll-back neoliberalism was, Peck and Tickell argue,

essentially destructive and also inevitably politicized, generating powerful counter-currents in

defence of the old political economic order. For this latter reason it was also, they argue,

‘shallow’: something not yet part of the marrow of the British, American and other political

economies.

However, from the early 1990s roll-back neoliberalism was gradually superceded by ‘roll-

out neoliberalism’. By this Peck and Tickell mean a period of entrenchment where neoliberal

ideas and practices “metamorphosed into more socially interventionist and ameliorative forms,

epitomized by the Third Way contortions of the Clinton and Blair administrations” (ibid. 388-9).

On the one side, this meant a ‘softening’ of certain neoliberal policies in order to tackle “the

perverse economic consequences and pronounced social externalities of narrowly marketcentric

forms of neoliberalism …” (ibid. 388). But on the other, it also entailed a normalization of

neoliberal ‘common-sense’. Roll-out neoliberalism can, then, be regarded as a creative, reality-

building process with two dimensions: namely, the use of ‘experts’ and governance bodies to

technocratise and apparently depoliticise all those things (like monetarist economic policy) that

were previously contested hotly; and the unfolding of new state interventionist agendas around

crime, welfare policy, immigration, policing, the family, lifestyle issues and so on. This twin-

process, Peck and Tickell (ibid. 390) suggest, “represents both the frailty of the neoliberal project

and its deepening”. It amounts to a recalibration of that project not so much due to the sort of

‘external’ shock that created space for neoliberalism in the first place (circa 1973-4) but, rather, in

response to the internal problems with roll-back neoliberalism – such as its tendency to produce

financial crises (e.g. the late 90s ‘Asian flu’) which impact serially on the ‘real’ economy, the

wider society, and the biophysical world.

This mutation in neoliberalism within its geographical heartlands has, Peck and Tickell

argue, been coincident with the use of global institutions to introduce neoliberalism ‘shock style’

elsewhere (such as Russia and Mexico). What Peet et. al. (2006) sardonically call ‘the holy trinity’

of US-dominated finance and trade organisations have, along with all sorts of fast policy transfers

and borrowings between existing and new neoliberal states, produced an internationalisation of

neoliberal political economy since the late 1990s especially (see Figures 1 and 2). This

21

internationalisation has, Peck and Tickell suggest, inevitably involved an up-scaling-cum-

relinquishment of several national-state powers. It has also, they further argue, been coincident

with a down-scaling of national-state powers to sub-national levels. This has made intra-national

spaces more responsive to international neoliberal policies and has also, Peck and Tickell argue,

fragmented national-scale opposition to neoliberal projects. This said, neoliberalism’s purposive

internationalisation threatens to generalise the earlier problems the US and UK experienced with

roll-back policies: “… the spectre is raised that the very channels though which the neoliberal

project has been [internationalized] … subsequently become the transmission belts for rapidly

diffusing international crises of overaccumulation, deflation and serial policy failure” (ibid. 399).

Therefore, they conclude, even in ‘mature’ neoliberal states there is the near-term prospect of

‘push-back neoliberalism’ – if not even more far-reaching change – linked to a wider

disintegration of the neoliberal regime elsewhere.

The utility of Peck and Tickell’s conceptual vocabulary is not only positive (a way of

describing the here and now) – it is normative too (a recommendation for how to think about

neoliberal realities). They are suggesting a way to grasp actually-existing neoliberalism that

appreciates its transnational dimensions while also respecting the highly uneven historical-

geographies of its transmission and implantation. It would be a mistake to regard theirs’ as

simply a ‘transition narrative’ in which neoliberalism is seen to progress through four stages

sequentially and unproblematically. Instead, their real point (as I see it) is that under the aegis of

certain global actors and rule-regimes, different localities and nation states are currently

differentially neoliberalised and (still) neoliberalising. This said, their argument does still risk

simplifying various local, regional and national situations by positioning them within one or

other sector of a rather too-neat taxonomic grid (i.e. deep/shallow, roll-out/roll-back

neoliberalisation). With these points in mind, I want (at last) to think about how the biophysical

world can be integrated into an account of neoliberalism’s uneven and evolving global-local

configurations.

IV. Neoliberal environments: towards a Marxian-Polanyian framework

I suggested earlier that there are three ways to arrive at a joined-up understanding of neoliberal

environments (in my expansive sense of this term). In the remainder of this essay I want to

explore the second of these: that is, work towards a general theory of how neoliberal

environments can best be analysed. Given my comments about meta-theory and the nature of

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‘neoliberalism’, my use of the word ‘general’ here is intentionally scare-quoted. As will become

clear, I cannot possibly claim that the theory proposed is definitive. And it will certainly be too

abstract to offer detailed insights into substantive questions of cause and effect on the ground

(this, after all, is the function of meso-level theorising and empirical work). I hope, though, that

the framework presented is sufficiently comprehensive and robust to aid research into any given

local neo-liberalisation of the biophysical world, or similar research focussing on a larger spatio-

temporal scales – not least because, apropos Peck and Tickell, it is the uneven and combined

relations between different scales that is ultimately of greatest interest and importance.

The argument will unfold in a step-wise fashion, moving from the more to the less

abstract and in this sense mirroring the discussion of the previous section. I start by considering

briefly the value of ideal-types when thinking through the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’ meta-

theoretically. The following sub-section then develops a conceptual argument about capitalism-

nature relations from insights provided by Marx, Polanyi and the recent work of ‘green

Marxists’.16 After this I make some programmatic comments about the ‘materiality’ of nature

and its role in influencing the possible trajectories of capital accumulation. Thereafter I

progressively adumbrate and refine a theoretical argument about nature’s multifaceted

neoliberalisation, leading to a further section (V) and a short conclusion.

Abstraction and ideal-typical thinking

One way of working towards a holistic theory of neoliberal environments is to start with ideal-

types – a quintessentially conceptual device that can produce real gains for concrete

understanding. Used iteratively, initially simple and abstract ideal-type arguments can be

thickened and transformed over time so that they lose their ideal-typical character and more

accurately (if never completely) represent the world they are designed to help us understand.

They are part of an unfinishable process of theorising the real, not a crude substitute for this

difficult task. Let me briefly elaborate, using the arguments of two accomplished practitioners of

ideal-typical reasoning: the sociologist Andrew Sayer (1995) and the legal theorist Margaret

Radin (1996).

16I scare-quote this term because ‘green’ here does not mean ecocentric. It is simply a descriptor for those Marxists who are interested in understanding how and with what effects capitalist economies engage with the non-human world.

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In his book Radical political economy: a critique, Sayer defines all theory as a process of

abstraction from the real which renders comprehensible, even as it simplifies, some of the

world’s concrete complexities. If reality was dominated by one or other systemic logic or set of

processes then one theory alone might get us a long way, both cognitively and normatively.

However, as a critical realist Sayer rejects this view and argues that understanding the world

typically requires some combination and modification of several different theoretical positions:

for Sayer, then, ‘good theory’ is, like ‘good theorists’ are, typically syncretic and combinatory.

Radin makes a similar argument, calling for ‘pragmatism’ in all theoretical argumentation. Her

book Contested commodities undertakes a set of thought-experiments into what reality would be

like if various scenarios actually applied: specifically, complete commodification, universal non-

commodification and compartmentalised commodification. Her argument uses what Sayer

recommends: ‘counterfactual arguments’ that sharpen our sense of what the world would have to

be like if the claims of ideal-typical representations of the real were to hold-good. Like Sayer,

Radin works towards a robust representation of actual commodification by working out-and-

down from abstract arguments, ultimately connecting them with real world examples of

‘contested commodities’ such as human kidneys for sale.

In light of their arguments, the link with my own case for meta-theory ought to be clear

enough. Meta-theory can aim to represent one or other dominant logic or set of processes that

insinuate themselves into all manner of different phenomena. But meta-theory can also aim to

describe the combination of independently specifiable processes that together govern significant

elements of social and/or environmental life. The second is the more ambitious and difficult task

because it entails combining different theoretical positions. But the first is no mean feat either if

the object of analysis is something as promiscuous and hydra-headed as capitalism and its various

‘actually existing’ forms. Though I intend to connect Marxist and Polanyian perspectives below,

I will be meta-theoretical in the first sense because these two perspectives are so consonant –

Polanyi, after all, was a Marxist avant la letter when he wrote The great transformation.

Towards a general theory 1: capitalism-nature relations

The theory I propose is, then, going to be intentionally abstract and ideal-typical in the first

instance – a propadeutic to further study or, put differently, a foil for others better equipped

than I am to realise this essay’s ambitions. Throughout, my assumption is not only that

‘neoliberalism’ is, in ideal-typical terms, one possible form of existence of the capitalist mode of

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production. My additional presumption is that neoliberalism is a form of political economic life

that, as Glyn (op. cit.) puts it in his book title, ‘unleashes capitalism’. A theory of neoliberal

environments is thus, in a meaningful sense, not far removed from a theory of capitalism-nature

relationships tout court. This links to a final assumption being made here, and a necessary one

too: namely, that we do not currently live in a world totally neoliberalised, which means that

neoliberalism is best seen as a project – an unfinished attempt to expand the social and biophysical

frontiers of capital accumulation. Hence the need to theorise, as well as study concretely, its

actual and likely socio-environmental dynamics.17

Marx

At the very considerable risk of stating the obvious, the substantive theoretical argument begins

with a telegraphic recapitulation of what I take to be the central insights and signal strengths of

the late Marx’s anatomisation of capitalism. As with an earlier part of the essay, some readers

may wish to skip ahead – but I revisit Marx here because his core claims seem to me just as

relevant as ever, and yet are not well understood by many Leftists socialised during the period

when the ‘posts’ were intellectually ascendant.18

The Marx of Capital regarded capitalism as a process not a thing: that is, a system whose

governing logics ensure that it is astonishingly dynamic. Three logics – or ‘rules of the game’ –

stand-out above all others within this mode of production. First, capitalism is growth-orientated:

it is a process of commodity production, distribution, sale, servicing and consumption whose

central goal is to realise more wealth (notably, in the form of money-capital) than was required

to make, move, maintain, sell and dispose of commodities in the first place. Secondly,

commodity production occurs within a competitive environment: firms of various kinds in

diverse economic sectors find themselves vying for market-share with rival producers, except in

relatively rare cases of monopoly control where barriers to market entry are high. Third, the

compulsion to accumulate wealth in a competitive economic environment ensures constant

pressure for producers to innovate in any and all aspects of their business practice. These

innovations can relate to new products, new processes and locations of production, the creation 17Note that in the sections to come when I use the terms ‘capital’ and ‘capitalists’ I will be referring to both those involved in owning and controlling finance as well as productive capital. The two ought to be teased apart and their relatively autonomous dynamics explored. However, this will further complicate an already complicated argument so I bracket the issue here, as well as the important links to rentier capital. 18Interestingly, Marx seems to me making something of a comeback, judging by the number of new books on his work and its contemporary significance (Albritton, 2007; Bensaid, 2002; Collier, 2004).

25

of new needs and wants among consumers, the search for new markets, efforts to alter regulatory

rules, and a host of other things too.

Together, this trinity of logics ensures that the accumulation of capital is a restless and

unstable process. The fine details and, in time, broad outlines of prevailing patterns of

commodity production, transportation, sale, servicing, consumption and disposal are always

being remade. Periodically, and in the absence of highly skilled regulation by governmental

bodies and other powerful state-like actors, this ceaseless process of change produces crises by

virtue of the internal contradictions between growth, competition and innovation. The classic

example is when numerous firms increase productivity and efficiency by displacing wage labour,

causing consumer purchasing power to tendentially decline – this being Marx’s famously-

identified tension between the forces and relations of production. Crises take the form of surplus

capital (commodities, money, capital equipment, fixed plant, and so on) existing in the midst of

insufficient opportunities for their absorption. This seemingly peculiar combination of surplus

and scarcity reflects the specific form in which wealth is measured in capitalist societies: not as

material wealth (the quantity and quality of diverse commodities) but as social wealth

(represented as the real abstraction money, and created in the process of production by wage

workers). Because workers are commodified within the capitalist mode of production they

require wages (money capital) in order to live, and accordingly lack the capacity to self-produce

the basket of basic and (depending on their income) more luxury commodities they use their

wages to purchase. Capitalist crises are thus, fundamentally, both crises of ‘over-production’ and

‘under-consumption’ at the same time: material abundance juxtaposed with social want is part of

capitalism’s irrational rationality because of the contradictions surrounding the source of both

wealth and consumer demand (i.e. wage-labour).

Such crises are also ramified events for the simple reason that ‘economic’ affairs are

always more than simply ‘business’ matters – this applies equally during periods of economic

growth and stability. State bodies dependent on taxes and loans to fund their suite of activities

can suffer fiscal and legitimacy crises when the motor of capital accumulation dies down.

Workers and their dependents – whose reproduction depends on requisite jobs and wages – can

find themselves un- or underemployed, poorly paid, compelled to migrate, or even completely

destitute. And all manner of civil society, voluntary and charitable organisations, necessarily

dependent on flows of money from the productive sphere, can also find themselves unable to

perform their roles and functions effectively or at all.

26

In order to address minor or major crises, firms, state bodies, workers and their

representatives, and a range of civil society actors have a range of options – acting alone and

together. One is to share the pain of a shake-out (equally or otherwise), which means the

devaluation of variable, commodity, fixed and other forms of capital to different degrees.

Another, connected strategy is to thoroughly restructure in situ the prevailing practices of

production (product types and mixes, production processes, labour relations etc), regulation

(fiscal and monetary policy, competition, consumer and labour law, education and training

policy etc.) and consumption in order to move towards a new and hopefully more stable regime

of capital accumulation. And a third option is to seek-out what David Harvey (1982) has

famously called a ‘spatio-temporal fix’ where, through the financial system, surplus money

capital is switched into ‘virgin’ territories and/or the future (e.g. by tying it up in major

infrastructure projects). Such a fix may serve as a palliative for capitalists in search of renewed

profits, but it also threatens to generalise capitalism’s crisis tendencies geographically and into

the future. It may also offer few returns to state-institutions, civil societies, workers and their

dependents in capital-exporting zones, unless profits therefrom or new external investment can

be utilised productively to restart the engine of capital accumulation. Unlike large fractions of

productive capital and many of those governing the flows of finance capital, these actors are

thoroughly embedded in specific localities, regions and national territories making them

vulnerable when economic downturns or full-blown crises strike.

Clearly, this is only a sketch of Marx’s theoretical word-picture of capitalism. One of its

key attributes, it seems to me, is its demonstration that processes of capital accumulation not

only have creative destruction written-into their DNA but are also tendentially all-encompassing.

They insinuate themselves far beyond the formal sphere of the ‘economy’, influencing daily life,

patterns of social and biological reproduction, state strategies and options, the public domain and

much more. This means that the (il)logics of capital accumulation both ‘internalise’ a set of

putatively separate domains of existence, and that these domains – even if they are ultimately

irreducible to these (il)logics – cannot fail to be affected by them, often profoundly so.

Polanyi

The great transformation is an historical essay, but it is perfectly possible to extract some general

insights from Polanyi’s otherwise specific argument that might help us make sense of the

neoliberal present. As with my summary of Marx, I am not going to dwell on different possible

27

readings of Polanyi’s work (see, among many examples, Block [2003]) – instead I extract what I

regard as some powerful and useful insights from his best-known text.

Polanyi wrote The great transformation in the early 1940s in an attempt to make sense of

the long era of ‘liberal capitalism’ that had ended in a global, six year conflagration. A close

student of Marx’s writings, Polanyi’s argument repeats but also usefully supplements the

former’s political economic teachings. Four Polanyian insights stand-out. First, The great

transformation made use of the important idea of a ‘pseudo-‘ or ‘fictitious commodity’. This is

any commodity whose social, cultural and/or ecological value exceeds the market value placed

upon it within a capitalist system. Polanyi identified labour (workers, their dependents and the

unemployed) and land (nature and environment) among his list of fictitious commodities because

neither human beings nor the biophysical world exist to meet the demands of capital

accumulation. Even so, both are deeply affected by its logics and rhythms meaning that they are

characterised by ‘doubleness’ or ‘duality’: they inhabit a world both within and beyond ‘the

market’. Secondly, this connects to the notion of ‘embeddedness’ – the idea that a capitalist

economy must exist in a more-than-capitalist world. This is a world of social, cultural, economic,

political and biophysical diversity that confronts capitalist economies as both opportunities and

barriers: ‘outsides’ that can be made profitable given the right conditions but whose non-

commodification may, also, be necessary to capitalism’s survival.

Thirdly, Polanyi coined the term ‘the double movement’ to describe a situation where

attempts to expand the reach and depth of capitalist commodification are met by more-or-less

vocal (even violent) forms of resistance. The ‘self-protection’ of society from the excesses of

liberal capitalism – such as low wages, a minimal public sector, and unchecked environmental

externalities – can take various forms. It is, Polanyi showed, an indication of free market

capitalism’s inability to disembed itself socially and biophysically from what E. P. Thompson

(1991: 10) called “a tissue of beliefs and usages”.19 However, the double movement need not be

read as a prediction – borne-out by past history – of the likely fate of neoliberalism. For

Polanyi’s fourth key insight was that a ‘market economy’ can extend itself quite far so long as

what he called a ‘market society’ can be engineered and suitably regulated. A market society is

one where individuals and communities are somehow encouraged to ‘live with’ the fairly stark

forms of creative destruction that are the hallmark of ‘capitalism unleashed’. Capitalism can,

19Andrew Sayer (2007) provides a contemporary reflection on the important but far-from-new concept of the ‘moral economy’.

28

then, live with, as well as influence, a wide range of ‘moral economies’ – some of which are more

accommodating than others.

Clearly, Polanyi’s argument takes its leave from the late Marx’s analysis of capitalism. It

is ultimately an account of how capitalist crises occur, but with an accent not only on ‘internal’

contradictions but also (and equally) ‘external’ friction between capitalism and what we might

call its ‘constitutive outsides’. Where Polanyi differs notably from the late Marx is in two areas.

First, he brings biophysical issues more directly and crisply into a critique of political economy

via the concept of ‘fictitious commodities’. Secondly, where Marx hoped that capitalism would

be undone by revolutionary struggle instigated by waged-workers, Polanyi’s argument points

alternately to cooptation (‘a market society’) and reform from within (‘the double movement’).

This means that Polanyi was ultimately far less sanguine than Marx about the possibility for

crises (of capital, the state, working people, of resource availability, and/or within civil society)

to lead to structural change (see Burawoy, 2003; cf. Birchfield, 1999).

EcoMarxism: the work of James O’Connor

Marx said little of a systematic nature about capitalism-environment relations. Over the last

fifteen years or so a set of authors have sought to make amends, in order not only to bridge the

well-known ‘red-green’ divide politically but also to address an analytical deficiency within the

Marxian tradition. These ‘ecoMarxists’ include Elmar Altvater, Paul Birkett, Ted Benton and

John Bellamy Foster – all of whom have produced major treatises (Altvater, 1993; Birkett, 1999;

Benton, 1993; Bellamy Foster, 2000).20 Since this is not the place to rehearse the debates and

disagreements within the ecoMarxist camp (of which there are many), I want once more to

selectively emphasise arguments and ideas that can help us create a coherent theoretical account

of neoliberal environments. To this end, I examine briefly the work of arguably the best-known

of all the ecoMarxist scholars, James O’Connor. O’Connor is not only a student of the late Marx

(preferring not to read Marx’s through the lenses of his various acolytes and interpreters); he has

also taken a good deal of inspiration from Polanyi.

In his book Natural causes (1998) and a series of programmatic journal essays, O’Connor

has coined the terms ‘the second contradiction’, ‘the conditions of production’ and ‘under-

production crises’. This trinity of concepts is useful, properly understood. The first and second

20I shoul also note here the work of several Marxisant scholars, such as Fred Buttel, Allan Schnaiberg and Ken Gould.

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connect Marx and Polanyi in order to suggest that the ‘external’ contradictions capitalism

confronts are just as important to its evolution (and potential demise) as the internal dialectics.

By conditions of production O’Connor refers to all those phenomena upon which capitalism

depends for its existence but which, either absolutely or relatively, it is unable to produce from

within. This is a version of the fictitious commodity and embeddedness arguments, but it is given

a systematic spin by O’Connor. He identifies ‘environmental conditions’ (biophysical resources,

be they economically productive, indirectly productive or ambient), ‘personal conditions’ (all

those things necessary to self-reproduce a living person, like housing) and ‘communal conditions’

(all those shared amenities and assets that people rely upon for social and biological

reproduction, like roads, public transport, schools, the legal system etc.). So ‘conditions of

production’ is O’Connor’s way of capturing the umbilical connection between capitalism, the

domain of human reproduction, and the realm of biophysical nature. It is his way of suggesting

that the ‘first’ and ‘second’ contradictions may be concurrent and causally related rather than

separate – even though it is possible for a growing economy to be governed in such a way that a

sharp deterioration in the conditions of production occurs (think of China today or early-to-late

Victorian Britain).

O’Connor’s central argument is that capitalism has a tendency to ‘underproduce’ these

conditions of production, though not necessarily all at the same time or to the same degree. For

instance, if we take environmental conditions, it is clear that firms rely upon naturally occurring

resources and spaces for a range of things, notably: (i) raw materials for immediate production

and a range of built environments that support such production, (ii) energy supplies, (iii) spaces

to make, move, sell, service and consume commodities (factories, airports, road systems,

shopping malls etc.), (iv) and zones into which to expel wastes generated by commodity

producers, distributors, sellers, servicers and consumers. In all these roles and capacities, the

biophysical world has a materiality that capitalist production cannot ultimately master or

control. For example, raw material deposits become exhausted; insufficient space may be

available in the right places for new infrastructure projects; and environmental sinks may

become polluted and harm a range of constituencies.

Cases like these, O’Connor argues, are not just problems for capitalist firms and their

employees. They are also problems for society at large because resource scarcity and

environmental degradation pose the wider issue of who has access, or suffers the consequences,

when particular elements of the biophysical world are enclosed or altered by processes of capital

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accumulation. If that world is, for capitalists, merely a means to the ultimate end of profitability,

for diverse other stakeholders it is variously a source of spiritual meaning, aesthetic pleasure,

subsistence use-values, and so on. This immediately poses the question of how conflicts over the

appropriate way to value the non-human world are to be avoided or somehow negotiated. And

here, unsurprisingly, O’Connor points-up the central role of the national state and its adjuncts,

building on his germinal work The fiscal crisis of the state (1973).

In a now very familiar argument within state-theoretical debates, O’Connor regards the

national state as the key regulator of capital accumulation within its sovereign territory. It must

somehow work within and outside the capitalist system, helping to ensure economic growth and

social stability by ameliorating the system’s internal contradictions and playing a role in

providing, and maintaining the health of, various conditions of production.21 This involves a mix

of setting framework conditions for business practice (e.g. commercial law), being a service

provider to the full range of social groups and, more generally, steering the content and

discursive framing of public debates about national affairs. For business, the national state – and

the sub- and supra-national institutions it may distribute some of its power to – can help to

mitigate or offset the first and/or second contradictions. For instance, it can raise business taxes

to pay for environmental clean-ups or craft taxation policy so as to encourage the development

of replacements for declining natural resources. However, other national stakeholders – workers,

non-governmental organisations, charities and so on – may politicise the conditions of

production in ways that run-up against business interests. In this situation the state somehow has

to mediate, depending on the balance of power among competing parties.

Objective material changes to nature caused by capitalist firms do not speak for

themselves. They are, instead, framed discursively by a range of actors who may – as workers

often do – find themselves, rather uncomfortably, wearing more than one hat (are you an

employee, a consumer, a shareholder, an environmentalist, a concerned parent or all of these

things?). Whether and how capitalism’s tendency to ‘underproduce’ the conditions of production

is deemed to be a ‘problem’, let alone a ‘crisis’, depends greatly on how these actors represent

these conditions semiotically and their ability, at any given time, to use the state apparatus to

their advantage. For O’Connor, then, struggles over meaning and the material power to

21This basic view of the capitalist state is not out of line with later, more fine-grained analyses of the complexities of, and dilemmas besetting, state bodies – see, for example, Jessop (1996).

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vanquish rivals are every bit as important as objective realities pertaining to the conditions of

production and the substantive economy.22

O’Connor’s work is, as my summary suggests, very relational and holistic. It works

biophysical issues into Marx’s political economy in a fairly systematic way, building on Polanyi’s

ideas. It has several specific things to recommend it. First, it strongly accents the ‘spill-over’

effects of capitalist political economy onto ecology and society, even as it highlights capital’s

absolute dependence on these two connected domains. It usefully identifies the multiple sources

of tension between actors who, in many cases, must simultaneously reside within and without

the capitalist economy. Secondly, it rightly focuses on national states and their adjuncts as key

mediating bodies in the triangular relations between capitalists, nature and the wider society (see

also Block [1994] and Eckersley [2004]). Thirdly, it moves beyond ‘objectivist’ accounts of

environmental problems and crises, reminding us that discourses and power-plays of various

kinds occupy a key role in determining whether and how ‘real’ contradictions become politicised

by those who stand to suffer from them (see, also, O’Connor [1987]). Fourthly, it makes plain

how the socio-economic and cultural positionality of different actors makes a difference to how

the internal and external contradictions of capital are experienced, negotiated and/or reacted to.

A ‘crisis’ need not be all-encompassing for a place or society, even though it could be. For

instance, a successful logging company observing commercial and civic law may nonetheless

create acute problems for peasants or deep ecologists because of its commitment to deforest hilly

or biodiverse areas.

Finally, and relatedly, O’Connor’s work shows that the labour movement and the (now

not so ‘new’) new social movements have much to gain by working in concert.

‘Environmentalisms’ of various kinds are still typically represented as social movement struggles,

as are those concerning identity, cultural recognition, gender, ‘race’ and the like. Yet classic

labour movement concerns about the workplace and the reproductive sphere, O’Connor

suggests, cannot be divorced from a consideration of putatively ‘non-economic’ issues like a

person’s right to clean water, unpolluted air or access to the environmental commons. They

bleed into each other because capitalism perforates whatever membrane formerly separated

them. Revolutionary and reformist movements against capital cannot, therefore, begin-and-end

22This makes for a contrast with the putatively ‘realist’ language of many environmentalists on the far-green end of the spectrum who are often prone to apocalyptic claims as if biophysical change will have (or has) deterministic societal outcomes.

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with classic labour struggle. In the case of the environmental movement – specifically its Left-

wing components – the challenge is to connect productively with labour politics while somehow

negotiating the ‘jobs versus environment’ antithesis that partly explains the historic ‘red-green’

antipathy.23

Neil Smith

I conclude this general discussion of the place of nature in capitalist societies by examining the

work of Marxist geographer Neil Smith. Like O’Connor and the other ecoMarxists I mentioned,

Smith respects both the spirit and the letter of Marx’s mature writings. Where he differs is in his

treatment of the biophysical dimension. This has three elements, even though he is best known

for one of these – the once counter-intuitive idea of the ‘production of nature’. All three are

evident in his book Uneven development (1984) and several subsequent essays (Smith, 1996, 1998,

2006)

First, in O’Connor’s work a residual naturalism is sometimes evident that runs-against his

insistence that ‘nature’ is always practically and discursively mediated. Smith is

uncompromisingly consistent on this score: “Nature”, he has remarked, “is nothing if it is not

social” (Smith, 1984: 30). This is not an anti-materialist claim or exaggerated form of social

constructionism. It is, more simply, a generalisation of economist Eric Zimmerman’s famously

wise observation that ‘resources are not, they become’. Different actors located within and

without the capitalist system cannot, Smith argues, interpret and engage with the non-human

world in ways uninfluenced by those actor’s interests, worldviews, social locations and learnt

practices. Nature never speaks for itself, whether we are dealing with extreme events like

Hurricane Katrina or more everyday activities like tending an allotment or jogging in a local

park. It is social ‘all the way down’ since discursively specific and technologically mediated

appraisals of the non-human world are ceaselessly operative, contested and changeable.

Secondly, Smith argues that the biophysical world is both a condition of, and propellant

to, capital’s uneven development in space and time. This is true not only in the case of nature-

dependent industries and areas (think of agricultural, forestry and mining districts, or fisheries

communities). It is more generally true for capital writ-large, since ultimately all aspects of

23It should by now be abundantly clear that both Polanyi’s and O’Connor’s writings have strong family resemblances to the French Regulation School of political economy, which has a biophysical dimension in the form of some of Alain Lipietz’s work (e.g. Lipietz, 1992).

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capitalist society are nature-dependent in some way, shape of form: the making, moving, selling,

servicing, consuming and disposal of any and all commodities necessarily requires raw materials,

energy sources, physical spaces and waste disposal opportunities. It follows, for Smith, that

uneven development is simultaneously a political economic and biophysical process. Capital’s

restless search for new investment opportunities and new markets routinely entails: (i) the

abandonment of no longer productive zones (where the conditions of production may be

deteriorating and too costly or risky to fix); (ii) biophysical changes in ‘virgin’ territories because

new energy- and raw-material intensive infrastructures may emerge combined with new

productive activities that may themselves make large biophysical demands; and (iii) the use of

these territories as absorption zones for surplus capital from growth regions, including myriad

resource-commodities like trees, foodstuffs and minerals in search of market opportunities. At

moments of crisis – economic, political and reproductive – environmental problems in one area

can become the impetus for new rounds of biophysical transformation elsewhere as capital

switches (often speculatively) into new growth areas. But even in non-crisis conditions, Smith

argues, the compulsion to work existing biophysical assets harder and seek-out new ones is part-

and-parcel of capitalism’s normal functioning.

Finally, Smith’s work at one level challenges Polanyi’s (and O’Connor’s) pseudo-

commodity idea. His seemingly counter-intuitive notion of the capitalist ‘production of nature’

can be read in a number of ways. One is the idea that capitalist firms, where it is technically and

biophysically possible, materially remake nature in order to secure new or additional profits.

Nature, here, becomes less an exogenous force that capital has to circulate ‘around’ and more

something it can physically circulate ‘through’ by virtue of scientific-technical innovation that

renders it more malleable. Clearly, the production of nature can only occur in biologically-based

economic sectors (like agriculture, forestry, fibre industries, and fisheries). But it is a useful

reminder that, biophysically, capital is not only destructive but simultaneously creative too (see

Goodman et al., 1987): it finds ways and means to materially subsume the non-human world

(think of genetically modified foods and animals), or else substitute natural products with

manufactured ones (think of chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers). In a rather profound

sense, parts of nature become manufactured rather than found – as it were, ‘unnatural’.24 This

sort of creativity is, of course, that celebrated by so-called ‘optimists’ or Cornucopians within

24In Marxian terms, this capitalist production of nature can seek to engineer both the forces/means of production (e.g. a GM maize plant) and the final product (e.g. an ear of GM corn). See Kloppenburg (2004) for a classic example.

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the environmental movement (currently represented in the social sciences by ‘ecological

modernizers’ and ‘industrial ecologists’). Of course, such creativity is not the same as control –

Smith is clear about this in all his writing. The capitalist production of nature can, just as much

as the ‘formal subsumption’ of nature, spark social opposition and a range of unanticipated and

even unmanageable environmental problems. Here, pace O’Connor, state bodies have important

roles to play in terms of (de)legitimising and practically regulating capitalist practices – and may

themselves suffer or enjoy fiscal and legitimation effects accordingly. Ultimately, then, Polanyi’s

pseudo-commodity insight applies to Smith’s ‘production of nature idea’, even if some capitalist

firms are successfully able to reposition the boundary between the social and the natural worlds

in the case of certain commodities (see Boyd et al., 2001).

Towards a general theory 2: the ‘matter’ of nature

If, as I am suggesting, we piece together the insights of Marx, Polanyi, O’Connor and Smith we

arrive at a complex and holistic understanding of capitalism-nature relations – even at the level of

abstract theory. I say ‘even’ because such theory is often (incorrectly) thought to aim for

certainty and simplicity, whereas it ought – as I argued earlier – to offer researchers the sort of

conceptual complexity typically required to fathom empirical complexity. In order to progress to

a theory of neoliberal environments I now need to add to the conceptual complexity somewhat

by teasing-out something that was mostly implicit in the previous sub-section or else scattered

throughout the discussion: the material significance of the non-human world to the course of

capital accumulation in space and time. I will use the term ‘matter’ here in both of its familiar

dictionary meanings, namely the physical properties of something and its significance (practical,

moral, spiritual, aesthetic) to those affected by it directly or otherwise. I take each in turn, but

the point of course is that they are closely connected and of equal relevance to the argument. As

Becky Mansfield (2003: 177) puts it aptly, we “ascribe meanings to things without erasing the

material nature of those things”.25

The biophysical world is at once differentiated and connected, animate and inanimate,

biological and non-biological, micro and macro, local and global. It comprises entities, species

and systems that are, variously, autonomous from one another, codependent, asymmetrically

25The arguments in this section have benefited from engagement with rich literatures on (i) ‘material cultures’ (e.g. Miller, 1998), (ii) cultural economy (e.g. Amin & Thrift, 2004), and (iii) consumption cultures (e.g. Fine & Leopold, 1993).

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connected or co-constitutive. Complex couplings and decouplings, loops and feedbacks,

thresholds and continuities, barriers and pathways characterise the non-human world at a range

of spatio-temporal scales from the smallest to the largest. Through our economic and other

practices we have inserted ourselves into this world, serving to simultaneously reproduce,

destabilise, degrade, reconstitute, repair, restore and eliminate the various elements and relations

that comprise it. Capitalism, I would argue, is easily the most transformative mode of production

the world has ever seen (see McNeill, 2000; cf. Lomborg, 2001). But, as the previous sub-section

argued at several points, the traffic is not all one way. For not only is capitalism dependent on

the biophysical world for a range of goods and services that may or may not be costed

monetarily. Its very organisation is also physically influenced by the capacities and affordances

that nature possesses in its unmodified or humanly modified states.

In the previous sub-section I described these capacities and affordances at both a general

level – entities and services that capitalists cannot ultimately produce – and a more specific level

(the quartet of: raw materials; energy sources; spaces to make, move, sell, service and consume

commodities; and waste disposal sinks). There are, however, some additional things that can be

said and here I think the categories of quantity, quality, connectivity, extensiveness and location

have a usefully general relevance.26

Quantity describes the physical availability of raw materials, energy sources, biophysical

spaces and waste sinks. Even though absolute biophysical scarcity is rare in capitalist societies,

quantity issues are important to the cost-calculus that determines at which point natural goods

and services become relatively scarce. Renewable and non-renewable resources are both, at some

point, finite goods; spaces that can be given over to infrastructures of production, reproduction,

distribution, sale, servicing and consumption are not limitless; and waste sinks have real

tolerance thresholds. All this connects to quality, which is the specific character of a biophysical

entity or system – its signature feature(s), as it were. A giant redwood is not the same as a

Douglas fir, and neither are anything like a minke whale, a cougar, a dung beetle or a quetzal.

The qualitative characteristics obviously matter enormously to how all the actors involved in the

drama of capitalist accumulation confront nature. Firms may have to adapt their production

processes if they cannot physically produce nature in Smith’s sense – this is especially evident in

non-biologically based resource sectors where enormous costs may be involved in accessing

26These categories are partly derived from Boyd et al. (2001).

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things like oil, copper or diamonds; state-bodies may wish, at the behest of their citizens, to

protect or restore rare species and ecosystems; and indigenous (‘fourth world’) peoples, to cite a

third example, may vigorously resist corporate encroachment into ancestral lands. In these and

other cases nature’s qualitative characteristics are central to clashes of value between actors vying

to determine its ‘proper’ use.

Connectivity describes a key characteristic of the non-human world. In simple terms it

means that any attempt to enclose, degrade, alter, abstract, remediate or relocate an element of

nature is likely to have non-trivial knock-on effects at one or more spatio-temporal scales. This is

obviously the case with atmospheric and water pollution, but there are numerous other cases

where capitalist firms or other social actors create ripple-effects – often unintended and

sometimes difficult to govern – by enclosing, abstracting, moving, restoring or disposing of some

element(s) of the non-human world. Extensiveness refers to the physical scale of biophysical

resources required for some element of capital accumulation. It is a particular challenge for

primary producers to access extensive resources where thousands and millions of hectares of land

or water are needed for production to be viable (see Prudham [2003]). Think of large-scale

forestry or many commercial fisheries. Finally, and relatedly, location matters because many

biophysical resources and assets are geographically specific and unevenly patterned. Their use

demands that actors have to be proximate to or in legal-cum-administrative control of them,

something that can require a lot of money, time and effort; these resources may be embedded in

unique ways of life (think of Pacific salmon and west coast aboriginal communities in Canada

and the US); and they may, because of their unique or iconic status, become the focus of overseas

attention by those wishing to exploit or protect them (think of Rwandan gorillas, Chinese white

dolphins, old-growth Clayoquot Sound forest, or oil in Alaska’s protected areas).

So, in a range of ways, nature’s biophysical characteristics play an important role in

determining whether and how they are used, by whom, in what manner, and with what effects.

But the second sense of mattering is crucially important too and it is useful to venture a

vocabulary to get a handle on this issue. Social actors invest the non-human world with

significance, for biological (e.g. the need for clean water) and non-biological (i.e. social, cultural

and spiritual) reasons. The latter, as I have argued, directs our attention to actors’ values and

interests, their capacity to realise these interests relative to other parties, and the wider moral

economies in which they operate at home and abroad. The biophysical world only matters in the

second sense of the term if social actors have sufficiently strong reasons and desires; if they have

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the power to act successfully via the state-apparatus or directly, or if – lacking such power – they

have some way to express their discontent as forms of non-trivial resistance. In these conditions,

struggles over nature are always already struggles over meanings (Peet and Watts, 1996):

‘environmental imaginaries’ both arise from and alter environmental practices in a ceaseless

dialectic.

The great complication here, which I hinted at earlier, is that the same individuals and

communities may have internally contradictory stances on different, or even the same,

biophysical issues. The fact that people are an amalgam of subject-positions – each position

involving different social relations, value systems, and social practices – complicates the ways

that they value the non-human world. A stereotypical and hypothetical but nonetheless

instructive example, is the CEO of an oil major who assiduously recycles plastic bottles at home,

buys only organic fruit and vegetables, and refuses to shop at large supermarkets in favour of

local shops stocking ‘low food miles’ produce. Multivalence, not simply ambivalence, becomes a

normal condition. Even where the internal contradictions are not so acute, people still have to

make decisions about what elements of the non-human world matter to them and why. Is one’s

stance taken as a worker, an owner or manager of a firm, a consumer, a smallholder, a member

of an NGO or NSM, a member of a national or global public, or a member of a specific cultural,

gender, sex, age, religious or ethnic group?27 And lest this sound like voluntarism – people

‘autonomously’ deciding whether and how to value nature in certain ways – it is worth recalling

how many of our beliefs and values are not our own: they are social, inherited and sometimes

imposed (benignly or otherwise). This means that the presence or absence of specific valuations

of things like forests, honeybees, coral reefs, aquifers or atolls in large measure reflects the ideas

and incentives built-into such things as the mass media, the education system, the world of

advertising, the charitable sector, our parental and community upbringing and so on. If capitalist

interests are able to forge these ideas and incentives, or at least make the profit-motive consistent

with them, then they have an awful lot to gain – not least the relative absence of protest at their

specific uses of nature for raw materials, energy sources, physical spaces or waste sinks.

Finally, having said something about the complexities of valuing the non-human world in

societies where capitalism dominates or intrudes, let me say something about where challenges to

27As Billig et al. (1988) have argued, even in ‘simple’ societies (never mind complex ones) individuals have a continuously ‘dilemmatic’ existence since the roles and relations that constitute their life courses are rarely consistent and harmonious.

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its uses of nature can focus, deploying a set of familiar but still useful terms. They can focus on

‘open access resources’ (like the atmosphere), ‘communal resources’ (e.g. land once used

collectively by herders for cattle grazing), ‘public resources’ (e.g. a government-owned and run

marine reserve), ‘club resources’ (e.g. a private golf course), ‘world heritage’ (e.g. a UNESCO

designated site like the Galapagos Islands) and any number of ‘private resources’ (e.g. farmers’

fields, titled mineral deposits, leased land given-over to airport construction, or exclusive game

reserves). Depending on who is doing the valuing of specific things within each of these broad

categories, they can be regarded as either necessary for life or, alternatively, as things that help to

make life worth living. What is more, the things signified by these categories all have certain

geographies and temporalities. This means that the actors involved in using them and deciding

their fate – including any aggrieved parties – may be proximate but also far more distant (and

may have to consider future generations). Depending on who they are, and the subject-positions

that inform their environmental concern, these parties can focus on any or all of the several

phases constitutive of the encounter between capitalist economies and biophysical environments,

namely: enclosure, commodity production (e.g. extraction, cultivation or restoration),

transportation and distribution, consumption, maintenance (including recycling) and waste

disposal. And, depending on the context in which they are operating morally, monetarily and

institutionally, these parties can address their concerns to capitalist firms directly, to various

arms of the state (local, national or otherwise), to the media or to and through a range of civil

society, voluntary and lobby groups.

To summarise, from the perspective of capitalist firms of various kinds the biophysical

world ‘matters’ in three ways: it presents barriers (physical and/or socio-cultural), opportunities

(to garner profits in a variety of ways) and surprises (unintended or unanticipated biophysical

problems, related forms of reactive state regulation, or social protest by various actors).28 Seen

from the perspective of other social actors within and without the capitalist economy, the non-

human world matters in similarly complicated ways. It provides a range of use-, symbolic-, and

affective-values that are sometimes amenable to commodification, but sometimes not. The

dilemmas and conflicts attaching to all this manifest themselves not simply between individuals,

communities, nations and organisations, but within them too. They may result in quiescence or

28I gratefully borrow this three-fold terminology from Boyd et al. (2001). However, I intentionally broaden its meaning to capture capital’s insertion not only into a biophysical world not (mostly) of its own making, but a social world irreducible to its dictates too.

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protest, depending. Regulatory bodies, where they are robust enough, must somehow deal with

protest without threatening jobs and profits within their territorial ambit – unless they can nip it

in the bud.29

Towards a general theory 3: Neoliberal environments

We’re now in a position to speculate theoretically about the trajectory of nature’s

neoliberalisation – past, present and future – in a world that is simultaneously capitalist but

more-than-capitalist. Because, like many others, I think it non-sensical to analyse neoliberalism in

abstraction from its capitalist integument, the previous two sub-sections have been a necessary

way-station to this part of the essay. Figures 1 and 2 seek to capture the main arguments

presented in these sections.30 They are different ways of diagramming what has been said so far.

The arguments they depict, I am suggesting, need somehow to be tailored to make sense of the

‘neoliberal environments’ that are my concern here.

One place to begin is by returning to the ideal-typical, seven-point definition of

neoliberalism that I presented earlier, and then subsequently complicating the account. This

definition does not constitute some fixed ‘standard’ that remains unchanged by the insights of

empirical studies into neoliberalisations. Instead, it is a provisional definition without which “it

is not clear how analysts [would] recognise ‘neoliberalism’ when they see aspects of it in hybrid

form” (McCarthy, 2006: 87). What, then, are the connections between each dimension of

neoliberalism and the biophysical world? I take each one in turn, though they ought not to be

seen in isolation. The overall message will be that, whatever else it is, “neoliberalism is also a

[profoundly] environmental project … and necessarily so” (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004: 277).

(i) Privatisation: All property rights are, of course, about social relations – they are not simply

bloodless rules and procedures crafted by politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers. They define who

has access to what, when, and under what conditions. Privatisation, in its various forms, defines

a bundle of property rights that empower certain individuals, communities or institutions to

29Note that I am intentionally avoiding the now-tired language of ‘environment determinism versus social constructionism’ because, unless it’s highly refined, this language robs us of the vocabulary we need to grasp the complexity of nature’s ‘mattering’. This complexity is captured well in Bridge and Bakker’s (2006) review essay on the biophysical world and its interpretation, and in Daniel Miller’s (2005) more general text. 30In Figure 2 the upper case letters in the upper part of the diagram have the following meanings: M = money; C = commodities; I = direct physical inputs to commodity production; MP = means of production; LP = labour power; P = the production process; C’ = new commodities; ∆ = monetary profit; OMP = capitalists.

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exclude other parties from access to (or use of) certain things, both physically and/or discursively

(think of land and trademarks). These things can be exchanged voluntarily in many cases, but the

right of alienation belongs to the owner(s) so long as there is an effective legal and penal system

to enforce the rules and norms of property in any given instance. Privatisation thus gives owners

certain powers to use or exchange their property, regardless of what rival users’ or owners’

wishes may be. Depending on who the owners are, privatisation can license radically different

patterns of use and alienation in relation to the full spectrum of entities, symbols and ideas that

can be the subject of property rights in both theory and practice.

Seen from a Marxian-Polanyian perspective, privatisation – whatever else it may be – is, of

course, vital to the operations of capital. Without more-or-less exclusive rights of title and/or

access to everything from parcels of land, built environments and inventions to labour power

and licensed software, capitalists could never launch commodities into circulation with a view to

realising profit at the end of each round of production. Where capitalists do not directly own

certain things deemed necessary for their productive activities they may lease rights of access and

use from others (e.g. from rentiers or various state bodies). The key question then becomes: how

much access and use do various capitalist class fractions have in any one instance?

Neoliberalism is a project to maximise various forms of privatisation, most especially in

the interests of profit-seeking businesses. The privatisation process can occur both within mature

capitalist economies but also in territories previously non- or only partly-capitalist. It can take at

least two forms: the private appropriation of previously state-owned and run assets; or the

private appropriation of previously open-access and communal assets. The latter Marx famously

called a process of ‘primitive accumulation’. However, in his two books on neoliberalism,

Harvey (2005a, 2005b) uses the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to remind us that the

frontiers of privatisation are still being extended today: Marx should not be read as implying that

enclosures of various kinds were a historic phase, a hallmark of 18th century capitalism. The

system, Harvey rightly insists, still has many ‘outsides’ it wishes to internalise with a view to

deriving profit.

In what respects and with what effects, then, can privatisation writ-large be seen as a

process with a strong biophysical dimension? Firstly, and most obviously, it entails land, sub-

surface resources, terrestrial waters, marine waters, genes, representations of nature and even the

atmosphere being the express target of enclosure. Various ‘environmental conditions of

production’ are directly or indirectly appropriated by capitalist as, variously, sources of raw

41

materials, energy stocks, spaces to sustain economic activities and waste sinks. Secondly, this

enclosure process frequently involves the exclusion of groups formerly dependent upon

biophysical resources for their livelihoods (e.g. freeholders, peasant farmers, nomadic herders) or

who otherwise enjoyed valued rights of access (e.g. hikers, tourists). In countries where a large

public sector once prevailed state bodies are also, of course, similarly excluded. But in neoliberal

regimes they of, course, self-exclude by selling-off or leasing formerly state run nature reserves,

mineral deposits, transportation networks and the like. Thirdly, an important biophysical aspect

of neoliberal privatisation involves enclosing nature for no other purpose than to conserve,

preserve or restore it. This, when attached to marketization (see ii. below), is what I have been

calling ‘free market environmentalism’, where so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ problems are

addressed by establishing rights and responsibilities in environmental harm and redress (‘market

failures need market solutions’ is the mantra). Exclusion applies here, of course, but the accent is

not on the sort of environmental degradation that so commonly accompanies capitalist

production.31

(ii) Marketisation: Privatisation need not be connected to marketisation (i.e. pricing and sale).

Owners may not be willing or able put a monetary price on their possessions, nor willing and

able to exchange them with other parties in price-fixing markets. However, in neoliberal regimes

the one implies the other two. Capitalists enclose physical things, symbols, tokens and ideas

precisely in order to monetise and exchange them. Given that far more of the biophysical world

is likely to be privatised within neoliberal regimes, it follows that far more of it is likely to be

marketised too. What, generally speaking, are the forms and effects of nature’s accelerated

marketisation?

First, and most obviously, the non-human world is either directly traded (as with

foodstuffs) or serves as a necessary production condition for the trading of other commodities (as

with a new privately-run container-port built on formerly public shoreline). This means that its

social value comes more-and-more to be determined by its market value as a final commodity, a

means of production or a force of production: that is, the monetary price that various producers

and consumers are willing and able to pay for it. Secondly, as numerous Left-critiques of the

market have pointed out, the conflation of monetary with social value means that less well-off

31For a set of rich reflections on privatisation and non-human nature see Mansfield (2007).

42

parties proximate to or distant from a biophysical resource get little if any say in its fate. These

parties are forced to pay (or pay more) for the use of a resource or environmental amenity that

was previously free or low cost. Conversely, those with relatively high purchasing power near

and far get a disproportionate say in whether and how certain biophysical assets and spaces are to

be used (see O’Neill, 2007). Thirdly, because the logic of capital accumulation is profit-making, it

follows that expanded marketisation means the greater quantitative use of nature and the

appropriation or perceived degradation of a wider range of biophysical phenomena in the

qualitative sense. So, the ‘formal’ and ‘real subsumption’ of nature to capital become writ-large.

Only in a ‘post-material’ economy or one in which materials were mostly recycled would this

statement not hold good.32 This is connected to the likelihood of ever larger feedback-effects as

more biophysical entities are exploited, abstracted, moved, relocated, consumed and discharged

along the entire circuit of capital accumulation. And it is connected too to the likelihood that

more locationally unique (non-ubiquitous) resources will become commercial targets. Fourthly,

the heightenend marketisation of nature by productive, financial and rentier capital creates new

groups of wage-labour dependent for their living on nature’s saleability.

Finally, where the feedback-effects and concerns about appropriating locationally special

resources are politicised in ways that require their mitigation or elimination, marketisation

becomes the neoliberal tool to address the environmental problems that marketisation itself

partly helped to create. I am, once again, referring to the use of economic instruments to protect

and/or restore terrestrial, atmospheric and marine environments from harm inflicted by

monetary under- or non-valuation by firms, rentiers and consumers. Depending on the rules of

the ‘eco-markets’ in question, these instruments can be more or less effective – though they

almost always take profit-making as a means or an end. They are intended to be the ‘green

thumb’ attached to Adam Smith’s famous ‘invisible hand’.

(iii) and (iv) State roll back or deregulation and Market-friendly reregulation: I take these two

elements of neoliberalism together. State organisations remain vitally important actors in setting

the ‘boundary’ between what is ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to capitalism – that is, the boundary

32There is currently a lot of discussion in environmental policy literatures about the possibilility of ‘decoupling’ economic growth from large scale biophysical transformation. This discussion is founded on the hope that growth can, in future, change in its quality. This may well be an idealistic and unrealistic aspiration. In the meantime, the most likely source of a reduction in capitalism’s biophysical impact in precisely the ‘normal’ recessions and crises that are part of the system’s operations.

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between that which is non-, partially- and completely-commodified. They are also crucial to

determining how capitalism is to be governed once boundaries are set in any given instance. The

reason, of course, is that the (national) state has a monopoly on the means of violence and is the

legally recognised representative of the societal interest. Neoliberal states can, theoretically

speaking, be of two kinds: those having to dismantle an inherited apparatus of governmental

procedures and regulations that placed limits on market-rule (e.g. post-communist and post-

Keynesian states); and those seeking to build a neoliberal order where the state’s role in

commercial and civic affairs was previously quite contained (think of several so-called ‘failed

states’). Clearly, a process of regulatory ‘roll back’ in the interests of capital accumulation can

only occur in states of the former type.

To the extent that these states actively encourage privatisation and marketisation they are

directly implicated in the biophysical effects of both processes. In addition, though, they are

relieved of the financial and legal responsibility for providing, maintaining or guaranteeing access

to a range of public, open-access or communal resources – such as countryside rights of way,

clean water and sufficient land for the construction of public housing. However, they are not

necessarily dissociated from any unwelcome consequences attending the withdrawal of

responsibility. Aside from having to set the framework conditions for the private use of

formerly non-private elements of the biophysical world, they may suffer legitimation crises

among their various publics and stakeholders if nature’s privatisation and marketization creates

problems for significant social groups – witness recent the ‘gas and water wars’ in Bolivia, among

many other possible examples.

In theory, these sorts of crises can be headed-off at the pass by purposeful ‘roll-out’

policies that, for both kinds of neoliberal state, so normalise neoliberal principles and practices

that the normative basis for critique among sections of various publics and activist organisations

is significantly undercut. Here, once more, free market environmentalism is a key weapon in the

neoliberal state’s policy arsenal when it comes to biophysical issues. As the recent enthusiasm for

carbon-offsets and debt-for-nature swaps suggests, a range of potentially concerned and critical

social actors can be coopted into the neoliberal way by assurances that ‘externalities’ can be

internalised by market-friendly societies. Some of them may even be financial beneficiaries:

witness indigenous groups allowing paid access to their ancestral lands to overseas tourists. But

another, more general weapon is for the state to disperse its regulatory power among quangos

and quasi-governmental bodies like the WTO. These ‘shadow state’ bodies, typically run by

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‘experts’ unelected by and far removed from national citizenries, can serve to regularise

neoliberal practices by enforcing rule-systems from a distance (geographically and/or

institutionally). Those disaffected by nature’s neoliberalisation can, in this context, find it

difficult to seek redress for their grievances, as they confront a complex world of standing

committees, arbitration panels, audit trails and distributed powers (see vii below).

(v) Use of market proxies in the residual state sector: In their own right state organisations are, of

course, significant economic actors at the local, national and supra-national levels. They may

employ very large numbers of people and they may be significant providers of services, amenities

and commodities. Neoliberal states directly provide only those things that, for whatever reason,

the commercial sector is unable or unwilling to provide for itself, its workers or sections of civil

society. Where possible it provides those things so as to maximise the cost-efficiency with which

they are produced or maintained. For instance, a neoliberal state may run a monopoly gas

industry based on reserves existing within its own territory (think Russia). But because this

monopoly is run as a commercial enterprise – one competing with other gas suppliers in

wholesale and retail markets internationally – to all intents and purposes it is a private firm (one

lacking domestic competitors). The biophysical effects attaching to state activities can, in a

neoliberal context, be remarkably similar to those of private sector enterprises (as discussed

above). Exceptions occur where even neoliberal states place limits on capital’s access to the non-

human world, or where these states use market instruments to organise their own governance of

various externalities produced by their in-house commercial activities or those of private sector

bodies. As with the national state’s regulation of capitalist enterprises, failure to suitably regulate

(practically and discursively) its own suite of activities from an environmental perspective can

make it the focus of discontent among social groups domestic or overseas.

(vi) The strong encouragement of ‘flanking mechanisms’ in civil society: Neoliberal state bodies

(and again, I am speaking theoretically here) are at pains to encourage the growth of (i) informal

and social economies, and (ii) a range of charitable, voluntary, not-for-profit and third-sector

organisations to fill the void created by the roll-back, or sheer absence in the first-place, of state

provision of personal, communal and environmental conditions of production. These economies

and organisations are intended to help individuals, families and communities deal with any social

or environmental externalities arising from the wider project of neoliberalism. The organisations

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can fulfil this role only if they are sufficiently numerous, sufficiently niched and sufficiently

well-funded. However, their success also depends upon them accepting – and hoping their

various constituencies accept – the basic terms and conditions of the neoliberal settlement. The

absence of such organisations in certain situations, or their failure to represent or assist their

various constituencies, can lead to them being negatively politicised along with the neoliberal

business and governmental practices they broadly seek to ameliorate. If they do not accept the

neoliberal settlement, these civil society groups can launch direct attacks on government policy

and commercial practice in the name of a post-neoliberal order33. This becomes highly likely

where extant informal and social economies offer people precious little shelter from the rigours

of the neoliberal order.

(vii) The creation of ‘self-sufficient’ individuals and communities: The ‘liberal’ in neoliberal

recalls one of the classic arguments for non-collectivist modes of living: the supposed ‘freedom’

of people to think and act as they see fit. This is a potentially powerful argument that the Left

has often dismissed to its own detriment. Neoliberalism, in ideal-typical terms, promulgates the

ideal of freedom along with its mirror-ideal, that of responsibility for oneself and one’s

immediate relations. In respect of biophysical issues this amounts to a project of discursive

desocialisation of the causes and effects of, as well as responses to, neoliberal political economy.

People are interpellated in the workplace, by the neoliberal state, by the media etc. so as to

fragment any sense of common action along class, gender or other collectivist lines. Neoliberal

subjects are encouraged to relate to the non-human world in a number of ways that cross-cut

their simultaneous positioning within and without the capitalist system. As people who may be

displaced and dispossessed by privatisation they are encouraged to be ‘entrepreneurial’ and look

for new employment opportunities; as people who may now have to pay for access to formerly

communal or res nullius resources they are encouraged to see themselves as consumers who are

‘free to spend’; as people who may care about environmental degradation and social poverty

overseas they are similarly encouraged to do their politics through the cash-register as ‘ethical

consumers’; as parents or citizens who may seek to protect a valued local biophysical amenity

that has, say, been illegally damaged by a neighbouring firm, they are encouraged to seek redress

through the courts, arbitration bodies, or representative interest groups (NGOs, NSMs,

33A highly visible example of this is the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee in South Africa. See Bond & McInnes (2007).

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community organisations etc.); as pension-holders and shareholders they are encouraged to see

nature as an investment opportunity, albeit often-times with a ‘green conscience’. I could go on.

Where neoliberal individualism does not put all its emphasis on the market as the place for ‘voice

and choice’, it emphasises peoples’ right to pursue their own agendas through a panoply of

administrative, legal, statutory, voluntary and charitable bodies. In short, where it does not

restrict people’s relations to nature to atomised ‘blind’ market decisions (which are always

income constrained and thus highly unequal social and geographically), it seeks to decollectivise

and depoliticise neoliberalism and its effects via a tangle of governance institutions and non-

elected administrative organisations.

Of course, the individuals and communities to whom a neoliberal ethic is addressed are

also the very firms and enterprises seeking to benefit from the previous six elements of the

neoliberal programme. Small, medium and large businesses spanning the full spectrum of

economic sectors are encouraged to take responsibility for their activities – including the

biophysical conditions and outcomes. This means they are ‘free’ – subject to costs, regulations

and any social protests – to use the biophysical world as they see fit. This ‘freedom’, in neoliberal

regimes, includes responding to economic (dis)incentives created by government-dictated quotas,

taxes and compensation-obligations that are together designed to reduce perceived environmental

damage locally or translocally. And it also includes observance (in theory at least) of a range of

voluntary codes, self-monitoring procedures, certification criteria and external kite-marks that

states, workers, publics and others feel are necessary to minimise a range of social and/or

environmental harms.

V. Neoliberal environments: a ‘second-cut’ theory

Where does this abstract discussion of ‘neoliberal environments’ get us to? It is a ‘first-cut’

theorisation that is usefully holistic, is quite rich in an explanatory and heuristic sense, and is

able to detect a certain complex-order at work where antinomies, tensions, negotiations and

comprises are the order of the day. It allows us, I think, to imagine two ideal-typical scenarios

that are not so much alternatives as different aspects of the same Janus-faced situation.

The first scenario shows neoliberalism proceeding apace sectorally and spatially,

extending capitalism’s reach still further within existing capitalist states while also entraining

territories hitherto non- or only weakly capitalist to dramatic effect. The biophysical world

becomes increasingly subsumed to capital, both formally and physically – creating profits and

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jobs. New raw material sources, energy sources, physical spaces and waste disposal zones are

sought-out and used. This subsumption, courtesy of free market environmentalism, also involves

remediation, conservation and nature-protection so that raw material stocks, energy sources,

physical spaces and waste sinks are not always aggressively suborned to profit (or, rather, their

protection/remediation becomes the means to the end of profitability). This is a generalisation of

the ‘environmental Kuznets curve’ idea (see Stern, 2001), a neoliberal version of ‘sustainable

development’ which even some Marxists reluctantly concede may not be too far fetched (see

Buck, 2007). The interpellation of people as ‘individuals’ allows them to exercise consumer

choice over how they relate, through the market, to the biophysical world. The dependence of

large numbers of jobs upon nature-based commerce additionally binds many individuals to the

continuation of nature’s neoliberalisation. More generally, the creation of a set of ‘market

societies’ smooths the transition to a set of interconnected ‘market economies’. This minimises

dissent regarding the various remaining ‘externalities’ of the market, not least because previously

‘political’ issues become bureaucratised and monetised. It means the business sector can proceed

with broad public, worker and consumer consent. It means that the state does not, on the whole,

get dragged into – let alone become the focus of – outstanding problems of ‘market failure’, be

they biophysical or social. And it means that various NGOs, NSMs and voluntary groups are,

for the most part, able to act successfully as flanking organisations that, through their piecemeal

actions, do not threaten the neoliberal order or encourage others to seriously challenge it.

The second scenario, in contrast to all this, looks very different indeed. It depicts a world

in which the rapid expansion of capitalism – which is, after all, what neoliberalism amounts to –

produces massive additional environmental change that cannot be successfully managed

discursively or materially. This change is caused by unprecedented levels of commodity

production, transportation, consumption and disposal.34 Some of this change is highly localised

and regionalised, some of it leads to slower, longer-term, large-scale changes that may not be

immediately apparent but which are nonetheless significant over time. Alone, or together with

the various employment and social problems created by neoliberalism, this environmental

change gets politicised: there is a double-movement against deteriorating ‘conditions of

production’ as a market economy rubs-up against various pre-existing moral economies and

‘unruly’ biophysical systems. It is a reaction in which otherwise separate and atomised labour

34Some of this may be offset by the demise of ecologically harmful and now ‘uneconomic’ state-run or state-subsidized economic activities that are uncompetitive in a neoliberal context.

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and non-labour movements, organisations and struggles may find common cause. The interests

and claims of those workers whose jobs are directly dependent on environmentally destructive

practices are outweighed by those of other labour and non-labour groups. Unless ‘roll-out’

policies can stymie this double movement, business practice in the environment/resource sectors

becomes the focus of social protest. In regard to environmental conditions of production, market

policies may ultimately fail to keep-up with, and tackle, the proliferation of market failures

associated with an expansionary neoliberal capitalism. State bodies must somehow deal with all

this, and may themselves become the subject of intense pressure from citizens, workers, NGOs

and the like. Depending on how these bodies and capitalist firms respond, the double movement

leads to strong reform at a minimum, or something even more radical and threatening to the

neoliberal order.

The point, of course, is that these two rather stark scenarios should be seen as

representing interpenetrating tendencies within the theory of neoliberal environments that I

have laid-out. The dialectical interplay of multiple opposing forces – something which is

internalised by numerous actors, individuals and institutions – defines a research agenda for the

analysis of neoliberal environments in the real world. Which raises the crucial question: how can

the theory be used as a strong heuristic to guide future empirical research into neoliberal

environments, as well as to help us synthesise some of the already-existing concrete studies?

If the two scenarios outlined above were to operate in a largely ageographical, atemporal

world they would describe a universal dialectic where one of them won-out, or where there was

some sort of compromise. But actually-existing neoliberalism does not, needless to say,

correspond to this image of two sets of warring tendencies operative at all points of the compass.

We need, then, to venture a language that can help us get a handle on the variable character of

neoliberal environments, their effects and responses to them. We need, in other words, to refine

the argument made thus far. As Mansfield (2004: 580) insists, “The particular forms that

neoliberalism takes should not be taken as aberrant from an ideal … [We] … need to acknowledge

that [neoliberalism] … is something created in practice, and that through practice it becomes

varied, fractured and even contradictory” (emphasis added). Here I want to return to Peck and

Tickell’s arguments, underpinned by Harvey’s and Smith’s proper insistence that capitalism and

its dialectics operate unevenly in time and space. Since this has been a very long essay, I simply

want to hint at what a less abstract approach to really-existing neoliberal environments might

look like before moving to a very short conclusion. I trust that readers will be able to read some

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of the complexity of the foregoing argument into the theoretical sketch provided below without

me retracing the contours of that argument.

Peck and Tickell’s thesis, recall, is that diverse but connected neoliberalisations have been

an experimental policy response to economic crises in some countries, while an enforced regime

change in others – and in all cases have the capacity to generate their own crisis conditions

(economic, cultural, political and, though Peck and Tickell do not accent it, environmental too).

What they call ‘roll-back’ neoliberalism in its various local, regional and national forms clearly

has a strong capacity to generate environmental ‘bads’ and to therefore elicit many forms of civil

society protest. This, one might expect, is especially true in places and countries where many

people are highly and directly dependent upon the use of the non-human world for their

livelihoods (waged or otherwise) – and where the state apparatus, the ruling party/ies, the

military and the police/security services are temporarily or permanently weak. Think of

Bolivia’s gas and water wars, or the Zapatista struggles against ‘free trade’ in Mexican agriculture.

However, in those economies where most people are not directly dependent upon the

biophysical world for their livelihoods, roll-back neoliberalism’s environmental effects may not

(for this reason) factor strongly in the regime’s politicisation by dissenters. Think of how the

environmental movements’ strength in the USA waned badly during the Reagan and Bush

Senior years, only now recovering as Bush Junior exits office. Then there are those cases where

roll-out neoliberalism’s accelerated destruction of nature does not, in fact, generate strong

opposition because so many new jobs are dependent upon this destruction and because an

authoritarian state can maintain social order – think of contemporary China, which Harvey

(2005a, 2005b) regards as a neoliberal state in all but name. Alternatively, in the absence of such a

state forms of protest may erupt – call to mind the landless peoples’ movement in Brazil – but

the balance of social forces locally, regionally or nationally may be such that the protest does not

lead to immediate change.

Roll-out (or ‘deep’) neoliberalisation is, one might expect theoretically, difficult to

achieve in those many places, regions and countries where economic activity is still significantly

non-capitalist and where livelihoods remain nature-dependent. This is because ‘accumulation by

dispossession’ is the blunt tool that permits neoliberalism to become implanted, albeit

precariously absent a strong state. The elections of Morales in Bolivia and Chavez in Venezuela

can be read as rejections of the neoliberal way by those many people who lose when important

aspects of nature are neoliberalised. However, in the environmental domain, roll-out

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neoliberalisation is arguably quite possible – indeed, an actual accomplishment – in advanced

capitalist states, with their typically large ecological footprints and significant ecological debts to

the rest of the world. In these heavily urbanised states where most people are physically removed

from the biophysical world, free market environmentalism can be successfully ‘sold’ as a

biophysical management tool and, indeed, credited with some real successes (see, for instance,

Bakker [2003]). Where it cannot, the politicisation of environmental issues typically occurs

among a minority of disadvantaged groups (e.g. poor communities suffering environmental

injustice), articulate and educated NIMBYs of various kinds, sub-national state bodies opposed to

neoliberalism on principle,35 or those ethically-minded citizens concerned about global problems

like greenhouse gas emissions. In all cases, national state institutions are unlikely to see such

dissent challenge society-wide acceptance of neoliberal policies, not least because the populace is,

in so many registers, coopted into the neoliberal way of living.

Heuristically useful as this theoretical disaggregation of nature’s neoliberalisation is, it is

still not useful enough. As I suggested in my earlier (and otherwise positive) discussion of Peck

and Tickell’s arguments, it offers a worldview in which the analyst looks for places, regions and

countries that fit into one of two categories of neoliberalisation, or which, alternatively, are

proto- or post-neoliberal. But this is, of course, too simplified a geography. We would, I suggest,

be better advised to presume that roll-back and roll-out neoliberalisms actually coexist on the

ground in many situations, affecting different elements of what is ostensibly the same place,

region or country. Take Mexico, with its massive rural spaces, farming and peasant populations:

the dynamics here are arguably very different than in Mexico City, where middle class

professionals, rentiers, financiers and capitalists live in their own particular ‘neoliberal worlds’.36

These differentiated sub-national geographies of neoliberalism matter immensely to whether,

how and by whom it is opposed or accepted. Peck and Tickell’s argument about the ‘down-

loading’ of some national state powers and responsibilities means that local state bodies may have

to bear the brunt of dissent, meaning it does not necessarily filter-up to the national scale. When

it does, it is very much dependent on how the agitators define themselves and what the issues are

as to whether ‘movements’ form as opposed to fleeting, topically-specific ‘campaigns’ – the latter,

unlike the former, are cognitively unable to take-on neoliberalisation and its capitalist core (see

35I am thinking here of elected sub-national bodies that are social democratic, ‘green’ or socialist in outlook. Interestingly, and rather unusually I’d suggest, in the US even Republican states (like California) have of late criticised their national leaders on their poor record of environmental management. 36Peck and Tickell have, in a recent (2007) publication, arrived at much the same argument.

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Miller [2007] pp. 237-8). Movements are much more likely to emerge among those sections of a

population that have not succumbed to the interpellations of neoliberal subjectivity, and where

critical livelihood or lifestyle issues are at stake. Indeed, they may even garner sub-national state

support, when local/regional state institutions who are opposed to national policies, make

common-cause with disaffected elements of their home support.

Of course, overlaying, connecting, and modifying various sub-global neoliberalisations

are those global institutions whose policies and rules have furthered free trade and cross-border

investment this last 30 years. The focus here is far broader that ostensibly environmental

organisations and accords, like UNEP and Kyoto. It also includes bodies (e.g. the EU) and

agreements (e.g. TRIPS) relating to investment, debt, currencies, production, property and trade

– whose ostensibly ‘non-environmental’ character belies their significant implications for the

biophysical world. Given their distance from the populations of neoliberal states, one might

expect that those states’ populations could only meaningfully force change within them via their

own national state bodies – a typically slow process with few guarantees. I say this because

‘direct’ supranational, civil society action is logistically difficult to organise and sustain (witness

the high-visibility but low-impact of various ‘anti-capitalist’ struggles this last decade).37 This

suggests that very severe and widespread environmental problems would, in the biophysical

domain at least, be the only effective lever for such global governance change any time soon.

Such problems would be linked to a delegitimation of the use of market instruments and

supposed ‘smart technologies’ as tools of biophysical management, and a strong realisation by

business that its own profits are at seriously risk without profound environmental remediation.

That the US population has so far failed to demand more aggressive forms of environmental

regulation from their leaders, with the likely positive knock-on effects this would have on Kyoto

and other global accords, does not bode well for the near-term reform of ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism

– nor of transnational bodies like the WTO which connect roll-out with roll-back neoliberalisms

within a global political economy.

The theoretical picture being painted here – of uneven, often intersecting processes of

roll-back and roll-out neoliberalisation – suggests a highly variable pattern of environmental use,

37I realise that this is a very summary judgement. Even so, I find little evidence that protests staged at WTO meetings and the like have much altered multilateral, governmental agendas.

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regulation and societal response worldwide.38 I am hypothesising that the double-movement will

most likely have direct, underlying biophysical causes in those roll-back situations where very

resource-dependent societies (mostly ‘second’/postsocialist and ‘third world) are being

neoliberalised – unless countervailing forces put a lid on or diffuse dissent. By contrast, in more

complex, less resource-dependent societies I am suggesting that environmental issues are, in

theory, less likely to feature in any double movement during either roll-back or roll-out phases –

unless local or transnational environmental problems are perceived as very severe, such that their

amelioration requires reform of the total policy environment seen to cause or exacerbate them.

Elements of both these hypothesised situations could well be found within one urban, regional

or national space, depending. The validity of these rough hypotheses can only be understood

empirically, of course. But as a guide to doing such empirical research (and reflecting on separate,

existing studies), the sort of ideal-typical reasoning that I have engaged in here is arguably of

some utility. It focuses analytical attention on whether and why certain ‘expected’ processes and

outcomes actually occur. It sensitizes us to whether and how nature’s neoliberalisation is a hybrid

process, one where neoliberal policies and practices articulate with social democratic, religio-

ethical, communitarian, nationalist (etc.) ones at different spatio-temporal scales. These ‘other’

policies and practices are not residual to the analysis – mere ‘complicating factors’ to be noted

dutifully. Instead, they ought to feature as central elements that make all the difference to how

the sort of tendencies specified theoretically in this essay are (or are not) made flesh in more-or-

less unadulterated forms. After all, we live in a more-than-capitalist, more-than-neoliberal world.

And, in such a world, the material and discursive effects of the biophysical environment cannot

be neatly managed within a box called ‘environmental policy’, nor are ‘environmental

movements’ the only stakeholders beyond business and the state with something to say about

the fate on the non-human.

VI. Conclusion

The theory of neoliberal environments I have put forward in this essay is just that: a theory. It is

thus, from the perspective of empirical researchers, ultimately indeterminate: it cannot in itself

explain the concrete-real because it lacks sufficient granularity. However, there is a large

difference between conceptual indeterminacy and sheer randomness. The framework presented

38Here I disagree with Prudham and McCarthy’s (2004: 275) judgement that “environmental concerns … represent the most powerful source of political opposition to neoliberalism”. I think the picture is more complex and uneven.

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contains, I hope, sufficient cognitive content and complexity that it can help us address the gap

in understanding that has formed this essay’s premise.

However, far more than cognitive issues are at stake here. This essay, like much of the

supporting literature to which it has referred, is critical of its theoretical object (‘neoliberalism’).

But what does it mean to be critical of something that does not exist in the theoretical form in

which it is represented? What, in other words, does it mean to be critical of nature’s

neoliberalisation in practice rather than just conceptually? These are important questions because

even the theoretical argument presented here has sought to steer clear of simplicities and

universalisms. It has been a meta-theoretical argument yet one that does not, I hope, fall foul of

the criticisms made by those suspicious of ‘totalising’ arguments. This suggests that Left critics of

nature’s neoliberalisation – indeed, of neoliberalisations in all their dimensions – cannot (and

should not) assume that is it always and everywhere regressive and to be opposed on principle.

As Sayer (1995) has argued powerfully, the Left does itself no favours if it evaluates complex

objects by way of blanket moralisms that side-step the challenges of proper normative

argumentation. The neoliberalisation of nature in both theory and practice ought certainly to be

the subject of our censure for all sorts of compelling reasons. And there will be some concrete

situations that are relatively simple to understand and evaluate negatively. But, equally, we have

to take seriously those situations in which nature’s neoliberalisation seems to ‘work’, without

always supposing that those for whom it works are the victims of ideology, ‘sell-outs’ or

otherwise naïve. In short, we need to operationalise an evaluative mind-set every bit as a complex

as the cognitive one I have presented in this essay. Local and national scale successes must be

reckoned with just as much as failures, and all of these married with more global forms of

evaluation. At that point, the Left will have a truly comprehensive and robust approach to the

variable, local-global geometry of neoliberal environments. Achieving that will be challenging

indeed. But, then again, it is both the curse and excitement of social science that its objects of

analysis are simultaneously small-scale and large-scale, complex and dynamic, factual and

evaluative. To shy away from the challenge is to concede that the world ultimately escapes our

capacity to understand and appraise it. And that would amount to intellectual and political

defeatism.

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Table 1: Modes of neoliberalization (from Peck & Tickell, 2003)

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Table 2: Geographies of neoliberalization (from Peck & Tickell, 2003)

61

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