ALI, Harris (with Roger KEIL)

Please see abstract listed under KEIL, Roger.

ALTVATER, Elmar

Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion (Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)

Is there an Ecological Marx?
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)


Marx is ambivalent with regard to the conception of nature in his critique of political economy. Sharing the interpretations of mainstream economics, nature is transformed from an ecological into an economic entity dissolving its holistic totality and its integrity into an ensemble of individual natural resources. In addition, Marx's critique of political economy with regard to the societal relation to nature is targeted to understanding human needs, thus transforming nature into use values. These categories have to be explicated. Therefore, the question "Is there an ecological Marx?" can only be answered by analysing these categories and the dynamics of the system following the laws of accumulation, as is bound to natural laws. Central categories in this respect are accumulation in time and expansion in space (globalisation), entropy and irreversibility. Such analysis makes it possible to address Jim O`Connor’s seminal approach to the "second crisis" of capitalism.

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BARTCZAK, Andi W.

Double-Edged Sword: Science for Profit, Science for Environmental Justice
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation and Political Ecology I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)


Most nonscientists consider science a field that they could never master: they innocently trust scientists or those who claim to have scientific knowledge. There is true science, where researchers pose hypotheses and then design experiments to determine if their hypotheses are true. There is junk science, where a business funds the research and dictates the conclusions; the co-opted scientist designs the experiment so that it will lead to the predetermined conclusion. There is soundbite science, where one or two facts are used to “prove” a foregone conclusion, despite evidence to the contrary. There are many examples of true science investigating hazards to people and the environment, such as the research done on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) discharged by General Electric into the Hudson River. There are also examples of scientists who twist their science to serve their paymasters; a case in point is the junk science commissioned by General Electric to prevent dredging of PCBs from the Hudson River. And there are people with technical backgrounds who take one or two facts out of context to support moneymaking schemes: a case in point is the timber industry’s use of experts claiming that forest management and fire prevention can be best accomplished by logging the largest (and most valuable) trees. True science explains that we don’t know enough to “manage” complex ecosystems, while cutting the largest trees increases the risk of catastrophic fires in forests.

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BOND, Patrick

Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion
(Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)

Global Governance Quandaries: Red-Green Activist Analyses, Strategies, Tactics and Alliances
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday 11:15, TEL 0016)


The recent 'global public goods' discourse has accompanied greater awareness of international-scale ecological problems, including global warming, water shortages and degradation, fossil fuel scarcity, species extinction and fisheries depletion, weapons proliferation, public health epidemics, and the impact of major 'development' projects on politics and economics, to name a few. The emergence of social movement networks aiming, simultaneously, at social and environmental justice, from local to global scales, is a potential counterweight to neoliberal international agencies and governments. But the red/green activists have yet to seriously consider, much less reach consensus on, scale politics and programmes. They often suffer divergent analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances, as witnessed in several emblematic campaigns, including battles over megadams and extractive minerals/petroleum industries. This is not a terminal problem, however, and the paper attempts to identify points where militant particularist approaches can achieve not only convergence, but synthesis and greater impact.


        view Patrick Bond's paper
        view Patrick Bond's presentation

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BUCK, Christopher

Experience First! Adorno and Radical Environmental Thought
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0006)


In this paper I argue that Adorno’s philosophy can contribute to a constructive intervention into the debate between deep and social ecologists. By adopting Lukacs’ analysis of the commodity form, Adorno avoids the tendency of deep and social ecologists to posit either ideological or material forces respectively as the essential cause of the ecological crisis. Moreover, Adorno’s critique of idealism’s presupposition of an unmediated separation of subject and object provides the groundwork for a reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and nature. In short, Adorno invites people to reflect on the way in which they are “natural” insofar as they are living beings that must participate in culturally mediated acts of self-preservation. As embodied subjects that encounter the world with both mind and body, humans can cultivate an affinity with external nature that enables them to experience it as more than manipulable matter. These non-instrumental experiences of nature can motivate people to engage in ethical and political projects. While Adorno famously denies the probability, if not possibility, of realizing his vision of reconciliation, his critics tend to overlook the theoretical justifications for this pessimism. For Adorno, the question is not “What is to be done?” but rather “What, at this particular historical juncture, prevents people from participating in transformative practices?” His answer to this question has implications for the politics of radical ecology: it suggests that radical environmentalists ought to direct their attention towards the structural conditions that inhibit people from experiencing the world in non-instrumental and non-anthropocentric ways.

       
view Christopher Buck's paper

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CASTREE, Noel

The Political Economy of Environmental Change:
From Blunt Tools to Sharp Instruments

Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)


Over the last 3 decades political economists have built up a formidable arsenal of concepts and evidence that pose fundamental questions about the way environments are transformed in capitalist societies. In this presentation I will argue that a number of theoretical confusions and normative elisions threaten to diminish the critical power of what contributors to journals like CNS have been arguing over recent years. Surveying a range of Marxian and neo-Marxism literature, I call for a systematic effort to identify points of commonality and difference in the arguments put forward to explain and evaluate environmental change in capitalist societies. I maintain that diminishing intellectual returns will set-in unless a concerted effort is made among Marxists and fellow-travelers to clarify their objects of critique. At a time when the creative destruction of natural environments proceeds apace, political economists need to present a more unified, precise and qualified critique of this destructive creativity.

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CHESTERS, Graeme (with Ian WELSH)

Complex Ecologies of Struggle
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice III
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)


This paper will explore the discursive ways in which ecology has functioned as a locus for thinking radically about social change and consider the implications of these ‘ecologies’ for Marxist and post-Marxist social and political theory. From philosophical treatises on the ecology of freedom (Bookchin), through social-psychological theories of the subject and ecologies of the mind and ideas (Bateson, Guattari) and on to the ‘political ecology of knowledge practices’ articulated by radical-empiricists of the Deleuzian mould (Delanda, Massumi, Protevi), this is a fertile terrain of dissonant and dissident thinking. Emerging from extensive empirical engagement with the alternative globalisation movement over a number of years this paper will suggest the importance of these ‘ecological’ insights for consideration of the implications, strategies, tactics and trajectories of the global movements contesting neo-liberal capitalism. The authors will argue that the emergence of complex ecologies of struggle simultaneously suggests the need for reappraisal of Marxist models of social change whilst revealing an ontology of radical potentiality.

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DEMIROVIC, Alex

Crisis and Nature
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0006)

In general crisis is conceived of being a mere economic crisis. Left and Marxist theory succeeded in broadening the scope of the conception of crisis to political and also to cultural processes and at least to the reproduction of the subjectivity of individuals itself. From the beginning to the end of the eighties there was a discussion going on how to integrate the so called question of ecology into Marxist theory. Here too the concept of crisis was useful to make understandable processes of destruction of the environment. Discussions leaded to the elaboration of the concept of a second contradiction of capitalism or a crisis of the societal relation to nature. Since the nineties we can observe, how the state attempt to cope with this crisis. The state therefore is undergoing structural transformations. In the paper some of the consequences of the reorganisation of the state will be discussed. The paper will examine whether the expectations of some of the representatives of the regulation school that a new type of social compromise including environmental issues is right or the crisis is still reproduced but in new forms and also a higher level.

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DORSEY, Michael

Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion
(Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)


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EKERS, Michael

The Canadian Tree-Planting Experience:
Producing Natures, Alienation and Critique

Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics IV
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0014)

Over the past twenty years over a half-billion trees a year are planting in Canada. These trees which themselves are part human and part nature, are planted by a young, unorganized labour-force. This paper will explore the socio-natural intricacies of the tree-planting industry, which contributes to both the production of distinctive capitalist socio-natures and a defining experience for up to 10,000 individuals a year. The first section of the paper explores how the tree-planting industry contributes the production of nature, involving the planting of cyborg trees, the exploitation and alienation of labour, the economic calculus and competition of individual planters, all of which become embodied in the material landscape. The second section tries to uncover the unique subjectivity of tree-planters, who are generally white university students with a history of privilege. It will be suggested that aside from the financial incentives of planting, the tree-planting experience involves transference of privilege, an encounter with the ‘other’, and a chance to engage with ‘nature’, but in the process objectifies individuals as wage-labourers. However it will be argued that the tree-planting experience cannot be thrown out as simply being bourgeois, but rather represents a limited critique of the alienation of wage-labour and the banality of everyday life. This paper will shed light on a unique industry that has truly produced capitalist socio-natures and will illustrate the transference, alienation and critique that is latent in the tree-planting experience.

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ERVINE, Kate

A Critique of Green Developmentalism: The Case of Chiapas
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice III
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)


At an estimated cost of $90.05 million U.S. dollars and a project life spanning two phases of 7 years in total, the Mexico-Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MMBC) has been touted as a ‘win-win’ opportunity for the mainstreaming of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development practices into the Mexican policy-making process, specifically in the recipient states of Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, and Campeche. While substantial funding is to be provided by the Mexican State itself, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the World Bank are similarly playing key roles in the evolution, implementation and funding of the MMBC. Utilizing a political ecology perspective, this paper undertakes a critical analysis of the ‘green developmentalist’ agenda of mainstream global environment and development institutions. In particular, it contends that rather than providing a means through which environmental degradation can be meaningfully addressed, the ‘green developmentalist’ agenda instead provides a vehicle through which capital develops new methods and strategies for capital expansion while simultaneously failing to address the role of the capitalist system itself plays in furthering ecological destruction. Moreover, adapting the notion of ‘coercive conservation’ to the case of Chiapas, it is argued that the MMBC paves the way for the Mexican State to rearticulate its spatial and political control in areas where its legitimacy has been contested by popular indigenous struggles for autonomy and self-government that have challenged both state development plans and private interests in the region.

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FABER, Daniel

International Capitalism, Ecological Injustice, and Unsustainable Production
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics V
(Sunday 11:45, TEL 0016)


To sustain economic growth and higher profits in the new global economy, international capital is increasingly relying on ecologically unsustainable forms of production. Motivated by increased competition and the growing costs of regulation, business is leading a political movement for “regulatory reform,” rollback of environmental laws, worker health and safety, consumer protection, and the like. Termed “neo-liberalism,” the effect has been an increase in the rate of exploitation of working people (human nature) and the environment (mother nature). It is the least politically powerful and most economically marginalized sectors of the population which are being selectively victimized by this process and the resulting ecological crisis. Global economic restructuring, facilitated by neo-liberalism, is implicated in this deterioration. Growing environmental injustice and unsustainable production are thus two sides of the same political-economic coin and are now so dialectically related to each other as to become part of the same historical process.

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FREUND, Peter

Fast Cars/Fast Foods:
Modes of Consumption, Space-Time, Health and Environmental Consequences

Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology III
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)


Capitalism has encouraged some unhealthy and enviromentally destructive modes of consumption(e.g., fast foods).Such modes, once established, help stabilize, make predictable and in general help control markets. Such modes also help naturalise a way of life-including unhealthy environments and "life styles". The focus here is on an eminently contemporary capitalist mode of consumption-mass motorization. Increasingly, individual passenger car transport systems in highly developed forms characterise "rich nations" and are being globalised to other nations. Many of the unhealthy/environmentally destructive consequences of auto-centered transport systems emanate from its impact on space and time. Mass destruction of the landscape, the unhealthy fouling of the ambient environment, the intensive exploitation of nonrenewable resources are some consequences. Health is affected by the production of injuries and fatalities, ontologically insecure public spaces, a spatial-temporal organisation that works against physical fitness. Vulnerability to such effects is enhanced by spatial and individual social inequalities produced by class, gender, race-ethnicity, age, and disability. The status of a nation as "poor " or "rich" is also relevant. Car centered transport has an affinity with sprawl. In recent years, adverse health and environmental consequences of sprawl have become more salient. It is these that are the focus here. The conclusion will address parallels between fast food /fast cars. Both are characterised by their effects on space-time and both are energy-resource intensive (oil/land). Supersize meals at Macdonalds are the culinary equivalent of S.U.V.s. It may not be a stretch to argue, in the spirit of a G.M. excecutive, that miniburgers make mini profits. How might red greens facilitate emancipating and sustainable spatio-temporal arrangements and uses of technology? Socialists need to fantasize about alternative modes of consumption that are "healthy" and leave a smaller ecological footprint yet meet needs and are pleasurable for the greatest number of people possible.

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GINDIN, Sam

Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion
(Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)


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GOLDMAN, Michael

The World Bank and the Making of ‘Green Neoliberalism’
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)


This paper will highlight the phenomenal role of the World Bank over the past fifteen years as the trailblazer in constituting a hegemonic type of ‘global environmentalism’ that fuses neocolonial forms of conservation and eco-rational logic with neoliberal forms of capitalist politics and capital accumulation. In this period, the Bank has been pivotal in facilitating what Jim O’Connor (1998) and Martin O’Connor (1994) have called the “green stage” of capitalist development, and what I call “green neoliberalism.” The paper lays out an analytic framework for understanding both the nature of World Bank power and immanent forms of counter-hegemony in the world today.

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GONZALEZ, George A.

Urban Sprawl, Global Warming, and Oil Depletion:
The Unraveling of the Modern Economy

Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)


The author describes urban zones as areas where goods and services are consumed. U.S. cities are particularly configured to maximize consumption. This is because of their highly sprawled form. U.S. cities are so sprawled because of the influence of local growth coalitions, made up of large land holders and developers, as well as of local economic interests that benefit from an expanding local consumer base. More decisive in creating urban sprawl in the U.S. is the fact that during the 1920s and leading into the Great Depression, the U.S. had an abundance of capital and an industrial base geared toward the production of consumer durables, especially automobiles. Urban sprawl was the means to absorb this excess capital and the output of U.S. productive capacity. Urban sprawl, however, is predicated on the unsustainable consumption of fossil fuels, especially oil. Additionally, the level of fossil fuel consumption necessitated by urban sprawl is environmentally destabilizing in-so-far as it brings about the rapid warming of the globe. Given that urban sprawl is key to the stability of the modern economy, global warming and oil depletion bring its viability into question. The analysis put forward here is consistent with the business dominance view of public policymaking.

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GÖERG, Christoph

Ecological Imperialism: A New Level in the Domination of Nature Postfordist Relationship with Nature and Adorno’s Theory of Non-Identity
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0006)


The presentation will focus on a more theoretical problem: the role of ecological problems for a theory of society building on Marx´ critique of political economy. Therefore at least four strongly connected questions will be highlighted. Concerning the basic contradictions of capitalism, first, the fundamental role of societal relationships with nature in and for the development of societies must be analysed, encompassing much more than the explicit reflection on existing or threatening environmental problems. Secondly, the actual historical situation (the emerging “postfordism”) in the development of societal relationships with nature must be grasped, keeping in mind the power relations among dominant actors (i.e. the New Imperialism) as much as the scope for environmental reforms. To estimate this scope, thirdly, we have to focus on the conflicts carried out for the shaping of societal relationships with nature and the institutional aspects of their regulation, but keeping in mind new forms of technological and scientifical constructions of nature, too. Fourthly, the limits in this kind of constructions have to be analysed reflecting on what T.W. Adorno called the Non-Identity of Nature. Following Adorno, limits in the appropriation of nature are not given in nature itself, but have to be determined in a critique of current forms of the domination of nature. And that means today: of the new Ecological Imperialism.

       
view Christoph Goerg's presentation

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GULICK, John

Soybeans and the Sino-Brazilian Socio-Ecological Division of Labor
Session: World Order, Imperialism and Global Ecological Politics I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)


When the global justice movement hit its stride at the turn of the 21st Century, it became a commonplace among the movement’s champions that a decentralized “network of networks” – indigenous peoples’, peasant, and urban poor organizations in the Global South linked with solidarity campaigners in the Global North – now constituted the leading edge of resistance to the Washington Consensus. However, the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq shifted attention to the lingering reality of geopolitical struggle in the world. This in turn resuscitated the notion that states (rather than radical red-green civil society organizations) outside the capitalist core could serve as vehicles for ecological and social justice – or, at very least, as instruments to open up some breathing room for bottom-up initiatives of the Global South grassroots. The G-20’s derailing of the WTO Cancun Ministerial, led by large-market developing countries such as Lula’s Brazil and Hu’s China, might be cited as one instantiation of this premise. For both intellectual and political reasons, this newfound recognition of the significance of state power outside the imperialist centers is welcome. However, it is important to realize that the big players of the non-OECD world essentially seek the institutionalization of a global capitalist order that, instead of selectively applying neo-liberal policies in the service of metropolitan accumulation, consistently abides by its Ricardian “comparative advantage” promises. Not only does this agenda bias the interests of sub-imperialist elites above those of the Global South’s poorest and most vulnerable, it is also founded on a set of increasingly untenable assumptions about the availability of cheap hydrocarbon fuels and inputs and the predictability of regional climates. In this paper, we explore one case-study that distills the ideological and practical limitations of the Group of 20’s agenda, namely emergent patterns of bilateral trade and investment between Brazil and China. Focusing on one dynamic aspect of these patterns – the exchange of Brazil’s industrially farmed soybeans for light manufactured goods assembled in China, with ocean-going container ships connecting the two locales of commodity production, transformation, and consumption – we make the following arguments about the resulting “socio-ecological division of labor”: 1) It accelerates the destruction and degradation of human, animal, and plant habitat in both the Cerrados and the Amazon rainforest (accelerating global climate destabilization); 2) It undercuts the subsistence of peasant smallholders in Northeast China; and 3) On both continents, it locks into place irreversible land use changes and inflexible physical infrastructure investments that will remain commercially useful only as long as world market prices for hydrocarbon fuels and inputs remain low enough to underpin global economies of scale in general and energy-intensive industrial agriculture in particular.

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GUNSTER, Shane

City Dreaming: Commercial Discourse and the Production of Urban Space
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)


My paper will offer a critical account of the representational strategies used to represent urban spaces in contemporary television advertising, specifically attending to the complex interplay between signifiers of natural and urban space. Although there is a rich scholarship on the depiction of cities in media such as film and literature, there has been virtually no attention directed to the use of urban environments in the construction of ads for a wide range of brands and commodities. I will address this gap by conducting a critical review of the representation of cities in television commercials gathered from a systematic sampling of US and Canadian television during the Fall 2004 season. Two sets of questions will guide my analysis. First, how does advertising produce and negotiate the simultaneous depiction of cities as utopian spaces (e.g. as entertaining, diverse, productive, exciting, etc.) and dystopian spaces (e.g. as dangerous, mundane, polluted, overcrowded, etc.)? Second, what is the relationship between nature and the city in TV advertising and how might this affect the ways in which we think, feel and dream about nature, the city and, above all, the relations between them? Drawing upon the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin and contemporary critics such as Mike Davis and Andrew Ross, I will argue that simplistic dualisms such as utopia/dystopia and city/nature are inadequate in terms of explaining the significance and the effects of how the culture industry constructs urban space in the context of advertising. We need a far more complex understanding, for example, of how nature serves not only as a foil to the city, but also as a potent allegory for how urban environments are (often) now experienced in a reified form, frozen and petrified by capitalist urbanization into a ‘second nature’ that appears just as inscrutable, unpredictable and ungovernable as ‘first nature’. This paper is part of a larger project that is exploring the use of utopian and dystopian imagery in commercial discourse and its effect upon the possibility for social and political mobilization.

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HALEY, Brendan

Social Democracy and Ecological Modernization: Sweden and Canada
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)


This paper will study Sweden’s policies of ecological modernization in order to learn lessons for similar policy proposals emanating from Canada’s New Democratic Party and labour union movement.  In Canada, NDP leader Jack Layton has proposed a form of “green industrial policy” and environmental investment strategies that are similar to the “greening of the Swedish welfare state” (folkhemmet) that was implemented by the Swedish Social Democrats from 1996 to the present. The study is interested in the successes and failures of the “greening” of the Swedish welfare state, how environmental issues are reconciled with the aspirations of the labour movement and social democracy and the model of development proposed by the labour union movement and social democratic parties. These questions will be assessed through policy research as well as through interviews with relevant actors in Sweden and Canada. The study will evaluate if forms of ecological modernization are a viable economic strategy for the labour union movement and social democratic parties. As well as if there is a willingness to move “beyond” ecological modernization, which appeals to traditional concepts of competitiveness and economic growth, towards a political strategy that encourages explorations of alternative concepts of development.

       
view Brendan Haley's paper

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HERMANN, Christoph

European Integration and the Impact on the Environment
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)


A number of authors have characterized the process of European integration as consolidation of Neoliberalism in Europe. Among others, Stephen Gill, has coined the term ‚new constitutionalism’ to account for the institutionalisation of neoliberal policies such as the promotion of ‚free’ trade, monetary restraint, budgetary austerity, privatization and flexibilisation of labor. “New constitutionalism,” in his words, “is an international governance framework. It seeks to separate economic policies from broad political accountability in order to make governments more responsive to the discipline of market forces and correspondingly less responsive to popular-democratic forces and processes.” Yet while Gill centers his analysis on economic issues, including the Growth and Stability Pact, environmental issues play a particular important role when it comes to sustainability, accountability and democratic processes in Europe. In this paper the impact of European integration and the alleged propensity to neoliberal restructuring on the environment will be assessed. Special attention will be paid to the principle of mutual recognition that has guided much of the recent integration process. Despite some important progress in environmental policies, mutual recognition is used as a substitution for the introduction of common European standards – including environmental standards. The paper will discuss the share of competencies between the European Commission and the member states in environmental issues and the consequences for the protection of the environment. It will also address the influence of big European and international companies and their ‘lobbying power’ in preventing the establishment of strong and effective protection measures. In addition the draft-constitution for the European Union will be analyzed and the role of environmental protection in relation to other policy issues will be discussed.

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HEYNEN, Nik

Starving for Revolution: The Black Panther Party’s Production of Revolutionary Art and the Urban Political Ecology of Hunger
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)


There is no revolutionary art as yet. There are the elements of this art, there are hints and attempts at it, and, what is most important, there is the revolutionary man, who is forming the new generation in his own image and who is more and more in need of this art. How long will it take for such art to reveal itself clearly? Leon Trotsky (1923)

In Raymond Williams’ tradition of “out-Marxizing” the Marxists of his time through producing more holistic explanations about historical material conditions, there is still work to do for the sake of understanding ecological imperialism and the uneven production of urban political ecology. This paper will excavate the uneven socionatural relations that necessarily inspired the revolutionary art of the Black Panther Party’s Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas to better elucidate strategies for radical opposition to the contradictions of capitalism. Douglas’ art drew on the debilitating inequality within much of the African-American lived experience, but did so from a perspective of defiance and hope, which now shines as a utopian example for further radical resistance. While Douglas’ work focused on many topics ranging from global imperialism to local police brutality, this paper will engage the uneven socionatural relations that are manifest in one of Douglas’ most familiar themes, that of inner city hunger as it is an under-theorized/under-examined quandary within Marxist urban political ecology. Douglas’ art, the art that was/is most responsible for representing the politics of the Black Panther Party through their newspaper, synthesizes the charged politics of scale ranging from his bodily experiences to wider African-American experiences of material inequality. In response to Trotsky’s proclamation and question, it is the formation of this “revolutionary man” through everyday life on the brutal streets of Oakland that produced a means of powerful resistance to imperial oppression. Douglas’ works of revolutionary art provide a useful lens through which to dialectically unpack the political economy of urban hunger, thus furthering the contributions of radical left ecology and possibilities of radical response to the contradictions of capitalism.

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HUBER, Matthew

We are All Resource-Dependent People: Towards an Urban Political Ecology of Consumption Acknowledging Resource-Use, Livelihoods and Nature in Cities
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0006)


Political ecology claims to examine the dialectics of nature and society by offering a “toolkit” situating local resource-use and concomitant “livelihoods” in broader historical, political-economic and cultural context. Yet the bulk of this research has been confined to rural, primary-production contexts. This paper emerges from the conviction that “resource-use” does not begin and end with extraction. Indeed, political ecology’s failure to see “resource-use”, “livelihoods” and “nature” within cities—manifest not only in parks, rivers, and gardens, but also materials, energy and wastes—has led many to ignore the role of specifically urban processes in the nature-society dialectic. This paper provides a theoretical edifice for constructing an urban political ecology of consumption. Using Marx’s theory of the commodity relation (and its “fetishisms”), I assert that sites of commodity exchange and “final” consumption contain veiled, but ever-present, “accumulated” relations between labor and nature. As the majority of commodities are consumed in urban contexts, these sites are uniquely shielded from natural “sources”—the material provisioning through the socioecological relations of production—and “sinks”—the socioecological circulation of waste. Furthermore, as consumption literature emphasizes, the sites of commodity exchange not only serve capital’s need for surplus-value realization, but also constitute discursive “terrains” of cultural meaning. Yet, the dialectical “nature-society” repercussions of these “consumer cultures” remain largely under-theorized. By situating the “denaturalized” cultural contexts of everyday consumption within the historical-geography of material practice, I conclude that political ecology can substantially unpack how urban livelihoods are structured by mostly unacknowledged power over and entitlements to nature.

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KEIL, Roger (with Harris ALI)

The Urban Political Ecology of Infectious Disease: The Case of SARS in Toronto
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0006)


Political ecologists have begun to look seriously at the relationships of globalized urbanization and the spread of infectious disease. Historical and medical geographers (e.g. Diamond 1999; Craddock 2000) have long examined the historical ties between urbanization and infectious disease. More recently, often under the impression of the changing global conditions after 9/11, the relationships of (re-)emerging disease, migration and globalization have come under critical review (McMurray and Smith 2001; Sarasin 2001; Gandy and Zumla 2003) On the basis of such work, we are proposing to take a look at this relationship through the lens of urban political ecology (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). As Frederick Buell has pointed out, the political ecology of infectious disease in an age is specific as it raises fundamental questions about whether “modernity is failing, not ironically defeating itself” (Buell 2003: 130). To what degree does the globalized urbanization process itself – ostensibly billed as a modernization process – contribute to this development. Using the Toronto SARS outbreak as a case, on the basis of the articulations of Toronto into the global cities network, and informed by newer political ecological work (Forsyth, Latour, Law, Luke, Whatmore, Castree), we will work out the specific urban political ecology aspects of emerging infectious disease in an age of global urbanization.

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KÖHLER, Bettina
Faculty of Architecture and Planning

The Making of the Global Water Crisis
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics III
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0010)


This paper joins the assumption that the use of water is and has always been a contested terrain, referring to complex material, social and symbolic realities at various spatial scales. Against this background the growing popularity of a global water crisis is analysed. Although referring to problems, as serious as the lack of access to drinking water of great part of the world population, the global water crisis is analysed as a produced discourse, which has itself political implications. The paper examines how central features of the discourse, as the privileging of a global scale perspective and the focus on a certain kind of scientific rationality and technical solutions – which have been key-elements in recent policy programmes in the context of ecological modernization – contribute directly to the ongoing commodification process of social relations and nature.

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KOVEL, Joel

The Conditions of Ecosocialism
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0006)


We need to concretely imagine-prefigure the contours of a post-capitalist society in an ecologically rational relationship with nature. The task is not a matter of drawing up blueprints but of conceiving the transformation in terms of a radically different mode of production. The central feature of this would be the reconfiguration of production into terms of ecosystems rather than commodities. The chief goal of this presentation will be to rethink the internal relations between these two points of view, building upon O'Connor's insight into use value as the neglected aspect of socialism's conceptualization of political economy. If we are to define use value in ecosystemic terms, as the point of insertion of consciousness into nature, we are in turn obliged to introduce a subjective dimension into ecological thought. However, introducing the ecocentric ethic essential for the new mode of production, the category of intrinsic value needs to be integrated with use values.

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LANGELLE, Orin

Corporate Globalization’s Destruction of Earth’s Life Support Systems
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)


Corporate globalization requires “unlimited growth” - a never-ending increase in the transformation of “resources” into capital. One third of the Earth’s natural wealth was lost from 1970-95. The Smithsonian estimates that the Earth loses over 300 species per day due to habitat destruction. Many native peoples are threatened with extinction and global warming threatens all life on earth. Corporate globalization has pushed the Earth’s life support systems to the brink of collapse. This ecological crisis demonstrates that an economic system based on accumulation of wealth and unlimited growth is unsustainable. Violence skyrockets in regions of the world where coveted resources are concentrated, such as the Mideast and equatorial regions. While resources diminish, conflicts escalate. Targeted violence is one tool of corporate globalization. Another tool impacting populations is economic violence. The World Bank/IMF’s policies are designed to wrest control of natural resources from resident populations - mainly indigenous peoples and people in the Global South. Even human beings are used as expendable resources. The WTO and trade agreements like NAFTA provide legalities for corporations and disenfranchise communities - overturning human rights, environmental and workers’ rights laws. These forms of coercion are two sides of the same coin of corporate globalization. Social movements can magnify their effectiveness by linking together to create a powerful movement for change that addresses the common economic, social and political roots of our issues.

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LUKE, Tim

The Structures of Sustainable Degradation:
Eco-Managerialism, Eco-Judicialization, and Eco-Commercialism

Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics IV
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0014)


This paper examines the systems and structures that nest in rhetorics of sustainable development, collaborative governance, and natural capitalism, especially in North America, as responses to worldwide environmental crises experienced during the past generation. There are now elaborate discursive networks, policy coalitions, and technological formations that inter-operate in the most advanced market economies, locally and globally, as interventions bent upon attaining "sustainable" development amidst severe environmental stress. Yet, these responses seem instead to only be developing highly adaptable structures of sustainable degradation, which closely manage, carefully juridify, or completely commercialize the practices whereby Nature's truly sustaining ecologies are exploited for the short-run benefit of the few with short-run costs to the many. In the end, however, they are producing structures of long-run ecologically degraded ruination for all.

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MAHNKOPF, Birgit

The Impact of Regional and Bilateral Agreements on Trade and Investment on Sustainable Developing
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)


The negative effects of free trade and foreign investment on the environment cannot be denied any more. Nevertheless, the liberalization of trade and foreign direct investment are considered as the only way of economic and social development in many developing countries. While multilateral agreements under the WTO (such as GATT, TRIPs and a new Multilateral Investment Agreement) are being fiercely opposed by social movements, interregional and bilateral agreements do not face a similar attention. However, these treaties which grew rapidly in number during the mid of the 1990s, include similar rules and can lead to far-reaching obligations for developing countries in areas where WTO decisions have not been taken yet or blocked by southern resistance. It is not just the US which pushes its economic interests in treaties outside the WTO. The EU is pursuing its own liberalization and deregulation scheme multilaterally within the WTO and at the same time in regional and bilateral agreements. Since most of the regional and bilateral agreements have been in force for a few years only, knowledge of the potential development impacts of these agreements is still limited. In the paper I will elaborate the main elements of regional free trade and bilateral investment agreements the EU already has negotiated and currently is negotiating with various developing countries as far more restrictive “WTO-plus” arrangements. Secondly, the requirements of a development-friendly approach to investment rules and the goals of an alternative order of world trade will be sketched. Thirdly, the role of ecological clauses will be discussed.

       
view Birgit Mahnkopf's paper

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MARTIN, George

Comparative Patterns and Social Ecologies of Global Motorization
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Saturday 15:45, TEL 0016)


The global diffusion of motorized urban sprawl is a significant material driver of local and regional social ecological change around the world. The agencies and infrastructures of this motorization promote built environments that are voracious consumers of oil, and are substantial contributors to ambient pollutions and global warming. While it has become a focus of environmental regulation in the North, motorized urban sprawl is being increasingly diffused to the massive urban centers of the South. In the South, the scales of the social ecological impacts of motorized sprawl in the 21st Century carry the potential to dwarf those recorded in the North in the 20th Century. While alarms have been sounded by environmentalists and others about the threat of greatly increased global greenhouse emissions posed by the development of this motorized urban sprawl in the South, this paper develops a framework for understanding a neglected topic: The differential social ecological patterns of motorized urban sprawl around the world. These patterns shed light on the range of ways in which the current intensification of global capitalism impact local and regional areas.

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MARTINEZ-ALIER, Joan

Capitalism: Dynamic or Doomed?
Panel Discussion (Friday 15:30, TEL 0016)

Environmental Justice and Regional Planning

Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0010)


Do cities produce anything of commensurable value in return for the energy and materials they import, and for the residues they excrete? Are the internal environmental conflicts over these resource flows in cities successfully pushed onwards to larger geographical scales? The more prosperous the city, the more successful it may be at displacing environmental loads, and the more successful also in solving internal environmental conflicts. Social movements against some of the "externalities" produced in cities could push for urban sustainability. Low-income groups, working class, and people of color constitute a movement for environmental justice, connecting environmental issues with racial and gender inequality, and with poverty. Environmental conflicts in European, Latin American, and Asian cities will be considered.

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McMAHON, Michael

From Neoliberal Threats to Social-Nature: Lessons from Great Lakes Basin Struggles?
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics III
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0010)


“The era of neo-liberal globalization appears to be drawing to a close.” This controversial opening to a 2001 contribution to CNS (12 (4) p. 67) is one that I build on with the help of related interventions running from the CBC’s “Dead in the Water” (2003), to its “H2O” (2004), to the still more recent outcomes of cross-border negotiations around Great Lakes waters in the wake of late-1990s, neoliberal threats. The former Canadian public television programs highlight reversals to the water privatization agenda around the world, even as they dramatize the return of the heavy hand of the capitalist state via a would be US move on Canadian waters. And here the main point of the paper is framed: ecological activists in both Canada and the United States may all too easily have accepted the neoliberal threats of 1990s as hard and fast givens, especially with regards to the “uncooperative commodity” that is water. In turn, a good number of environmentalists became complicit with state-led proposals to permit exports of water to service sprawl beyond the margins of the Great Lakes basin, to avoid the still bigger threat of WTO-framed, long-distance water sales. This is the so-called Annex 2001 process. One of the questions it begs is this: If the era of neo-liberal globalization is drawing to a close with the help of new state-citizen alliances, how are we to proceed to better construct “social-nature relations”? How might such scalar constructions and productions of nature provide a basis for challenges to supra-regional entities such as post-9/11 “North America”, where capital remains very much alive, if not well?

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MIES, Maria

War is the Father of all Things" (Heraclit) but "Nature is the Mother of Life” (C.V. Werlhof)
Session: Keynote Address
(Friday 19:00, TEL 0016)


The contradictions of global capitalism manifest themselves these days more and more in WARS. Wars, conquest, colonialism were not only its first words, they are also its last words. Wars are "necessary" preconditions for the beginning and the ongoing functioning of capitalism (ongoing primitive accumulation). The capitalist economy and the military system follow the same principles, the war logic (destruction called production, universal competition, conquest, creating a world empire). This war logic, however, is not restricted to the military and the economy as such, it permeates all spheres of life and transforms all social relations into war relations. This is particularly true for the relation between humans and nature. Nature is being treated as an enemy who has to be conquered by basically militaristic science and technology. Capitalists legitimate this global war system by promising, that thus an abundance of "things" (Heraclit) would be created, poverty would disappear and human beings would be set free from the fetters of nature. According to our ecofeminist analysis this global capitalist war system has indeed filled our supermarkets with "things," but to do this it had to destroy nature, to subordinate and exploit other peoples, classes and races all over the globe. Feminists understood that women were also treated as part of this "wild nature" which had to be conquered and subordinated. Therefore Capitalism did not overcome patriarchy, it only modernized it. This means that patriarchal wars of destruction are seen as creators of all things and even of peace and freedom. If socialists want to overcome this capitalist-patriarchal war system they must try to overcome the war logic not only in its direct militaristic manifestations but above all in the philosophy underlying the concepts of progress, productive forces, science and technology and the relationship of humans to nature and of men to women. Nature is not our enemy but the Mother of Life.

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MORAES, Andrea

Meanings of Public Participation for the Brazilian Watershed Management Committees
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0010)


Demands for public participation emerged in the 1970s as a critical response to top- down development projects that failed to reduce the poverty they supposedly were designed to combat. Authors such as Paulo Freire defended the idea of participation as a means of transforming society through collective self-inquiry, reflection and action. In this context, participation had an emancipatory meaning and was understood as a way to mobilize and include those actors who had traditionally been excluded. Some twenty years later, the term participation has become a buzz-word. Public participation is used in all fields of knowledge and policy: from education to rural development. Large development agencies and governments adopted the idea of participation (involving local people) as a means for achieving more effective interventions. The emphasis turned to the efficiency aspect of participation, and participation often did not imply a shift in power or real involvement in critical decisions. Can this new-style participation actually mobilize and empower previously excluded interests, actors and communities in civil society? Or does this type of participation rather re-establish the privileged position of established actors? This paper will report the work in progress about the meanings of public participation for members of the Brazilian watershed management committees of São Paulo state – Brazil. During the 1990s, Brazil began to face the previously unthinkable finitude of its water resources – thanks to rapid population increase, deterioration of water quality, pollution, as well as the pressure from grass roots and environment movements. The result was the creation in 1997 of the Federal Water Law that instituted the National System of Water Management where water was understood as a limited resource to be managed territorially and shared as a public good. In order to deal with different interests an integrated public management was proposed through the creation of Watershed Management Committees – formed by 1/3 of government representatives, 1/3 of municipalities and 1/3 of civil society.

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O’DONNELL, Thomas W.

The Global Oil System: Resources, Technology, and the New U.S. Strategy
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics V
(Sunday 1
1:45, TEL 0016)

In spite of the insecurity of supplies, depletion trends and global warming, oil stubbornly remains the basis of transportation everywhere. The present oil system emerged with the shocks of the late 1970s to early 1980s, and the formation of a cartel of OECD consuming states – the International Energy Agency (IEA) – to counter the OPEC producers’ cartel. The IEA accumulated large strategic oil reserves; the constant threat to release these undermined the producers’ embargo weapon, and gradually forced OPEC to restrict prices to a band favored by the IEA and its dominant member, the U.S. In time, OPEC acceded to join a "consumer-producer dialogue" with the IEA, the International Energy Forum (IEF), and, after the invasion of Iraq, the “Permanent Secretariat” of the IEF was formed (May 2003) – a significant development in energy globalization. "Cheap oil" has been fundamental to US policy, fostering oil addiction and relentlessly remaking the transportation infrastructures of all consuming states in the image of the automobile-intensive U.S. This addiction brings with it dependence and subordination to Washington, organizer of the global oil market control institutions. Under this regime the oil-poor EU is steadily being reduced to an oil-dependent and automobile-intensive status like that Japan has long endured. And China too, already having exhausted its cheap-to-extract domestic oil, is sliding into a similar state. But, the cheap oil system now faces two crises. First, Saudi Arabia, the "central bank of oil," is suffering several internal crises which alarm Washington, and, second, a mismatch looms between global oil demand and pumping capacity, driven especially by Chinese demand. In response, the Clinton and the Bush Administrations (Cheney Energy Plan) launched an offensive to radically expand the global pumping capacity of oil, pushing all producing states to accept large private oil investments, to submit to ‘transparency’ and to a more highly centralized global market-control apparatus. U.S. actions in Iraq, in the Caspian basin, with and against Russia, in Venezuela and Mexico, in Nigeria – and its sharp clash with "Old Europe" plus Russia and China over its 2003 seizure of Iraq – must be reconsidered in this light. The priority of maintaining oil hegemony is the basis for the otherwise inexplicable U.S. policy of opposing any real fight against global warming, and for adamantly refusing to modernize its own mid-20th-century transportation infrastructure.

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PANAYOTAKIS, Costas

Conspicuous Consumption, Economic Inefficiency and Ecological Degradation
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)

Mainstream economists are increasingly becoming aware of the economic inefficiency generated by consumerism and conspicuous consumption. Their discussion of these issues fails, however, to recognize the links between consumerism and the class nature of capitalist society. This paper explores these links and shows that a class-based analysis of capitalist consumerism undermines the mainstream economic interpretation of environmental problems as the result of economic ‘externalities’.

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PERKINS, Ellie

Public Participation and Ecological Valuation: Inclusive = Radical
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0010)


This paper discusses the gender and class implications of participation-based political-economic valuation processes, which are increasingly used in Europe, North America, and elsewhere as a basic component of environmental and public policy decision-making. While avoidance of purely market and money-based valuation is generally attractive, public participation processes can potentially exacerbate gender, ethnic, class, and other inequities. This in turn is likely to have negative environmental implications. The paper focuses on the complexities of conceptualizing and designing practical alternatives to market-based valuation systems which are gender- and diversity-sensitive and take into account the different kinds of relationships with the environment held by different members of society. Such alternative valuation systems are a necessary foundation for feminist and ecological economics. Whether, and in what way, they may be part of a more radical political-economic transformation is addressed in the final section of the paper.

       
view Ellie Perkins' paper

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PETERMANN, Anne

Global Warming, Carbon Trade, and Genetically Engineered Trees
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0014)

Twelve years ago governments ratified the Convention on Climate Change. Five years later, they agreed on the Kyoto Protocol, which was to establish concrete commitments to reduce fossil fuel emissions from Northern countries. The Kyoto Protocol established emission reductions of only 5.2% below 1990 levels-which scientists agree is completely inadequate to address global warming. Even these targets, however, are being evaded through schemes such as carbon trading and the establishment of carbon "sinks" like GE tree plantations that will in fact further worsen global warming. Comparing satellite maps from ten years ago to images today reveals a clear trend of plantations replacing native forests. Studies done by the US EPA and the World Resources Institute found that in tropical areas plantations at best sequester only 1/4 the carbon as native forests. The conversion of native forests to carbon sink plantations diminishes carbon sequestering potential. Communities disproportionately impacted by climate change and fake "solutions" like GE trees plantations include indigenous peoples, the poor, women, children and the elderly. In addition, governments and institutions like the World Bank are encouraging accelerated use of increasingly limited fossil fuel stocks, causing more and more military conflicts around the world, magnifying social and environmental injustice. If we are to avert a climate crisis, drastic reductions in fossil fuel use are inescapable, as is the protection of remaining native forests. In response, peoples' movements are rising up around the world to demand real action on climate change and to challenge the privatization of the air through a massive "carbon market," included in the Kyoto Protocol.

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PETERS, Frederick

The Valuation of Water: What European Water Policy has Made of James O’Connor’s 2nd Contradiction and What the Left Can Do about It

Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics II
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0007)

The valuation of water has been under debate in the environmental activist and academic circles in Europe, as it has in been in the rest of the world, since the first waves of privatisation of water infrastructure in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Economic “shock treatment” applied to Eastern Europe in the 1990s lead to much pressure on governments there to carry out similar privatisation schemes around water infrastructure, with mixed results. The European Union has also recently completed negotiations on an umbrella legislation called the Water Framework Directive. With European enlargement, countries such as Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary and the Baltic Nations, have thus been subject to a two pronged process of “Europeanisation” of their water infrastructure among other sectors of the public and private sphere. On the one hand there has been the application of market economy principles to their economies. On the other, there has been the application of new regulatory regimes with far reaching effects on issues such as water and the environment. While the issues of the valuation of water and water infrastructure have been debated among the left, much of it in the pages of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, following O’Connor’s publication of his Second Contradiction of Capitalism, policy and law makers in the European Union as well as (largely) European Capital have made pretty clear judgements on how it should be valuated. This paper reviews the debates on the valuation and capitalisation of water that have come up in reaction to neo-liberal economics and “fee market” discipline, and looks at the history of recent developments in the European Union and their effects on urban and rural water provision and the capitalisation of water.

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PHILIP, Kavita

Nature, Culture, Capital, and Empire: Reflections on Doing Environmental Histories of the Global South

Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics V
(Sunday 11:45, TEL 0016)

This paper draws on my published work in colonial environmental history of South Asia (Civilizing Natures, 2004), as well as on ongoing work on the technologies of the new imperialism. I offer some methodological reflections on doing political and historical scholarship on nature, culture, science, and technology in the global south, with particular reference to the South Asian experience with colonialism and the new imperialisms. Nineteenth century scientific theories of non-western nature and natives shaped the belief, persistent to this day, in an epistemological divide between universal science and local knowledge. This essentialism has characterized both liberal and conservative histories; but more radical political analyses suggest a more complex picture of networks and connections. Local knowledges from the peripheries of empire were constitutive of both the form and content of science at the metropolitan centre. For instance, indigenous Indian knowledge of forests and cropping techniques influenced the thinking of late eighteenth century Hippocratic and Physiocratic thinkers in Britain, spurring the theory and practice of a romanticist environmentalism. Caribbean and South Asian plant species radically changed the shape of European botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in terms of taxonomic advances, and by altering the geographic scope and economic power of botanical research. Anthropology was quite literally dependent on colonial infrastructures--including scientific voyages and botanical projects--in order to obtain access to its object of study, the non-western native, who in intricately constrained ways participated in the construction of anthropological knowledge. Botany, anthropology and forestry in the nineteenth century (like many other sciences, from geography to linguistics) had their most important sources of data, their objects of investigation, located at colonial sites. The colonies were the laboratories for nineteenth century sciences of race and of resources. Drawing the maps of global power was simultaneous with, and constitutive of, the process of drawing the maps of self and other, nature and culture. Histories of colonial science entail the critique of our current narratives of the history of western science itself, and their rewriting into an integrated narrative that analyzes the discourses of exploitation and romanticism within the same theoretical framework that analyses the claims of science. This paper suggests ways in which we might shape the study of nature, culture, capital and empire in the contexts of prior colonial histories as well as of the emerging world order.

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RICOVERI, Giovanna

Towards Ecological and Social Justice in the South and the North
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday 11:15, TEL 0016)

Under the present conditions of neo-liberal globalization, capitalism survives only as a result of exploitation of natural wealth and the use of violence in appropriating resources. Biodiversity (mainly in the South) and public services (mainly in Europe) are the last frontier of a global economy of plunder. The result is the emergence of politics as “public space”. Representative democracy is limited as the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and trans-national corporate bodies make fundamental economic decisions. This induces insecurity among people and communities, thereby erasing cultural identities, individual and collective liberties, civil and social rights creating ideal humus for “humanitarian” wars and pre-emptive wars against terrorism. Environment and natural resources become a focal point of struggle in both North and South against neo-liberal globalization, whereby social groups resist and organize to develop the conditions for real democracy (in water use, food distribution, and public participation), in contrast to formal democracy, where the more powerful dominate.

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ROELOFS, Joan

Socialism and Ecology
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice III
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)

Disillusionment with Marxism and the revival of anarchism brought Charles Fourier’s theories back onto the stage in 1968. Nevertheless, socialists and ecologists have barely explored the strange yet practical treasures they hold. Skepticism about the “revolutionary project” and indications of a shrinking proletariat have led to searches for a “third way,” or at least, a different way. Marxism was also challenged by the Green movement that arose in the 1970s, calling attention to feminist, ecological, and multicultural concerns neglected by traditional radical parties. Post-modernism and post-Marxism disturbed the rigid categories and boxes into which ideas and ideologies have been stuffed by scholars and activists. “Utopian socialism” was a label that had stuck. It was used first by capitalists and then by Marx and Engels, loyal bedfellows in this conspiracy at least, to discredit early socialists. Today there are more people willing to admit that both “the invisible hand” of capitalism and the “proletarian revolution” of Marxism could fit into the “utopian” box, while the so-called “utopians” were brimming with practical suggestions and experimental, rational, and peaceful methods for healing society’s woes. Even their visionary, imaginative, and rather fantastic aspects had the very practical effect of serving as recruitment tools. We can find excellent resources for a contemporary ecological socialism appropriate for the whole planet in Fourierism and other neglected (often reviled) socialist theorists. This paper will describe some relevant ideas of Fourier, William Morris, Robert Blatchford, R.H. Tawney, and the Fabian socialists.

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ROSEWARNE, Stuart

Removing the Veil and Reclaiming Economic Space: Migrant Women Workers, the Hidden Employment and the Manufacture of Transnational Identities
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday 11:15, TEL 0016)


Feminist scholarship has been critically important in documenting the changing patterns of international migration and, more particularly, in unveiling the predominance of migrant women workers in the contemporary era of international migration. This has been crucial to contesting the tendency for women migrants to be treated as invisible in this global movement of people. It has also prompted, if not necessitated a rethinking of – via a gendering of – theories of international migration. One emphasis, largely formed within a socialist-feminist framework, has been preoccupied with revealing the subordinate position of many migrant women workers. Here the emphasis has been on documenting the distinct labour market experiences of migrant women workers, on women concentrated in the informal sphere of the economy, working as domestic workers and sex workers. A contrasting emphasis has focused the migrant experience in the definition of identity, in an unveiling of migrant workers’ differential experiences to explore the multiplicity of factors – familial, political, economic, social, cultural and symbolic – that structure place within the host nation and thereby give voice to transnsationalism. This paper seeks to take issue with these emphases by examining the struggles of migrant women workers who are contesting dominant institutionalised constructions of economic identity. The study will focus on ways in which migrant women workers are organising to regularise informal sector and clandestine work and redress the institutionalised invisibility and labour market marginalisation across the occupational spectrum. This leads on to consideration of how collective organising has assumed a transnational dimension, based on political links as well as economic exchanges and investments. One particular concern will be to analyse the importance of the construction of transnational identities in providing leverage for progressing political and industrial claims in the pursuit of women negotiating a place in the public sphere of the economy.

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RUDY, Alan

Revisiting the Second Contradiction and its Critics
Session: Marxism, Critical Theory, and Ecology I
(Saturday 9:30, TEL 0006)


My paper responds to the criticisms of the second contradiction by Foster/Burkett, Benton, Dickens, Sandler and Martin Spence. In short, there are flawed tendencies to a) conflate "conditions" with "nature"; b) abstract the theory from the changing historical materiality and movements associated with conditions of (re)production; and c) collapse the macroscopic/modal scale and inter- relatedness of the second contradiction with local/formal and discrete environmental crises. These misunderstandings generate contradictory claims that O'Connor is overly-determinist and -contextualist, overly-pessimistic and -ptimistic. Some of this derives from O'Connor's own stress on ecological over the personal and communal conditions. I stress the relation of the second contradiction to Fiscal Crisis of the State and O'Connor's work on "culture" and the capitalist mode of cooperation in a clarification of the roots, intent, and efficacy of the theory.

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SALLEH, Ariel

Neo-Liberal Denial: an ecofeminist reflection on the genetic engineering industry
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics
(Sunday 10:00 , TEL 0014 )

This paper is an ecofeminist reflection on the genetic engineering industry, highlighting contradictions in its discourse and practice. These contradictions are symptomatic of the denial of human interconnection with living ecosystems, and they serve well to legitimate neo-liberal enclosure and commodification of nature. As ecofeminists see it, the socially constructed divide between humanity and nature is foundational to Western capitalist patriarchal institutions. These include economics and science, ethics and the law. In genetic engineering, this dissociation shows up in the ontological split between humanity v nature; in the epistemological schism between determinism v fluid genomics; in the methodological fracture between fact v value in risk assessment; the semantic disconnect between patent originality v substantial equivalence; in the neo-liberal policy distinction between coexistence v colonisation; and in the democratic contradiction of us v them. The global consequences of genetic engineering are irreversible, so it's critical that our political deliberations challenge this industry at every turn.

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SANDBERG, L. Anders (with Gerda R.WEKERLE)

Please see abstract listed under WEKERLE, Gerda R.


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SCHAFFER, Harwood (with John GULICK)

Please see abstract listed under GULICK, John.

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SMITH, Neil

Making Nature’s Nation
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics V
(Sunday 11:45 , TEL 0016)


George Bush has told us: "Liberty is universal.... Liberty is the natural desire of all people." As such, Bush harks directly back to an eighteenth century confusion of nature, liberalism and Americanism that has become virtually instinctive in western thought. This paper argues that western ideologies of nature are not only the preserve of an environmental politics but are alive and well, profoundly influential, in a broader popular discourse and that alternatives have to take seriously the centrality of labour in our understanding of nature. It critiques the connections of nature, liberalism and Americanism that are suddenly back on the intellectual agenda.

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SPERBER, Irwin

Structural and Ideological Contradictions in the Environmental Movement: Why the Movement is Dead in the Water and What to Do About It
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice
(Saturday 9:30 , TEL 0010)


Much criticism has been directed at environmental organizations for their lack of effectiveness, their ambiguity over objectives, and their failure to reach a broad consensus even on the meaning of “environmentalism” itself. In view of the predatory track record of corporate polluters, mature capitalist societies are precisely the ones in which the need for a strong environmental movement is most urgent. At the same time, these societies have potent obstacles standing in the way of such a movement’s emergence. The most prevalent of these obstacles include: (1) an extreme dependence on foundations and agencies that selectively award funding to organizations that are cautious and non-confrontational in their mode of political discourse and withhold it from those that are militant, disruptive, or “irresponsible;” (2) a preoccupation with maintaining special taxation status (e. g., “tax exempt” or eligible for tax-deductible donations) in compliance with criteria imposed by agencies of state power; (3) an internal chain of command that reflects, reinforces, and runs parallel to that of a multinational corporation: a board of directors and chief executive officer that excludes the rank-and-file from decision-making and operates at a high level of secrecy; and, (4) an ideology of scapegoating and shifting responsibility for organizational failure exclusively to anyone or anything outside the organization so that no candid self-examination of such failure or self-correction can take place. Heightened self-awareness regarding these obstacles is the first of several steps necessary to mobilize the environmental movement.

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TURNER, Terisa E. (and Leigh S. BROWNHILL)

The Future in the Present Oil Wars
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics IV
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0014)


The future in the present oil wars is two-fold. First there is a strike in the production of labour power. Evidence of this strike is the global use of nudity by women to express their refusal of oil wars and the destruction of oil exploitation itself. Second there is a strike in the production and consumption of oil. The refusal to produce has in the new century been expressed significantly by women who have forced shut-downs of petroleum production because the curse of oil has made life impossible. The refusal to consume has been expressed worldwide through many boycotts of major petroleum corporations. This coordinated production- consumption strike denies oil capital its commodity and markets. Therefore it undermines the power and existence of these corporations in a fundamental way. Both strikes have their positive promises. Women’s nakedness strike against death affirms a life-centred as opposed to profit-centred political economy and morality. The simultaneous production-consumption strike provides organizational groundings for direct deals in which producers and consumers themselves attribute value to the exchange. This auto-valuation is premised on producer and consumer control. Such control is a necessary condition for bringing to an end the combustion of hydrocarbons and hence global warming. The prominence of women in these two strikes follows from the fact that women are at the centre of both the creation and the use of the four foci (nature, unpaid work, social services and built space) of enclosure and destruction by globalizing capital. The trenchant defense by women and their allies of these crucial bases of life has provoked corporate resource wars. If we understand and join the two strikes at the heart of these wars we enhance the possibilities of victory, understood as life for all.


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VAN HOOREWEGHE, Kristen L.

Intersecting Capitalism, Patriarchy, and the Environment: Looking at the NAFTA through a Gendered Lens
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics III
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0010)


As a result of increased pressure from non-governmental organization (NGOs) and from women throughout the world, development organizations have begun to recognize the importance for integrating gender into their policies and strategies. The problem however, is that this integration serves the interests of capital accumulation and is not necessarily in the best interest of women. Rhetoric such as globalization, free trade, development, and progress are being used by governments, international institutions, and NGOs without critical consideration of the capitalist and patriarchal system in which they are embedded. This research seeks to examine the consequences by analyzing the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the women of North America. Under NAFTA capital accumulation is prioritized over other components of development such as adequate working conditions, access to health care, and a clean environment. NAFTA’s inability to extend beyond a neoliberal approach to incorporate women reproduces the capitalist patriarchal hierarchy and contributes to the powerlessness of women in North America. The intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, class, labor, and the environment must be examined to gain a better understanding of what development should mean for all and not simply for Western patriarchal ideology. Examining NAFTA with a renewed focus on the sexual division of labor and the four social relations of production, reproduction, sexuality, and child rearing and socialization, will reveal the inadequacies of NAFTA as a development strategy in promoting human and environmental advancement in a capitalist patriarchal system, particularly for women in northern Mexico.

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VAN WAGNER, Estair

Participatory Democracy in the Global City: Promise and Potential for Urban Environmental Justice
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0006)


As the forces of global ecologies and political economies converge to shape and define urban life, global city governance is increasingly defined and constrained by worldwide networks and the problems of scale. In the face of globalization, participatory democratic approaches are being looked to as potential tools to democratize local governance and meet the challenges of ecological injustice at the local level. With citizens playing a direct role in deciding the financial priorities and planning of the region, participatory budgeting has emerged in Brazil as the most concrete representation of participatory democracy. It promises a tool to democratize local governance and confront issues of wealth distribution, poverty and environmental injustice. From an urban political ecology perspective this research examines the potential for participatory budgeting in Toronto as a tool for social and environmental justice. As a global city embedded in the neo-liberal political economic structure of trans-national capitalism, Toronto is participant in and subject to global flows of people, capital and ideas which shape and define the possibilities for the democratization of urban governance. Does participatory budgeting in the context of North American cities have the potential to challenge neo-liberal capitalism and empower oppressed and marginalized communities to redefine ecological and economic relationships? If so, the promise of participatory democracy for environmental justice lies in the simultaneous structural change to the legal and political foundations of local governance, and the cultivation of a radically different political culture that questions neo-liberal capitalism and articulates an alternative political-economic framework.

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VINZ, Dagmar

Gender, Nature, and Time Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Sustainability
Session: Ecosocialism, Feminism, and Environmental Justice II
(Saturday 11:15 , TEL 0016)


Only if economic, social and ecological times are coordinated, paths for sustainability will be opened up. Socio-ecological time politics is thus a key to sustainability and the transformation of time pattern in society is necessary for an ecologically sustainable and gender equal future. In the context of globalization, however, a time concept gains hegemony, which is characterized by the appreciation of speed, flexibility and short-term decisions. Globalization processes go hand in hand both with the expansion in space and with the acceleration in time, and form a basis for the turn to a new flexible capitalism. Instead of leaving processes of ecological and social reproduction their time both the societal relation to nature and gender relations are transformed by current tendencies of acceleration and speed in society, economy and culture. In my presentation I first want to describe the transformation of time structures in the context of globalization and then give examples for its effects on nature and gender relations. I will especially refer to examples which are related to the production and consumption of industrial food. The question is how the crisis of social and ecological reproduction are interlinked. In the last part I want to present my consideration on perspectives for socio-ecological time politics which are designed to challenge the hegemonic time concept and to promote ecological sustainability and gender justice. This will include concrete considerations how to implement time politics as an essential part of sustainability strategies.

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WALLIS, Victor

Socialism and Technology: A Sectoral Overview
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0010)


This paper goes beyond general comparisons of socialist with capitalist technology to focus on particular sectors of economic activity. The goal is to provide a concise but representative overview of the ways in which capitalist priorities have conditioned the development of the various spheres of activity and then to discuss, in each case, what sector-specific responses would be consistent with an overall socialist approach. I view socialism in explicitly ecological as well as social/economic terms, based on the contention (found already in Marx) that the natural world as well as humanity - most immediately, the working class- is put at risk by the drive for accumulation and profit. I see the need to pursue this line of inquiry as having become more rather than less urgent following the end of socialism’s first epoch. The problems which occasioned the original socialist project - poverty, war, technological domination - have not been attenuated but rather have deepened. The sectors considered in my paper are grouped as follows: 1) agriculture/forests/ fisheries, 2) industry/transport/energy, 3) information/communications/education, 4) surveillance/repression/military, 5) public health and healthcare services. In discussing the capitalist impact on these sectors, I draw on recent research to argue that the distorting effects of the corporate agenda—and of governmental policies geared to it—have reached extreme levels, not only in environmental terms, but also in terms of new and unhealthy patterns of human behavior. All this makes socialist transformation at once more difficult and more urgent than it was in an earlier period.

       
view Victor Wallis' paper

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WEISSMAN, Evan L.

Urban Agriculture’s Promise in a “Developing” World: Cuba as a Case Study

Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)


The neoliberal model of “development” has particularly detrimental effects on agriculture. Worldwide, hunger continues to pose great problems for the whole of humanity. Despite popular belief, hunger is not a problem of food availability, but caused by unequal distribution exacerbated by neoliberal development. Agriculture once supported capital accumulation, as technological advances would boost food production and thus free up sources of labor. Now, food itself is a commodity, and agriculture directly serves to foster capital accumulation. Additionally, as agriculture becomes less labor intensive and land is ever more unavailable for cultivation, the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanized. The commodification of agriculture and the growing urban identity of world populations devastate global food security. This paper examines the promise of urban agriculture to enhance food security, focusing on the success of Cuba. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 undermined Cuban food security, as former subsidies were no longer available. To feed its population, Cuba initiated the largest organic agriculture effort in history. In doing so, Cuba successful thwarted potentially devastating hunger and possible famine. Although much has been written on Cuba’s success, often overlooked is urban agriculture and the unmistakable popular characteristic of the movement. A systematic examination of the Cuban case exemplifies the importance and feasibility of urban agriculture and provides a model for other nations. Degradation of the planet is inextricably linked to the degrading conditions of life for the majority of the world population. Cuba provides a model for simultaneously addressing the root of both.

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WEKERLE, Gerda R. (with L. Anders SANDBERG)

Contested Natures, Land and Development: The Emergence of Bioregional Citizenship in an Exurban Region
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation and Political Ecology I
(Saturday 14:00, TEL 0014)


In the recent years, the Oak Ridges Moraine has gone from a landform seldom mentioned to iconic status in environmental protection. The ORM has emerged as a bioregion that is seen as sacred nature to be preserved. The bioregional focus on a land ethic that links human and non-human nature and an economy of nature challenges some of the basic principles underlying both the commodification of nature and of property within capitalist economies. While bioregionalism has emerged as a major scientific and academic discourse, and it also became a political tool to allegedly resist or fight sprawl. Environmental mobilization against urban sprawl on the moraine brought together unlikely alliances of groups whose interests seemed mutually exclusive or even opposed. This presentation will focus on the tensions and intersections of different actors (environmentalists, homeowners, planners, farmers, quarry owners, developers, etc) in the development of “bioregional citizenships” over the struggles for nature, land, and economic development. It therefore raises questions about the extent to which the bioregional conservation agenda serves to further extend and create a stable environment for capitalist development and neoliberal governance models by strategies to control land and nature associated with policies characterized by privatization, exclusion and constraints on deliberative democracy.

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WELSH, Ian (with Graeme CHESTERS)

Please see abstract listed under CHESTERS, Graeme.

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WILSON, Zoe J.

States, Socialism and Sanitation: Challenges from Africa
Session: World Order, Imperialism, and Global Ecological Politics III
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0010)


According to the World Health Organization 80% of all diseases and 25% of deaths in the developing world are caused by polluted water. More than 90% of waste water worldwide is discharged into the environment either uncontrolled or after unsatisfactory treatment. Simultaneously the spectre water of water scarcity is creeping across the globe. In Africa alone, 300 million, one third of the continent’s population already live under conditions of acute water scarcity. Yet, in some circles, the mindset that remains that developing countries we’ll just follow the model the industrialized countries, which is to pipe pressurized safe water 24/7 to everybody. Paradoxically, at the same time, conventional waste water systems are increasingly seen as systems where drinking water is misused to transport waste into the water cycle, causing environmental damage and hygienic hazards. More daunting still is that in most of Sub-Saharan African today, countries lack either water availability, investment dollars, capacity, political will, or all of the above, to address urgent water and sanitation issues. Where, then, can urgent solutions lie for the people who the live the consequences, in the short, medium and largely unpredictable longer terms? Drawing on examples from across Africa, this paper weighs the pros and cons of emerging philosophies and technologies associated with “appropriate” water and sanitation solutions and the challenges they pose to traditional approaches to “nature, capitalism, socialism.”

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WISSEN, Markus

Urban Politics and the Commercialization of Infrastructure in the Water Sector
Session: Urbanization, Ecological Degradation, and Political Ecology II
(Sunday 10:00, TEL 0006)


Urban technical networks are "the mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of nature into city takes place" (Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw). In the Fordist phase of capitalism they were more or less hidden and considered as neutral elements of the urban fabric. With the crisis of Fordism and the accelerated neoliberal restructuring, however, they became increasingly contested. In search for a post-Fordist "spatial fix" (David Harvey), which could contribute to solving problems of over-accumulation of capital, private business discovered the former publicly driven infrastructural networks in the water, energy or telecommunication sector as an interesting field for investment. In doing so it was supported by the privatisation and liberalisation policies of neoliberal governments on a local, national and European scale. The result often was an infrastructural unbundling within which the "cherries" were commercialised whereas the less lucrative rest remained under public control. The proposed contribution to the CNS conference will take the commercialisation of networked infrastructures as a lens through which recent developments of urban politics and urban political ecology are observed. Starting from empirical evidence in the water sector of German cities it will be shown how infrastructural commercialisation goes along with a rescaling of urban politics and with an accelerated introduction of entrepreneurial elements into the governance of cities. Furthermore it will look at the distributional consequences of these processes and ask to what extent new forms of uneven development are produced
.

        view Markus Wissen's paper

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