Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Progressive spaces of neoliberalism?

2009; Wiley; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8373.2009.01387.x

1467-8373

Nick Lewis,

Urban Planning and Governance

At a time when neoliberalism is held by critical geographers to be responsible for global financial crisis and a new, neoconservative government with strong neoliberal elements is reforming tertiary education in New Zealand, it might appear suicidal for a geographer to be editing a special section on ‘Progressive Social Spaces of Neoliberalism (?)’ in Asia Pacific Viewpoint. I might reflect that the question mark may prove career saving but prefer instead to argue that these events make the intervention even more timely. It is important to head off any use of these two events to bury the work of the special section. The papers in this special section are informed by post-structural thinking and seek to explore how we should imagine and enact better futures by developing alternative political projects within neoliberal frames. They contest both the totalising interpretation of neoliberalism and the view that it is always and everywhere regressive, and call for far more nuanced accounts that admit difference, possibility and agency. The global financial crisis opens up space for alternative imaginaries as well as opportunities to say ‘I told you so’. Similarly, the incoherencies, incompleteness and yet growing comprehensiveness of New Zealand's new governmental agenda challenge us to seek creative ways to fashion new political projects and perform existing alternatives differently. This is the politics of the special section, which is proactive and deeply critical, and resigned neither to defeat nor to the barricades. Much of the social science report addressing social transformation in New Zealand and Australia over the last 15–20 years has framed discussion in a critique of neoliberalism. Over the last decade, the dominant Anglo-American geographical report has also adopted this critical framing. This critique has been attached relatively seamlessly to packages of reforms that have, in different ways, disentangled state from market; removed barriers to international trade; freed and encouraged global capital markets; empowered global corporations at the expense of states, labour and other social groups; and encouraged competitive, materialistic, individualistic and entrepreneurial subjectivities and identities. Neoliberalism is charged with reconfiguring freedom and choice and redistributing opportunities and wealth from the poor and marginalised to the privileged. However, for many, this has become too simple a story, a metanarrative that is not always and not simply so. The value of neoliberalism as an empirical, theoretical and political lens for the critical analysis of social change has been seriously questioned. Critics have pursued different lines of critique. Barnett (2005) and Castree (2006) have suggested that ‘neoliberalism’ has been under-theorised in many accounts and asked to do too much analytical work at too many scales and in too many contexts. They have called for tighter definitions and better-targeted critiques. Lines of questioning have included baseline understandings of neoliberalism itself (as some form of interplay among political programme, ideology and governmentality; see Larner, 2000; Ong, 2006); the contradictory epistemological grounding or positioning of much work in its name; appropriate scales and objects of analysis; the empirical test that not all reforms to the state in the last 25 years are most helpfully understood as neoliberal; context, specificity and the multiplicity of actually constituted or realised neoliberalisms; the messy actualities of implementing neoliberalism in any setting; time and the changing form of neoliberal projects; the political commitment of critics and implications for praxis; and longer standing considerations of structure and agency. The accusation has been that as a critical frame ‘neoliberalism’ has been deployed as an anchor for a deep political disaffection and specific critical narratives expressed via overly simplistic critiques of power, weak analysis of its operations, casual empirics and naïve and ineffectual politics. Barnett labels this critical framing a ‘consolation’. Against this, David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism, published in close proximity to his New Imperialism and his compelling engagements as a public geographer (see http://www.davidharvey.org), has reinvigorated Marxian critique of financial capitalism and the concentration of capital and political powers. The critique by others of neoliberalism at scales from the global (International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Social Forum) to the ‘Think Tank’, the village, prison or workplace is revitalising political economy in geography (see e.g. Peck and Theodore, 2008). Peet (2007), Watts (2006) and others have used such a critique of the political confluences and pernicious influences of neoliberalism at multiple scales and in multiple settings to revitalise development geography, while McCarthy and Prudham (2004) have used a critique of neoliberalism around environmental governance to drive an influential political ecology movement. Critique from Africa and Latin America uses the notion of neoliberalism to ground and relate critiques of the effects and affects of IMF conditionalities, failing Millennium Development Goals, continued unequal exchange in the grip of water, food and energy crises, and various processes of social and political change within national scales (see Santos, 2005). The point is that, even if some of its scholarship has been consolational, the critique of neoliberalism has been galvanising and has performed valuable intellectual and political work in many settings (see Peck, 2002; 2004). The point of this special section is not to come down on one side or the other of these debates but to demonstrate how the conceptual and political value of neoliberalism as a critical frame is being reworked in one particular way. Three recent volumes of work led by geographers (England and Ward, 2007; Smith et al., 2008; Keil and Mahon, 2009) have responded to the challenge to generate more meticulous and situated readings of neoliberalism (see Larner, 2003). Reassuringly, the authors in these volumes have begun to move, however, beyond telling comparative stories of the working out of a hegemonic, coherent and complete neoliberalism in different spaces. Instead, they mobilise the analytical and political potential of a critique of neoliberalism for a variety of methodological, theoretical and political debates. This special section develops this approach. It also builds on the work of Gibson-Graham (2006, 2008), who advocates the engagement with a politics of the possible by directing attention to diverse economies and political projects so as to disturb the apparent stability and hegemony of big ‘C’ capitalism and (by extension) big ‘N’ neoliberalism. Each of the authors in this section targets fissures in neoliberalism and examines projects that have emerged in and through such openings. The authors also argue in one way or another that their work in such space targets and reflects the position (geographical, political and intellectual) from which they conduct it, as well as the geographies that they interrogate. The special section is then, at some level, set against the dominance of the geography report by Anglo-American geographers and their accounts of the world. For a host of reasons and obviously with notable exceptions such as Tickell and Peck (1995) in economic geography, this report was relatively late to neoliberalism as an analytical frame compared with those of geographers in Australia and New Zealand. They also came to it from different paths. These included concerns with both trenchant and intensifying local inequalities, neoconservatism at the national scale, global imperialism in the United States and the search in the UK for new epistemological and methodological foundations for a revitalised and repoliticised disciplinary gaze through readings of cultural studies and social theory. When revealed in the international journals, these paths appear as global tendencies. Our engagement with neoliberalism in this part of the world has taken different directions, and we have come to frame and engage in the debates around neoliberalism differently. We have, of course, experienced neoliberalism differently, at different times (neoliberalisms coupled to more dictatorial development states and/or IMF conditionalities in East Asia, for example, or frustrated by institutional thickness in the Australian case) and from differently institutionalised knowledge production settings and disciplinary trajectories. We are also distanced from any furies that may underlie these debates yet are able to follow them closely as privileged participants from the margins.1 In the New Zealand context, from which most of the contributions in this section emerge, a smaller disciplinary community, historical accident in the geographies of New Zealand geographical careers and cross-disciplinary undergraduate programmes had given us close connections to scholars in other disciplines. The earlier work of sociologists and philosophers of education was particularly influential (Peters, 1993; Dale, 1994). Tightly grounded in resistance to neoliberal reform and paying close attention to its micropolitics and governmentalities as well as broader state theory, this work connected neatly to the grounded work on changing communities laid out in the collective Changing Places critiques from within geography (Britton et al., 1992; Le Heron and Pawson, 1996). This was a different intellectual ground from which to confront neoliberalism, just as the exemplary purity of the New Zealand neoliberal experiment (Kelsey, 1995) offered a different realised neoliberal governance regime away from which to theorise it (see Larner, 2003). New Zealand geographers also began working relatively early with ideas drawn from the governmentality report and confronting the changing and contemporary meanings of neoliberalism. This meant a confrontation with ideas of neoliberal subjects and spaces (Larner and Le Heron, 2002, 2005) as well as Third Way institutional rebuilding. Similarly in Australia, the interpretation of these changes in the geographical report was led by Peck and Tickell (2002), who theorised ‘roll out’ neoliberalism, or the invention of institutions to secure neoliberal governance and a particular form of market sovereignty. McCarthy and Prudham (2004) secured this definition with their own rolling back of emerging settling institutions into core definitions of neoliberalism. In both cases the move sustained the political potential of a critique of neoliberalism in settings where its most destructive forms were still being rolled out. Both the rolling back thesis and moment, however, attribute to neoliberalism a greater historical coherence and seamlessness between neoliberal political projects of different forms and moments than Larner and colleagues identified working from New Zealand. For these New Zealand-based geographers, it overemphasises both hegemony and their coherence and strips them of their genealogies, geographies and small ‘p’ politics (Lewis et al., 2008). The papers in this section emerge from nuanced empirical work in the Asia-Pacific region from geographers and others based in Australia and New Zealand that looks beyond the politics of identifying and representing political projects as neoliberal to new encounters that examine the generative dimensions of neoliberalism. They draw heavily on published work emerging from the region – accounts of diverse neoliberalisms, neoliberal theorisation and ideas of post-development rooted within the region. They also draw inspiration from authors such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos who identify spaces such as the World Social Forum as progressive unintended consequences of neoliberalism. For Santos (2005), reading it from beyond Anglo-American preoccupations with complete, non-contradictory progress and finished alternatives, the World Social Forum is a space that claims forcefully ‘the existence of alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation’ and affirms ‘the possibility of alternatives’. It is this tradition to which the special section is devoted. It aims to add nuance to our accounts of neoliberalism and initiate further conversations across them. The term ‘progressive spaces of neoliberalism’ has begun to circulate in this part of the world, as it has in different phrasing elsewhere (Leiva, 2008). However, little has been written directly of such spaces. Authors in this special section were, in effect, invited to treat ‘progressive’ as the other of ‘regressive’ in relation to the negative effects of neoliberalism in practice – that is, to be provocative. Dictionary definitions define the term as referring to change in the state of affairs or more precisely as proceeding towards a better state. For Le Heron (2007), it is clearly about the creation of spaces of co-learning for more reflective engagement, in which new capabilities might be developed. For others, it is about emergent spaces of empowerment, opportunity or alterity in the face of neoliberal homogeneity. Bargh and Otter (in this issue) confront the darker side of the notion of ‘progress’ and its implication in projects of colonisation. They caution us to be wary in our use of the term. Despite these concerns, however, they agree with the other authors that its use in this special section takes us beyond totalising notions of progress to tentative and exploratory change in an emergent world, in engagements that allow us to extract and carry forwards the positive from current trajectories and moments. The authors investigate the analytical and political possibilities of such claims. As with other commentaries on neoliberalism's genealogy, incoherence, incompleteness and diversity of forms (see Lewis et al., 2008), the authors make no claim that neoliberal political projects are either over or exhausted as powerful forces for change. Nor do they make claims for a benign neoliberalism or deny its universally destructive forms and effects. Rather, the authors in this special section challenge themselves and others to be more nuanced and incisive in their identification and assessment of the impacts of neoliberalism, to direct commensurate critique at that which it replaced, to identify new spaces of engagement and to recover political potential from these critiques. They identify spaces of possibility, where alternative projects have been developed. These spaces are, of course, of different shapes and sizes, emergent, contingent, actively and creatively fashioned, uncertain, insecure, contested and always in the making. They take the form of political projects rather than settled spaces, projects that must be aligned and realigned through ongoing political and intellectual work. The narratives have much to say about the fissures of neoliberalism, and point to new, localised politics of engagement with neoliberalised institutions. The five papers have much to say to the wider published work about the emergent relationality and instability of progressive spaces. Indeed, as authors in this journal have long argued and demonstrated, there is much to be said from this part of the world and not just about this part of the world. Each of the papers argues both that neoliberalism is nowhere near as coherent a whole as is commonly understood. Crucially, this observation is not used to dismiss the wealth of critique of neoliberalism, but is used productively to argue that it opens possibilities for knowing and performing differently. Two of the papers confront the remaking of urban spaces: one in Australia (McGuirk and Dowling, in this issue) and one in New Zealand. Two confront the question of Maori engagement with neoliberalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand: one in relation to the genealogies of a Maori educational institution and a diverse economy, and the other to Maori governance and community development. The fifth paper focuses on hybrid models of resource management in the Philippines. Each confronts both the limits of neoliberalism in terms of its extensivity and capacity to govern, and the possibilities to mobilise other projects that are generated by exploiting this incompleteness or by subverting neoliberal forms or developing alternative imaginaries. Three key messages cut across these highly particular narratives of progressive spaces. The first is that, while they are particular, they are unlikely to be exclusive. The second is that, rather than describing alternative outcomes, they are about mobilising projects and, thus, always in the making. Third, three of the stories are of embedded research and knowledge production, where the researchers are active participants and actively enacting different futures. McGuirk and Dowling deploy a post-structuralist political economy approach to examine master-planning as a planning technique and development practice in Australia. They focus their attention, in particular, on master-planned residential estates and the emerging residential environment in Sydney. They argue that the complex political and economic entanglements that constitute these master-planned residential estates are irreducible to a narrative of neoliberal ideology and practice or any idealist neoliberalisation of the residential development process. McGuirk and Dowling's deconstruction performs different types of political work. It suggests that neoliberal projects must be enacted in complex economic and institutional environments, from which they will not emerge pure. Indeed, their story suggests that these projects will be far from pure in their initial imaginaries and mobilisation as projects. If neoliberalism is constituted by an imperfect assemblage of imperfect projects that are then imperfectly implemented, then there is far greater capacity for resistance, subversion, or mobilisation of alternative projects and enactment of different imaginaries than are allowed for in dominant readings of neoliberalism. McGuirk and Dowling show a capacity for what they term ‘analytically destabilising and politicising urban neoliberalism’ and in turn sense fresh political possibilities. Le Heron (2007) also examines the urban development process in relation to globalising tendencies and neoliberalising political projects but takes a different approach to the challenge of identifying progressive spaces. For him, these are always in the making and less easily definable. His empirical focus is on Auckland and the co-constitution of academy and policy moments in political spaces. Le Heron relates his theorisation of post-structural political economy to his work within particular policy projects to examine the ways in which academics might inspire alternatives in the policy realm through different strategies of engagement. In this sense, his paper is about actual policy spaces of possibility, as well as how we might both practice in such spaces and work to create conditions for their emergence. He reflects on the possibilities presented by gaining access to rooms where projects are developed and moments when decisions are made, either in person or via former students or current networks. Like the other authors, he sees little prospect of rolling back neoliberal tides but observes that policy rooms are always co-constituted by knowledge and interests. This makes alternatives possible and gaining access to rooms crucial. It highlights praxis in graduate teaching alongside other strategies for engagement. If worlds are enacted by temporary coalitions of interest, then, even if decisions lock in long-term investment trajectories, there will always be other moments that may be influenced or other potential projects to float. In this account, progressive spaces are always present and always in the making even if they are not always clearly envisioned, visible or tangible. In their account of contemporary Maori struggles to build political, economic and social structures, Bargh and Otter examine spaces of neoliberalism that are embedded in discourses of colonisation in place. They argue that, while neoliberalism must be confronted and critiqued in terms of its entanglement in the genealogy of such struggles, Maori have worked this entanglement to encourage diverse political economies of production, trade and enterprise distinct from neoliberalism and colonisation. Thus, they argue from both empirical and political grounds for the failure of the stance that the notion of neoliberalism is everywhere and all and ever dominating, and in more or less the same way. Relating Kaupapa Maori scholarship to post-development ideas, they emphasise the value of ‘looking for’ progressive spaces as a political project, as opposed to identifying yet more spheres and forms of dominance. Rather than posit or accept that some outcomes have been more or less progressive, they investigate two cases that highlight how the ‘messy actualities’ of neoliberalism might be reworked in ongoing political projects. As non-geographers and Maori activist-intellectuals, Bargh and Otter's reading of Doreen Massey is fascinating. It leads them to locate discussion of the ‘progressive spaces’ of neoliberalism in the specificities and genealogies of particular places and reinforces their own inclination to focus on both sides of the couplet and examine the interplay between ‘… nuanced experiences and intricacies of progressiveness and neoliberalism’ and the ways in which they have ‘faltered’ in different local and distinct genealogies. Similarly, they see in Castree support for an exceptional position for indigenous theorising of place and progressiveness. Importantly, this is not grounded on an essentialist exceptionalism but recognises that, if progressiveness resides in fostering diversity and relationality, indigenous peoples must (at least) first negotiate their own response to the boundaries of place and renegotiate the terms of a relationality that was, in the first instance, generated by colonisation. Lewis and colleagues (2008) also examine Maori institutions but do not take us to the same depth of place reached by Bargh and Otter. Rather than a genealogy of colonisation, their paper is a contextualisation in terms of subversion of neoliberal technologies of control. It examines the building of Maori community development institutions in Te Rarawa, in the far north of New Zealand. The paper traces the development of social services agency Te Oranga from an uncertain delivery agency to de facto regional welfare authority. It builds on the authors' deeply embedded links with the agency to relate how Te Oranga developed its capabilities and whanau-centred world view into a model of performance that challenged the contradictions and inefficiencies at the heart of the contractualist neoliberal state. The paper examines the grounded practices of a particular political project that exploits the fissures in neoliberalism – both the contradictions of new public management and the pressures exerted by Maori political projects. While arguing that Te Oranga has fashioned a progressive space that is, at least, in part made possible by neoliberalism, the authors insist that the example offers neither evidence of a strategic, decisive, undisputed or enduring victory over neoliberalism nor necessarily a model for other places. Instead, it is contingent upon other political projects and related to the work of particular agents. It has been and remains very much emergent and continuously contested. This, the authors argue, has significant implications for how we approach questions of development as well as opportunities to build different futures from neoliberalism. They observe that past gains will have to be fought and refought for into the future, just as new spaces are, in their terms, ‘always present but equally always not yet realised’. Finally, Karen Fisher (in this issue) takes us beyond Australia and New Zealand into the wider region and into the space of the mega-issues of resource and environmental governance in the twenty-first century. Again, the paper is empirically rich. It examines the messy details of an actualised neoliberalism from the perspective of the tradeoffs around access, efficiency, ownership and representation. Again, she finds deep interstices in neoliberalism and deep contradictions in an overly simplistic critique of it. She explores the hybrid forms of water privatisation in Taglibaran in the Philippines. She finds that they define a different form of neoliberal governance from the ideological forms normally subjected to critique, which, in articulation with an active and complex political context, yield certain advantages from privatisation over other posited solutions. Her yardstick is a reliable access to safe water for disadvantaged populations, rather than the projected effects of an ideologically framed ‘purist’ neoliberal model. Her conclusions are contingent upon the involvement of domestic rather than global capital and the delicate balance of local political forces and collective will for safe water provision. Once again, she does not argue for a stable, well-defined progressive space, only for its existence as a set of practices and temporary coalitions with progressive effects. In this reading of them, these papers share in common several themes as well as their exploration in different ways of localised opportunities within the niches of actualised neoliberalisms. While recognising it as a totalising project, they scratch away at the contradictions, incompleteness and limits of neoliberalism in terms of its capability to settle political contest, allocate resources efficiently or reach into different political contexts. The authors engage with the policy process as a more open, contested set of spaces than that normally allowed for in critical accounts of neoliberalism. They develop accounts that see possibility and view people as active political and economic agents. In doing so, they actively seek out diverse economies, possibilities and opportunities and celebrate them without subjecting them to the tyrannical test of durability. In many ways, this is their point: the political process throws up opportunities, and there are ways to identify, elaborate and foster them, even if there are powerful actors, projects, alliances, and deeply inscribed trajectories that restrict and will shift and reform to eliminate alternatives. Post-development is less about engaging to judge outcomes against the force of history, but more about endeavouring to disrupt its essentialising and totalising effects and affects and to live different histories. It is in this sense that it might be possible to jettison the term ‘progressive’ as a descriptor of spaces that simply ‘are’– emergent and multiple co-constituted spaces. Le Heron (2007), Lewis and colleagues (2008), Bargh and Otter and, to a lesser extent, McGuirk and Dowling draw on embedded experiences, and call in different ways for a remodelled and a more deeply engaged form of performance of knowledge production all the way from the classroom to research ethics and the practice of public social science. Le Heron theorises this approach as post-structural political economy, which he terms ‘a knowledge production project which emphasises the generation of situated knowledge production capacities and capabilities’. For Le Heron, as for the other authors, this directs attention to the micro-political, yet in no way denies the weight of political–economic context and historical trajectories. This theorisation draws from Gibson-Graham's (2006) post-capitalist politics and the post-development ideas that underlie their work. Gibson-Graham also appears writ large in each of the other papers. Le Heron, for example, also draws from actor-network and governmentality-inspired work from the global report, just as the other papers draw inspiration from different wider theoretical report. What is to be celebrated here in this 50th anniversary for Asia Pacific Viewpoint is the way that work from the region is inspiring other work from the region, which, richly articulated with that from elsewhere, is informing knowledge production regionally and communicating strong storylines to other places globally.