Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Pivoting on the process of reserve replacement undertaken by key oil transnationals in Canada as a spatial fix for capital, the article considers how individual firms employ formal review processes to project their strategic interests. The proponent firm shapes, through its own participation, the regulatory terrain on which competitors will subsequently operate. In Alberta's tar sands, the oil industry's reserve replacement process serves as a spatial–temporal fix for capital, and the review process and tribunal acts as a complementary socio-ecological fix – restricting social/affective claims, including First Nations resistance, to an official tribunal setting. In seeking formal approval to replace declining oil and gas reserves with unconventionals, proponent firms claim investor security, while social movement opponents emphasize risk and insecurity arising from carbon-intensive, frontier extraction. In the case of the contested Shell Jackpine Mine Expansion Joint Review Panel, as in other environmental assessment processes in Alberta, the proponent firm and state representatives employ the oxymoronic term ‘resource sterilization’ to describe ecological protection. ‘Resource sterilization’ offers a discursive representation of how capital's spatio-temporal fix in unconventionals is facilitated through the terms of the formal review process, in which social claims are muted.

Infrastructure projects provide a spatial fix by increasing the scale and rate of capital accumulation, and because infrastructure projects themselves absorb massive amounts of productive and finance capital. I seek to explain the timing, character, and consequences of a Can $85 billion infrastructure boom in Canada's largest province, Ontario, between 2003 until 2013. I focus on the expansion and privatization of environmentally oriented infrastructure in Ontario via three policies: the conversion of public coal power plants to private natural gas and nuclear facilities; the Green Energy Act (a renewable energy feed-in tariffs programme); and The Big Move (a Can $50 billion dollar rapid transit plan using a public–private partnership model). I employ a Polanyian– O'Connor approach to emphasize the role of labour, environmental groups, and other social movement groups in bringing these investments about. I argue that infrastructure investments are not only a spatial fix aimed at finding capital a safe long-term investment and addressing class struggles around job creation. In Ontario these infrastructure investments have also provided the state with a broader socioecological fix for the economic and political contradictions stemming from air pollution and congestion. Social movements have pressured the government to address what James O'Connor refers to as the underproduction of the conditions of production: that is, degraded human health and quality of life; a deteriorating environment; and inadequate public infrastructure. Throughout the paper I emphasize how the socioecological fix in Ontario is being accomplished by advancing the neoliberal governance of public infrastructure. I point to how these neoliberal socioecological fixes are simply displacing socioecological crises to new spatial and temporal scales.

Many have argued that the burning of fossil fuels is an essential component of the socionatural metabolism of capitalism as we know it, and that the anthropogenic climate change it is causing may finally bring about capitalism’s end. In this paper, I explore the potential for, instead, a societal shift towards renewable energy sources as the dominant components of global energy supplies to provide a socioecological ‘fix’ to current forms of crisis. In so doing, I develop a notion of an integrated socioecological fix that combines the central elements of Harvey’s ‘spatial fix’ and of neoliberal environmental ‘fixes’ that maintain accumulation by enrolling new elements of nonhuman nature into circuits of capital. I argue, first, that the capital intensiveness and spatial extensiveness of any such transition could provide a global-scale, if temporary, socioecological fix to capitalist crisis tendencies; and, second, that the creation of global scale geographies of renewable energy production, distribution, and consumption would necessarily involve powerful new rounds of investment in, and claims on, rural areas. These impacts would likely fall disproportionately on rural areas, where land values are lowest and existing users often have less power and fewer formal land rights.

This paper investigates the scales and temporalities through which climate change impacts may be rendered into socio-ecological fixes for crises of overaccumulation within the (re)insurance industry. The property insurance and catastrophe reinsurance sectors are notorious for their cyclicity, with prices and returns oscillating dramatically between “soft” and “hard” markets. The problem of overaccummulation in soft market periods is often resolved by the destruction of reinsurers' capital reserves through huge catastrophic losses. This is typically followed by the revision of catastrophe models and reestimation of exposed values, processes which absorb additional (re)insurance capital and provide technoscientific legitimacy for raising rates. Reframing climate change risk in terms of ecologically-sourced devaluation suggests that, rather than posing an immediate existential threat, in the short to medium term the uncertain impacts of global climate change might constitute a recurrent “catastrophic fix” for particular segments of financial capital. This highlights both the productivity of uncertainty about climate change impacts and the limits of presuming that the operations of the private insurance market can produce a built environment more adapted to climate change. Rather, the more likely outcome is splintering protectionism: a patchwork of high risk, high reward areas where insurance is available only to those with the ability to pay rising premiums, leaving the state to manage the retreat and relocation of less remunerative properties and populations.

Theorizations of the spatial fix classically look to geographical expansion as the fix for capitalism's perennial crises of overaccumulation. Recent scholarship, evident in this theme issue, extends this thinking to the socioecological, recognizing that many ‘fixes’ these days involve appropriating or reconfiguring nature anew. This paper extends this yet further, by considering the body as a site of socioecological fixes. In recognition of Harvey's original notion of the spatial fix being always in relation to limits, this theorization puts a finer point on scholarship on the body as an accumulation strategy which has not always acknowledged the dialectical elements of this strategy. The body as a site of both limits and fixes is traced through the case of food marketing and processing strategies designed to overcome the obstacle to capitalist accumulation enshrined in Engel's law. These have in part contributed to the so-called obesity epidemic; and they are also involved in the commodified cures designed to resolve it—metabolism-defying diet foods being the example par excellence. These are designed to overcome particular limits of accumulation but, in doing so, produce new problems that are only partially resolved. Although the examples provided in this paper are limited to obesity and its putative cures, the larger point is to shed light on capitalism's potential to significantly rework bodily processes and spaces in ways conducive to ongoing accumulation, as immanent in the bioeconomy.

In the 1930s, the Canadian state sunk large sums of capital into forested landscapes in order to address a mounting and widespread unemployment crisis and the environmental legacy of industrial forestry practices. Unemployed men were enrolled into relief camps established at emerging Forest Experimentation Stations. These Stations reflected, and contributed to, a growing emphasis on reforestation and sustained-yield production. I argue that the use of relief labor in the development of forest research stations represented a socio-ecological fix to the broad crisis of the 1930s that sought to: (1) secure the conditions for renewed capital accumulation, (2) tackle the problem of unemployment, and (3) address the frayed legitimacy of the state and forestry sector. I build on debates on the formal and real subsumption of nature to consider the socio-ecological dimensions of David Harvey’s theorization of the “spatial fix.”

In the midst of the “sixth extinction” and declarations of the so-called Anthropocene, scientists and conservationists are debating the nature of planetary limits. They are also rethinking the very goal of nature conservation in a postnatural direction that is less oriented on saving pristine nature. To shed light on this contemporary debate, this paper looks back to examine three “circuits of power and knowledge” where biodiversity loss is constituted as an ecological crisis with humanity in its crosshairs and later as a more flexible problem of trade-offs. The paper contributes a grounded, empirical examination of the production of, and changing nature of “global biodiversity limits,” showing how they emerge through articulations between power laden and elite ecological-economic knowledge and frameworks, global biopolitical and ethical concerns, state-capital accumulative logics, and national security interests. Reaffirming a critical stance on limits and tracing a persistent ontology of scarcity in global biodiversity science and policy, the paper draws from the story of global biodiversity limits to inform the current discussion of the postnatural turn.

Geographers of technology illustrate software code's contexts, effects, and agencies as they shape urban space and everyday life, but the consequences of code for nature remain understudied. Political ecologists have critiqued remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based conservation projects, but have not engaged more broadly with the role of software in the contested production, circulation, and application of ecological knowledge. Yet, around the world, data analytics firms and conservation nonprofits argue for optimizing environmental management through faster and bigger data collection and new techniques of data manipulation and visualization. I present a case study from the US state of Oregon, illustrating how conservationists and environmental regulators employ computer programming to plan markets in which entrepreneurs restore stream and wetland ecosystem services to earn offset credits. In these markets, code-executed algorithms constituting spreadsheets, web maps, and GIS utilities generate, relate, and make sense of the data that define credit commodities. I argue that code tends toward three effects: producing a landscape defined by wetlands' modeled value, performing social relations associated with nature's neoliberalization and financialization, and legitimating these moves. Although emphasis on the performativity of code and other technological objects is warranted, the contexts in which these are authored, deployed, and evaluated should remain central to understanding environmental governance. This is to caution against seeing technology as reducing nature and society to state or capitalist rationalities and to hesitate to differentiate prima facie code's work on space and on nature. I call for bridging political ecology and geographies of technology in ways that can explain how code is generative of environmental knowledge, change, and conflict.

Local-scale government ordinances that attempt to delay or displace oil and gas drilling in their territories are common in regions with hydrocarbon extraction activities. Drawing on literature from policy mobilities and resource and energy governance, this paper analyzes policymaking processes that resulted in a December 2013 ordinance in Dallas, Texas, which established a 1500 foot (457.2 meter) setback between gas wells and residences, making drilling (with hydraulic fracturing) nearly impossible. Dallas was not the first city in the region to adopt an oil and gas drilling ordinance; indeed, many regulatory provisions were copied from other regional cities. This paper explains policy mobility in the Dallas policymaking process in terms of anti-political practices and hydrocarbon institutions that, overall, determine neoliberal hydrocarbon governance. City governments cede some of the political process to gas drilling task forces that work to render setbacks technical. Legal classification of subsurface hydrocarbons as the mineral estate creates a legal gray area that confounds municipal regulatory authority and gives discursive power to mineral owners to threaten municipal officials with lawsuits. Both of these anti-political strategies encouraged selective copying and morphing of other policy provisions by the Dallas city government. Adopting longer municipal setback distance regulations represents a type of contestation of neoliberalism situated between complete deregulation and overt opposition.

The military offers a form of welfare-for-work but when personnel leave they lose this safety net, a loss exacerbated by the rollback neoliberalism of the contemporary welfare state. Increasingly the third sector has stepped in to address veterans’ welfare needs through operating within and across military/civilian and state/market/community spaces and cultures. In this paper we use both veterans’ and military charities’ experiences to analyse the complex politics that govern the liminal boundary zone of post-military welfare. Through exploring ‘crossing’ and ‘bridging’ we conceptualise military charities as ‘boundary subjects’, active yet dependent on the continuation of the civilian-military binary, and argue that the latter is better understood as a multidirectional, multiscalar and contextual continuum. Post-military welfare emerges as a competitive, confused and confusing assemblage that needs to be made more navigable in order to better support the ‘heroic poor’.

Women-owned enterprises have boomed significantly during the past several decades. The purpose of this study is to theorize and empirically delineate the connections between female entrepreneurship and community development through the lens of entrepreneurship. Our results indicate that, from the initial creation of these businesses, to their daily operations and resource mobilization through social networks, women entrepreneurs are closely connected to local communities through their business activities. At the same time, as engagement and payback to local communities are fundamental to their professional goals and operation strategies, female entrepreneurship activities have significantly contributed to local communities in a wide range of ways. The dialectical connections between women business owners and their communities have significant potential to be incorporated into community development policies and practices.

The melting-pot argument, whereby economically heterogeneous multi-cultural societies, characterised by high levels of immigration from a variety of origins, become more homogeneous over time, has attracted much attention, especially in North America. Australia has similarly experienced major waves of immigration from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. This paper reports successful tests of hypotheses, derived from the melting-pot model, that economic integration of immigrant groups there has also resulted in reduced inter-group occupational and income differences across successive generations, but that the pace of integration can vary across ethnic groups. Using a bespoke tabulation from the 2011 Australian census we explore differences among ten immigrant (ancestry) groups in their educational qualifications, and their occupational and income distributions, using a recently developed method to identify significant patterns within large contingency tables. We find that by the third generation there were no substantial differences either across the ten groups chosen to represent four main waves of immigration to Australia or between these groups and the non-immigrant population.

There is growing interest in how, when and where neighbourhoods affect individual behaviours and outcomes. In Britain, falling levels of owner-occupation and the growth of ethnic minority populations have sparked a debate about how neighbourhood characteristics and neighbourhood change intersect with the decision to move. In this paper we investigate how mobility preferences vary with neighbourhood characteristics and neighbourhood change. We use multilevel logistic regression models to test whether this is configured by personal attributes or attachment to one's neighbourhood and perceived similarity to one's neighbours. The results show that neighbourhood deprivation, changes in neighbourhood ethnic composition and changes in tenure mix are associated with preferring to move. Importantly, we show that a feeling of belonging to the neighbourhood or feeling similar to others in the neighbourhood significantly reduces the desire to move.