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Neoliberalising rural environments
Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 386e390
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud
Editorial
Neoliberalising rural environments Scholarly debate about the conditions for, and extent of, ‘neoliberal nature’ continues to thrive. Rural researchers have contributed to this in many different ways, reflecting “the subjection of more and more areas of ... [rural] environmental life to the logics of capital accumulation” (Castree, 2007, p. 8). Over the last three decades rural places worldwide have arguably been transformed by the market processes and commodification of nature that are widely seen as trademarks of neoliberalisation. Longer term sociodemographic trends have been exacerbated by a combination of globalisation and neoliberal economic policies that have profoundly restructured “the material, social and economic conditions of life in rural areas” (Cocklin et al., 2002, p.2). The forms that this restructuring takes are varied, but include the withdrawal of or cuts in expenditure on services, reduced subsidies to agriculture, the liberalisation of international trade, and a shift to policies encouraging efficiency, self-reliance and competitiveness. Yet, while the social, economic and environmental impacts of neoliberalisation on rural communities and the farming sector are well documented (e.g., Cheshire, 2006; Coleman et al., 2004; Jaffe, 2006; McMichael, €nen, 2013; Wolf and Bonanno, 2014), 2012; Nousiainen and Pylkka there has been little systematic attempt to investigate the interplay between neoliberal principles and policies and the governing of rural environments. This is a significant gap since, as Woods (2011, p. 259) contends, “state regulation of the rural environment has increasingly been challenged, re-assessed and re-oriented by the application of neoliberal rationalities”. Drawing upon the work of Woods (2011) and Lockie (2010), the trend towards neoliberal governance of rural environments can be characterised in terms of: (1) challenges to established regimes of state support for agriculture linked to broader market opening for agricultural products through trade reform; (2) the commodification of rural nature, advocacy of ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES) and wider use of other market-based mechanisms, and (3) growing reliance on various ‘technologies of rule’, which seek to subject rural actors to market disciplines and auditing processes of various kinds. 1. Dimensions of the neoliberal governance of rural environments 1.1. Challenges to environmental regulation and state assistance as ‘barriers to trade’ State assistance to farmers has long been one of the cornerstones of rural policy in places such as the European Union and United States. Indeed, policy scientists have been perplexed by the ability of farm lobbies in these jurisdictions to defend substantial government subsidies at a time when most other sectors have http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.10.006 0743-0167/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
lost theirs (Sheingate, 2000; Stogstad, 2002). However, since the mid-1990s, trading partners such as Australia have begun to critique the trade distorting impact of such subsidies in the context of successive World Trade Organisation (WTO)-sponsored trade rounds, pressing for significant reductions in government subsidies as part of a broader trade liberalisation agenda (Potter, 2006). While progress has been slow, some re-balancing of state support has been achieved and the consequent ‘decoupling’ of government payments from agricultural production is seen by some as evidence of the force of neoliberal arguments in a period of fiscal retrenchment. Those seeking to defend the state assistance paradigm have been required to develop new ways to justify a more targeted pattern of state intervention predicated on a discourse of ‘public money for public goods’. This defence of government subsidies is based on the argument that agriculture is ‘multifunctional’ and has important environmental and social as well as economic functions that need to be underwritten by the state (Dibden and Cocklin, 2009). In the EU, an exceptionalist case continues to be made that the provision of state assistance to economically marginal producers is needed to retain a countryside occupied and managed by family farmers (Potter and Lobley, 2004). Elsewhere, the broader argument that state payments can only really be justified in the long term where they are linked to the provision of public goods (including, critically, ecosystem services of various kinds) increasingly holds sway. This view frames the terms of debate around state support to agriculture and, for neoliberal advocates, paves the way for a more restricted future role for government in relation to agriculture and rural space. 1.2. Commodification of nature and payments for ecosystem services Such a re-focusing of the nature and extent of state subsidies also creates space for non-state actors to enter as contractors of ecosystem services on their own account. So-called ‘payments for environmental services’ (PES) have been promoted on the very neoclassical economic assumption that environmental degradation is a consequence of market failure due to factors such as “imperfect information, inadequately defined property rights, and/or pricing of natural resources below their full economic and environmental cost” (Lockie, 2013, p. 91). If, as Dempsey and Robertson (2012) argue, ‘ecosystem services’ is fast becoming one of the organising environmental concepts of our times, then PES is the logical way to provision them via a market exchange. Indeed, Potter and Wolf (2014) speculate that a PES revolution in environmental provisioning on private lands is possible if commercial actors such as private water companies and other utilities begin to contract these services on a large
Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 386e390
enough scale. There exists a growing body of critical and empirically rich research on PES from countries such as Costa Rica (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012), Mexico (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010), Vietnam (McElwee, 2012), the United States (Robertson, 2004), the United Kingdom (Wynne-Jones, 2013) and Australia (Lockie, 2013). This literature provides important insights into the techniques through which PES schemes are developed, how they are rolled out in practice, and the extent to which their implementation reinforces the neoliberalisation of environmental governance. 1.3. Reliance on ‘technologies of rule’ to govern rural environments and actors ‘at a distance’ Even without any significant roll-back of direct state involvement in environmental governance, neoliberal impulses may still be evident in the way authorities seek to govern environments and individuals ‘at a distance’ (Higgins and Lockie, 2002; Lockie, 2010). These techniques are inter-related but can be divided into two broad forms. The first are ‘technologies of agency’ that seek to “encourage a calculative prudent approach to selfgovernment by members of a population” (Lockie, 2010, p. 367). These include ‘bottom-up’ environmental initiatives, such as Canada's Environmental Farm Plans (Robinson, 2006) or Environmental Management Systems in Australia (Higgins et al., 2007), through which rural producers develop plans to assess and better manage their environmental performance. They also include schemes (public and private) that use voluntary incentives to improve the environmental practices of rural producers, such as industry best management practices (Lockie and Higgins, 2007) and payments for the provision of ecosystem services (Higgins et al., 2012; Potter and Wolf, 2014; Robertson, 2004; WynneJones, 2013). The second are ‘technologies of performance’ “that provide the means through which self-government may be monitored, informed, and, where necessary held to account” (Lockie, 2010, p. 367). The most common example in the literature is the rise of third party certification in which independent audits are conducted by third parties to verify that agri-food production practices meet particular environmental, social justice or quality standards (Bain and Hatanaka, 2010; Hatanaka et al., 2005). This is related to the growing influence worldwide of audit regimes/disciplines e such as GlobalGAP e in which food retailers increasingly require adherence by rural producers to a set of rules if they wish to supply to those supermarkets (Campbell et al., 2006). Technologies of performance are also penetrating environmental governance through the disciplines of accountancy and economics. This is evident in the reliance on accounting as well as economic techniques and knowledges in the governance of greenhouse gas emissions and the construction of carbon markets (Callon, 2009; Lovell and MacKenzie, 2011). It is evident too in the valuation by economists of nonmarket environmental goods, which are crucial to the development of markets for ecosystem services (Robertson, 2006, 2007). 2. Translating neoliberal principles and techniques into practice The literature discussed above draws attention to the different ways in which neoliberalisation is manifested in rural environmental governance. Work conducted by rural social scientists in recent years nevertheless continues to emphasise that the translation of neoliberal principles and techniques into practice is far from a straightforward or uncontested process, with resistance to neoliberal impulses, and adaptation to them, both being evident at a variety of scales. This raises broader questions concerning: (a) the
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ways in which neoliberal rationalities, techniques and understandings are contested and resisted, and by whom; and (b) how neoliberalisation can still proceed, be made workable in practice or even positively exploited, via a wide variety of state-market adaptations and collaborations. These questions frame the contributions to this special issue. In the next two sections of this introductory paper we examine the ways in which rural sociologists and geographers have engaged conceptually and theoretically with each question followed by an outline of how these ideas, concepts and theories have been taken up and developed in the contributed papers. 2.1. Contesting and resisting neoliberalisation A major theme in the literature on neoliberalisation of rural environments is how, and under what circumstances, contestation and resistance is possible. At a policy level, this is best exemplified in debates over rural nature, and particularly in efforts to defend the ‘multifunctional’ European model of agriculture against growing international trade liberalisation that we refer to above. At face value, multifunctionality could be construed as a form of resistance to neoliberalisation, given its defence of income support and environmental protection within economically marginal rural areas. Indeed, critics have argued persistently that this policy position is a thinly veiled form of protectionism for European agriculture (Dibden et al., 2009). Yet, the continuing liberalisation of agricultural policy in Europe has contributed to the emergence of a more ‘decoupled’ multifunctionality agenda, “which accepts the imperatives of market productivism on the better land and for the more competitive sectors while attempting to offer some protection and selective opportunities to diversify into niche markets to marginal farmers affected by restructuring elsewhere” (Potter and Tilzey, 2007, p. 1301). In these terms, multifunctionality is a form of resistance as well as accommodation to neoliberalisation. The incorporation of resistance and contestation as part of the roll-out of neoliberalism is arguably even more evident at the programme level. Mansfield's (2007) case study of the Western Alaska Community Development Quota e a programme which allocates a portion of regional fisheries to the mostly indigenous people of Western Alaska in order to provide economic development opportunities to Native Alaskans (Mansfield, 2007, p. 479) e shows that neoliberal principles do not necessarily undermine and colonise other non-neoliberal goals. Thus, Mansfield argues that this programme both disciplines the “subjects to the market” and “provides protections from the market to achieve social justice goals” (Mansfield, 2007, p.495). On this basis, forms of governing that appear neoliberal can also embody goals that represent a challenge to and contestation of neoliberal objectives. These conclusions are consistent with Robertson's work on markets for ecosystem services where he argues that “rollout and resistance may be embodied in the same policy and in fact the same person” (Robertson, 2007, p. 520). For Robertson, opportunities for resistance and redirection emerge from the problems associated with efforts to ascribe market value to, and thereby commodify, natural resources. These values are not simply ‘discovered’ but involve considerable debate by scientists and bureaucrats over issues such as the commodity to be valued, how values can best be measured, and how changes to values might be documented and certified. Even where ecosystem services are commodified, these measures are translated and rendered meaningful on-the ground by field technicians (Robertson, 2006). While this may enable markets in ecosystem services to work in practice, it also has the potential to place limits on the neoliberalisation of non-market public goods.
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In this Special Issue, the co-existence of resistance and neoliberal roll-out in terms both of the subjectivities of actors and the realities of implementation is explored in several of the contributed papers. In their paper on the politics of greenhouse gas regulation in New Zealand, Cooper and Rosin (2014) draw on the concept of environmental subjectivities to explore the extent of farmer opposition to the use of emissions trading as a marketbased instrument. They identify the scope for a neoliberal programme to be disrupted by the ‘unruly subjectivities’ of agents who, ironically, have come to see themselves as beyond government control following the neoliberal deregulation of New Zealand agricultural policy in the 1980s. This supports previous work by Higgins et al. (2012), which revealed that the use of market instruments e in this case conservation tenders e to provide incentives for farmers to manage native vegetation problematises as well as makes possible the neoliberalisation of rural environments. In this case, while tender schemes may allow landholders “to achieve their own environmental goals or supplement their income”, they may also contribute to resistance based upon “the fear of increased government regulation as well as perceived threats to property rights” (Higgins et al., 2012, p. 384). At the same time, while tender schemes enable the extension of market forms into new domains, they are able to work only in conjunction with other government actions (such as regulation) and circumstances such as farmers' responses to severe climatic circumstances. A similarly complex interplay between the cultural understandings (and resistances) of subjects and new neoliberal modes of state action is explored in the contribution from Maye et al. (2014). These authors describe how the traditionally statecentric task of animal disease control in the UK is increasingly giving way to a new ‘landscape of choice’ as fiscally-constrained governments seek to devolve responsibility to farmers themselves. Despite emphasising the extent to which farmers are being given more autonomy in their management of Bovine Tuberculosis (BTB), government is still heavily present in setting limits on these choices. Meanwhile, a lack of sensitivity to farmers' own cultural understandings of disease has generated resistance to government plans for further devolution. Maye et al.'s conclusion is that the state's preferred partnership model of disease management faces an uncertain future until it engages more fully with these subjectivities. The relationship between farmer autonomy and neoliberal forms of governance is explored in more detail in the paper by Stock et al. (2014). They draw a distinction between neoliberal autonomy, characterised by individual entrepreneurship and economically rational behaviour, and actual autonomy, in which individuals co-operate with one another to achieve collective social and environmental goals. Stock et al. examine how these different forms of autonomy are evident in co-operative agricultural arrangements across four national case studies e England, Switzerland, New Zealand and Brazil e and the consequences in each case for environmental and social outcomes. The authors argue that while agricultural co-operativism can in some cases act as an emancipatory strategy for farmers to escape dependency on the structures of capital, or at least offer the potential to do so, it mostly supports and/or extends neoliberal autonomy. However, neoliberal autonomy does not necessarily lead to uniformly negative environmental or social outcomes. As Stock et al. contend, the extension of neoliberal autonomy can contribute in some cases to ecological benefits and provide a source of economic stability for farmers. Nevertheless, at the same time, it can also have decidedly negative environmental outcomes and provide farmers with little opportunity for meaningful ‘bottom-up’ participation.
2.2. Making neoliberalisation workable: hybrid environmental governance The question of how, in the face of the above forms of resistance and re-direction, neoliberal reforms can be made to work in practice is taken up by the remaining papers in this Special Issue. Increasing numbers of scholars are commenting on the dangers of adopting a bifurcated view of state versus market relations and are pointing to the range of adaptations that are possible. This has given rise to the concept of hybrid environmental governance involving arrangements or practices that bridge, or blur, divisions such as public/private, economic/social, state/market. Hybridity recognises that neoliberalism is neither hegemonic nor universal, and exists in different forms across specific geographical and institutional contexts (Larner, 2003). Hybrid governance arrangements have become increasingly prominent due to the recognition that “seemingly purely market-, state-, or civil society-based governance strategies depend for their efficacy on support from other domains of social institutions” (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006, p. 298). Indeed, as Lockie and Higgins (2007) observe, the neoliberalisation of rural environmental governance is characterised by experimentation with a range of strategies, instruments and institutional arrangements. The notion of hybrid governance has been used in two broad ways in the rural environmental governance literature. The first approach focuses on how neoliberal forms of governing work in the context of other rationalities of rule to achieve environmental governance goals. From this perspective, the neoliberalisation of rural environments does not necessarily mean the displacement of alternative rationalities or techniques of governing. In fact, as Higgins and Lockie (2002, p. 422) argue in an Australian context, while natural resource management programmes “are increasingly seeking to govern in an advanced liberal way, this is being shaped by the recognition that resource management problems have social causes and consequences, and that solutions beyond the individual managerial skills of farmers are required”. This has given rise to hybrid governance strategies that enable governments to make neoliberalising ambitions workable in practice. Hence, in their paper exploring attempts to roll out PES schemes in Vietnam, McElwee et al. (2014) emphasise the extent to which success has required the involvement of local actors in the implementation process. As they point out, much of the variegation observable in those PES measures that have succeeded has been due to the active engagement of rural actors in shaping the parameters of PES design. In common with other analysts of the PES approach, McElwee et al. show how what is often portrayed as a purely neoliberal idea actually involves a mix of market incentives and traditional regulation. Like other forms of regulation, PES are political projects embedded in many different institutional and ecological contexts. Similarly, in their paper on Amazonian forest management, Pokorny and Pacheco (2014) highlight the significance of state regulation in enhancing the attractiveness and functionality of market approaches to natural forests. However, unlike the PES schemes in McElwee et al.'s paper, Pokorny and Pacheco observe that the legal-institutional framework established to facilitate economic gains from the commercialisation of natural forests favours the corporate sector and discriminates against local forest users. At the same time, the financial attractiveness of other land use options compared to forest management increases the risk of forest conversion by corporate actors to other land uses, resulting in poor farmers being displaced by externally capitalised investors and negative conservation outcomes. Pokorny and Pacheco argue that a more environmentally sustainable and socially just future
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depends on massive regulatory invention to support local forest managers and the optimisation of local value chains. The second approach to hybrid governance focuses specifically on the hybrid institutions that have emerged in response to neoliberal agendas of various kinds. In their paper exploring how ownership arrangements have adapted to neoliberal pressures for the privatisation of public lands in the UK, Hodge and Adams (2014) emphasise the opportunities that neoliberalism creates to craft new forms of property and property rights that are neither fully private nor held exclusively by government. Building on earlier work analysing processes of ‘institutional blending’ (Hodge and Adams, 2012), they show how property rights may be spread amongst different interested parties in order to ensure that conservation values can be safeguarded. While institutional blending may diminish in some cases the role of the state in rural land management, in others it may involve an increasing degree of state intervention in order to guide the creation of markets and direct market-oriented forms of governance in particular ways. The paper by Higgins et al. (2014) is interested also in the hybrid governance arrangements underpinning rural land management. Focusing on the hybrid governance strategies of institutional blending and contextual adaptation, they examine in an Australian context how and why hybrid forms of governance enable PES schemes to be workable, and the consequences for the neoliberalisation of rural environments and subjects. Using two case studies of PES in the State of Queensland, Higgins et al. argue that the intertwining of institutional blending and contextual adaptation is crucial in making each PES scheme workable. Yet, the extensive use of non-market instruments, such as regulation and extension, has ambiguous neoliberalising consequences. On the one hand, the use of non-market instruments compromises the application of neoliberal principles to rural environments. On the other hand, these instruments are crucial in the building of neoliberal landholder subjectivities. The papers in this special issue conclude overwhelmingly that while rural environmental governance is underpinned increasingly by neoliberal principles and techniques, these tend to be “tamed by on-the-ground realities” (McElwee, 2012, p. 420) as well as shaped in practice by existing institutional arrangements and policy approaches. In some cases this is disruptive to neoliberalising environmental objectives, but in others it gives rise to more complicated effects in which “ostensibly neoliberal structures are supported by decidedly non-neoliberal practices” (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012, p. 41). We argue that future research on the neoliberalisation of rural environments needs to engage in more depth with questions of how neoliberal policy prescriptions are implemented in practice, and the often complex and ambiguous effects on rural environments and actors. Doing so is likely to take “ideas of neoliberalisation well beyond its essential conceptualisations and motivations” (Hodge and Adams, 2012, p. 477), but is crucial in highlighting the adaptability as well as limits of neoliberal environmental governance.
References Bain, C., Hatanaka, M., 2010. The practice of third-party certification: enhancing environmental sustainability and social justice in the Global South? In: Higgins, V., Larner, W. (Eds.), Calculating the Social: Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 56e74. Callon, M., 2009. Civilizing markets: carbon trading between in vitro and in vivo experiments. Account. Organ. Soc. 34, 535e548. Campbell, H., Lawrence, G., Smith, K., 2006. Audit cultures and the Antipodes: the implications of EurepGAP for New Zealand and Australian agri-food industries. In: Marsden, T., Murdoch, J. (Eds.), Between the Local and the Global:
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Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Agri-food Sector. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 69e93. Castree, N., 2007. Neoliberal Environments: a Framework for Analysis. WP 04/07. Manchester Papers in Political Economy. Cheshire, L., 2006. Governing Rural Development: Discourses and Practices of Selfhelp in Australian Rural Policy. Ashgate, Aldershot. Cocklin, C., Bowler, I., Bryant, C., 2002. Introduction: sustainability and rural systems. In: Bowler, I., Bryant, C., Cocklin, C. (Eds.), The Sustainability of Rural Systems: Geographical Interpretations. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 1e12. Coleman, W., Grant, W., Josling, T., 2004. Agriculture in the New Global Economy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Dempsey, J., Robertson, M., 2012. Ecosystem services: tensions, impurities, and points of engagement within neoliberalism. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 36 (6), 758e779. Dibden, J., Cocklin, C., 2009. ‘Multifunctionality’: trade protectionism or a new way forward? Environ. Plan. A 41, 163e182. Dibden, J., Potter, C., Cocklin, C., 2009. Contesting the neoliberal project for agriculture: productivist and multifunctional trajectories in the European Union and Australia. J. Rural Stud. 25, 299e308. Fletcher, R., Breitling, J., 2012. Market mechanism or subsidy in disguise? Governing payment for environmental services in Costa Rica. Geoforum 43, 402e411. Hatanaka, M., Bain, C., Busch, L., 2005. Third-party certification in the global agrifood system. Food Policy 30, 354e369. Higgins, V., Lockie, S., 2002. Re-discovering the social: neo-liberalism and hybrid practices of governing in rural natural resource management. J. Rural Stud. 18, 419e428. Higgins, V., Dibden, J., Cocklin, C., 2007. Market-oriented initiatives for agrienvironmental governance: environmental management systems in Australia. In: Maye, D., Holloway, L., Kneafsey, M. (Eds.), Alternative Food Geographies: Representation and Practice. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 223e238. Hodge, I.D., Adams, W.M., 2012. Neoliberalisation, rural land trusts and institutional blending. Geoforum 43, 472e482. Jaffe, J., 2006. Social cohesion, neoliberalism and the entrepreneurial community in rural Saskatchewan. Am. Behav. Sci. 50 (2), 206e225. Lockie, S., 2010. Neoliberal regimes of environmental governance: climate change, biodiversity and agriculture in Australia. In: Redclift, M., Woodgate, G. (Eds.), International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, second ed. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 364e377. Lockie, S., 2013. Market instruments, ecosystem services, and property rights: assumptions and conditions for sustained social and ecological benefits. Land Use Policy 31, 90e98. Lockie, S., Higgins, V., 2007. Roll-out neoliberalism and hybrid practices of regulation in Australian agri-environmental governance. J. Rural Stud. 23, 1e11. Lovell, H., MacKenzie, D., 2011. Accounting for carbon: the role of accounting professional organisations in governing climate change. Antipode 43 (3), 704e730. Mansfield, B., 2007. Property, markets, and dispossession: the Western Alaska community development quota as neoliberalism, social justice, both, and neither. Antipode 39 (3), 480e499. McAfee, K., Shapiro, E.N., 2010. Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico: nature, neoliberalism, social movements, and the state. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 100 (3), 579e599. McElwee, P., 2012. Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem? Geoforum 43, 412e426. McMichael, P., 2012. Development and Social Change: a Global Perspective, fifth ed. Sage, Thousand Oaks. Nousiainen, M., Pylkk€ anen, P., 2013. Responsible local communities e a neoliberal regime of solidarity in Finnish rural policy. Geoforum 48, 73e82. Potter, C., 2006. Competing narratives for the future of European agriculture: the agri-environmental consequences of neoliberalization in the context of the Doha Round. Geogr. J. 172 (3), 190e196. Potter, C., Lobley, M., 2004. Agricultural restructuring and state assistance: competing or complementary rural policy paradigms? J. Environ. Policy Plan. 7, 34e50. Potter, C., Tilzey, M., 2007. Agricultural multifunctionality, environmental sustainability and the WTO: resistance or accommodation to the neoliberal project for agriculture? Geoforum 38, 1290e1303. Potter, C., Wolf, S., 2014. Payments for ecosystem services in relation to US and UK agri-environmental policy: neoliberal policy disruption or hybrid policy adaptation? Agric. Hum. Values 31, 397e408. Robertson, M., 2004. The neoliberalization of ecosystem services: wetland mitigation banking and problems in environmental governance. Geoforum 35 (3), 361e373. Robertson, M., 2006. The nature that capital can see: science, state, and market in the commodification of ecosystem services. Environ. Plan. Soc. Space 24, 367e387. Robertson, M., 2007. 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Stogstad, G., 2002. Ideas, paradigms and institutions: agricultural exceptionalism in the European Union and the United States. Governance 11 (4), 463e490. Wolf, S., Bonanno, A. (Eds.), 2014. The Neoliberal Regime in the Agri-food Sector: Crisis, Resilience and Restructuring. Routledge, Abingdon. Woods, M., 2011. Rural. Routledge, Abingdon. Wynne-Jones, S., 2013. Connecting payments for ecosystem services and agrienvironmental regulation: an analysis of the Welsh Glastir Scheme. J. Rural Stud. 31, 77e86.
Vaughan Higgins Charles Sturt University, Australia
Clive Potter Imperial College London, UK Jacqui Dibden Monash University, Australia Chris Cocklin James Cook University, Australia
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud
Editorial
Neoliberalising rural environments Scholarly debate about the conditions for, and extent of, ‘neoliberal nature’ continues to thrive. Rural researchers have contributed to this in many different ways, reflecting “the subjection of more and more areas of ... [rural] environmental life to the logics of capital accumulation” (Castree, 2007, p. 8). Over the last three decades rural places worldwide have arguably been transformed by the market processes and commodification of nature that are widely seen as trademarks of neoliberalisation. Longer term sociodemographic trends have been exacerbated by a combination of globalisation and neoliberal economic policies that have profoundly restructured “the material, social and economic conditions of life in rural areas” (Cocklin et al., 2002, p.2). The forms that this restructuring takes are varied, but include the withdrawal of or cuts in expenditure on services, reduced subsidies to agriculture, the liberalisation of international trade, and a shift to policies encouraging efficiency, self-reliance and competitiveness. Yet, while the social, economic and environmental impacts of neoliberalisation on rural communities and the farming sector are well documented (e.g., Cheshire, 2006; Coleman et al., 2004; Jaffe, 2006; McMichael, €nen, 2013; Wolf and Bonanno, 2014), 2012; Nousiainen and Pylkka there has been little systematic attempt to investigate the interplay between neoliberal principles and policies and the governing of rural environments. This is a significant gap since, as Woods (2011, p. 259) contends, “state regulation of the rural environment has increasingly been challenged, re-assessed and re-oriented by the application of neoliberal rationalities”. Drawing upon the work of Woods (2011) and Lockie (2010), the trend towards neoliberal governance of rural environments can be characterised in terms of: (1) challenges to established regimes of state support for agriculture linked to broader market opening for agricultural products through trade reform; (2) the commodification of rural nature, advocacy of ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES) and wider use of other market-based mechanisms, and (3) growing reliance on various ‘technologies of rule’, which seek to subject rural actors to market disciplines and auditing processes of various kinds. 1. Dimensions of the neoliberal governance of rural environments 1.1. Challenges to environmental regulation and state assistance as ‘barriers to trade’ State assistance to farmers has long been one of the cornerstones of rural policy in places such as the European Union and United States. Indeed, policy scientists have been perplexed by the ability of farm lobbies in these jurisdictions to defend substantial government subsidies at a time when most other sectors have http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.10.006 0743-0167/© 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
lost theirs (Sheingate, 2000; Stogstad, 2002). However, since the mid-1990s, trading partners such as Australia have begun to critique the trade distorting impact of such subsidies in the context of successive World Trade Organisation (WTO)-sponsored trade rounds, pressing for significant reductions in government subsidies as part of a broader trade liberalisation agenda (Potter, 2006). While progress has been slow, some re-balancing of state support has been achieved and the consequent ‘decoupling’ of government payments from agricultural production is seen by some as evidence of the force of neoliberal arguments in a period of fiscal retrenchment. Those seeking to defend the state assistance paradigm have been required to develop new ways to justify a more targeted pattern of state intervention predicated on a discourse of ‘public money for public goods’. This defence of government subsidies is based on the argument that agriculture is ‘multifunctional’ and has important environmental and social as well as economic functions that need to be underwritten by the state (Dibden and Cocklin, 2009). In the EU, an exceptionalist case continues to be made that the provision of state assistance to economically marginal producers is needed to retain a countryside occupied and managed by family farmers (Potter and Lobley, 2004). Elsewhere, the broader argument that state payments can only really be justified in the long term where they are linked to the provision of public goods (including, critically, ecosystem services of various kinds) increasingly holds sway. This view frames the terms of debate around state support to agriculture and, for neoliberal advocates, paves the way for a more restricted future role for government in relation to agriculture and rural space. 1.2. Commodification of nature and payments for ecosystem services Such a re-focusing of the nature and extent of state subsidies also creates space for non-state actors to enter as contractors of ecosystem services on their own account. So-called ‘payments for environmental services’ (PES) have been promoted on the very neoclassical economic assumption that environmental degradation is a consequence of market failure due to factors such as “imperfect information, inadequately defined property rights, and/or pricing of natural resources below their full economic and environmental cost” (Lockie, 2013, p. 91). If, as Dempsey and Robertson (2012) argue, ‘ecosystem services’ is fast becoming one of the organising environmental concepts of our times, then PES is the logical way to provision them via a market exchange. Indeed, Potter and Wolf (2014) speculate that a PES revolution in environmental provisioning on private lands is possible if commercial actors such as private water companies and other utilities begin to contract these services on a large
Editorial / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 386e390
enough scale. There exists a growing body of critical and empirically rich research on PES from countries such as Costa Rica (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012), Mexico (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010), Vietnam (McElwee, 2012), the United States (Robertson, 2004), the United Kingdom (Wynne-Jones, 2013) and Australia (Lockie, 2013). This literature provides important insights into the techniques through which PES schemes are developed, how they are rolled out in practice, and the extent to which their implementation reinforces the neoliberalisation of environmental governance. 1.3. Reliance on ‘technologies of rule’ to govern rural environments and actors ‘at a distance’ Even without any significant roll-back of direct state involvement in environmental governance, neoliberal impulses may still be evident in the way authorities seek to govern environments and individuals ‘at a distance’ (Higgins and Lockie, 2002; Lockie, 2010). These techniques are inter-related but can be divided into two broad forms. The first are ‘technologies of agency’ that seek to “encourage a calculative prudent approach to selfgovernment by members of a population” (Lockie, 2010, p. 367). These include ‘bottom-up’ environmental initiatives, such as Canada's Environmental Farm Plans (Robinson, 2006) or Environmental Management Systems in Australia (Higgins et al., 2007), through which rural producers develop plans to assess and better manage their environmental performance. They also include schemes (public and private) that use voluntary incentives to improve the environmental practices of rural producers, such as industry best management practices (Lockie and Higgins, 2007) and payments for the provision of ecosystem services (Higgins et al., 2012; Potter and Wolf, 2014; Robertson, 2004; WynneJones, 2013). The second are ‘technologies of performance’ “that provide the means through which self-government may be monitored, informed, and, where necessary held to account” (Lockie, 2010, p. 367). The most common example in the literature is the rise of third party certification in which independent audits are conducted by third parties to verify that agri-food production practices meet particular environmental, social justice or quality standards (Bain and Hatanaka, 2010; Hatanaka et al., 2005). This is related to the growing influence worldwide of audit regimes/disciplines e such as GlobalGAP e in which food retailers increasingly require adherence by rural producers to a set of rules if they wish to supply to those supermarkets (Campbell et al., 2006). Technologies of performance are also penetrating environmental governance through the disciplines of accountancy and economics. This is evident in the reliance on accounting as well as economic techniques and knowledges in the governance of greenhouse gas emissions and the construction of carbon markets (Callon, 2009; Lovell and MacKenzie, 2011). It is evident too in the valuation by economists of nonmarket environmental goods, which are crucial to the development of markets for ecosystem services (Robertson, 2006, 2007). 2. Translating neoliberal principles and techniques into practice The literature discussed above draws attention to the different ways in which neoliberalisation is manifested in rural environmental governance. Work conducted by rural social scientists in recent years nevertheless continues to emphasise that the translation of neoliberal principles and techniques into practice is far from a straightforward or uncontested process, with resistance to neoliberal impulses, and adaptation to them, both being evident at a variety of scales. This raises broader questions concerning: (a) the
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ways in which neoliberal rationalities, techniques and understandings are contested and resisted, and by whom; and (b) how neoliberalisation can still proceed, be made workable in practice or even positively exploited, via a wide variety of state-market adaptations and collaborations. These questions frame the contributions to this special issue. In the next two sections of this introductory paper we examine the ways in which rural sociologists and geographers have engaged conceptually and theoretically with each question followed by an outline of how these ideas, concepts and theories have been taken up and developed in the contributed papers. 2.1. Contesting and resisting neoliberalisation A major theme in the literature on neoliberalisation of rural environments is how, and under what circumstances, contestation and resistance is possible. At a policy level, this is best exemplified in debates over rural nature, and particularly in efforts to defend the ‘multifunctional’ European model of agriculture against growing international trade liberalisation that we refer to above. At face value, multifunctionality could be construed as a form of resistance to neoliberalisation, given its defence of income support and environmental protection within economically marginal rural areas. Indeed, critics have argued persistently that this policy position is a thinly veiled form of protectionism for European agriculture (Dibden et al., 2009). Yet, the continuing liberalisation of agricultural policy in Europe has contributed to the emergence of a more ‘decoupled’ multifunctionality agenda, “which accepts the imperatives of market productivism on the better land and for the more competitive sectors while attempting to offer some protection and selective opportunities to diversify into niche markets to marginal farmers affected by restructuring elsewhere” (Potter and Tilzey, 2007, p. 1301). In these terms, multifunctionality is a form of resistance as well as accommodation to neoliberalisation. The incorporation of resistance and contestation as part of the roll-out of neoliberalism is arguably even more evident at the programme level. Mansfield's (2007) case study of the Western Alaska Community Development Quota e a programme which allocates a portion of regional fisheries to the mostly indigenous people of Western Alaska in order to provide economic development opportunities to Native Alaskans (Mansfield, 2007, p. 479) e shows that neoliberal principles do not necessarily undermine and colonise other non-neoliberal goals. Thus, Mansfield argues that this programme both disciplines the “subjects to the market” and “provides protections from the market to achieve social justice goals” (Mansfield, 2007, p.495). On this basis, forms of governing that appear neoliberal can also embody goals that represent a challenge to and contestation of neoliberal objectives. These conclusions are consistent with Robertson's work on markets for ecosystem services where he argues that “rollout and resistance may be embodied in the same policy and in fact the same person” (Robertson, 2007, p. 520). For Robertson, opportunities for resistance and redirection emerge from the problems associated with efforts to ascribe market value to, and thereby commodify, natural resources. These values are not simply ‘discovered’ but involve considerable debate by scientists and bureaucrats over issues such as the commodity to be valued, how values can best be measured, and how changes to values might be documented and certified. Even where ecosystem services are commodified, these measures are translated and rendered meaningful on-the ground by field technicians (Robertson, 2006). While this may enable markets in ecosystem services to work in practice, it also has the potential to place limits on the neoliberalisation of non-market public goods.
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In this Special Issue, the co-existence of resistance and neoliberal roll-out in terms both of the subjectivities of actors and the realities of implementation is explored in several of the contributed papers. In their paper on the politics of greenhouse gas regulation in New Zealand, Cooper and Rosin (2014) draw on the concept of environmental subjectivities to explore the extent of farmer opposition to the use of emissions trading as a marketbased instrument. They identify the scope for a neoliberal programme to be disrupted by the ‘unruly subjectivities’ of agents who, ironically, have come to see themselves as beyond government control following the neoliberal deregulation of New Zealand agricultural policy in the 1980s. This supports previous work by Higgins et al. (2012), which revealed that the use of market instruments e in this case conservation tenders e to provide incentives for farmers to manage native vegetation problematises as well as makes possible the neoliberalisation of rural environments. In this case, while tender schemes may allow landholders “to achieve their own environmental goals or supplement their income”, they may also contribute to resistance based upon “the fear of increased government regulation as well as perceived threats to property rights” (Higgins et al., 2012, p. 384). At the same time, while tender schemes enable the extension of market forms into new domains, they are able to work only in conjunction with other government actions (such as regulation) and circumstances such as farmers' responses to severe climatic circumstances. A similarly complex interplay between the cultural understandings (and resistances) of subjects and new neoliberal modes of state action is explored in the contribution from Maye et al. (2014). These authors describe how the traditionally statecentric task of animal disease control in the UK is increasingly giving way to a new ‘landscape of choice’ as fiscally-constrained governments seek to devolve responsibility to farmers themselves. Despite emphasising the extent to which farmers are being given more autonomy in their management of Bovine Tuberculosis (BTB), government is still heavily present in setting limits on these choices. Meanwhile, a lack of sensitivity to farmers' own cultural understandings of disease has generated resistance to government plans for further devolution. Maye et al.'s conclusion is that the state's preferred partnership model of disease management faces an uncertain future until it engages more fully with these subjectivities. The relationship between farmer autonomy and neoliberal forms of governance is explored in more detail in the paper by Stock et al. (2014). They draw a distinction between neoliberal autonomy, characterised by individual entrepreneurship and economically rational behaviour, and actual autonomy, in which individuals co-operate with one another to achieve collective social and environmental goals. Stock et al. examine how these different forms of autonomy are evident in co-operative agricultural arrangements across four national case studies e England, Switzerland, New Zealand and Brazil e and the consequences in each case for environmental and social outcomes. The authors argue that while agricultural co-operativism can in some cases act as an emancipatory strategy for farmers to escape dependency on the structures of capital, or at least offer the potential to do so, it mostly supports and/or extends neoliberal autonomy. However, neoliberal autonomy does not necessarily lead to uniformly negative environmental or social outcomes. As Stock et al. contend, the extension of neoliberal autonomy can contribute in some cases to ecological benefits and provide a source of economic stability for farmers. Nevertheless, at the same time, it can also have decidedly negative environmental outcomes and provide farmers with little opportunity for meaningful ‘bottom-up’ participation.
2.2. Making neoliberalisation workable: hybrid environmental governance The question of how, in the face of the above forms of resistance and re-direction, neoliberal reforms can be made to work in practice is taken up by the remaining papers in this Special Issue. Increasing numbers of scholars are commenting on the dangers of adopting a bifurcated view of state versus market relations and are pointing to the range of adaptations that are possible. This has given rise to the concept of hybrid environmental governance involving arrangements or practices that bridge, or blur, divisions such as public/private, economic/social, state/market. Hybridity recognises that neoliberalism is neither hegemonic nor universal, and exists in different forms across specific geographical and institutional contexts (Larner, 2003). Hybrid governance arrangements have become increasingly prominent due to the recognition that “seemingly purely market-, state-, or civil society-based governance strategies depend for their efficacy on support from other domains of social institutions” (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006, p. 298). Indeed, as Lockie and Higgins (2007) observe, the neoliberalisation of rural environmental governance is characterised by experimentation with a range of strategies, instruments and institutional arrangements. The notion of hybrid governance has been used in two broad ways in the rural environmental governance literature. The first approach focuses on how neoliberal forms of governing work in the context of other rationalities of rule to achieve environmental governance goals. From this perspective, the neoliberalisation of rural environments does not necessarily mean the displacement of alternative rationalities or techniques of governing. In fact, as Higgins and Lockie (2002, p. 422) argue in an Australian context, while natural resource management programmes “are increasingly seeking to govern in an advanced liberal way, this is being shaped by the recognition that resource management problems have social causes and consequences, and that solutions beyond the individual managerial skills of farmers are required”. This has given rise to hybrid governance strategies that enable governments to make neoliberalising ambitions workable in practice. Hence, in their paper exploring attempts to roll out PES schemes in Vietnam, McElwee et al. (2014) emphasise the extent to which success has required the involvement of local actors in the implementation process. As they point out, much of the variegation observable in those PES measures that have succeeded has been due to the active engagement of rural actors in shaping the parameters of PES design. In common with other analysts of the PES approach, McElwee et al. show how what is often portrayed as a purely neoliberal idea actually involves a mix of market incentives and traditional regulation. Like other forms of regulation, PES are political projects embedded in many different institutional and ecological contexts. Similarly, in their paper on Amazonian forest management, Pokorny and Pacheco (2014) highlight the significance of state regulation in enhancing the attractiveness and functionality of market approaches to natural forests. However, unlike the PES schemes in McElwee et al.'s paper, Pokorny and Pacheco observe that the legal-institutional framework established to facilitate economic gains from the commercialisation of natural forests favours the corporate sector and discriminates against local forest users. At the same time, the financial attractiveness of other land use options compared to forest management increases the risk of forest conversion by corporate actors to other land uses, resulting in poor farmers being displaced by externally capitalised investors and negative conservation outcomes. Pokorny and Pacheco argue that a more environmentally sustainable and socially just future
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depends on massive regulatory invention to support local forest managers and the optimisation of local value chains. The second approach to hybrid governance focuses specifically on the hybrid institutions that have emerged in response to neoliberal agendas of various kinds. In their paper exploring how ownership arrangements have adapted to neoliberal pressures for the privatisation of public lands in the UK, Hodge and Adams (2014) emphasise the opportunities that neoliberalism creates to craft new forms of property and property rights that are neither fully private nor held exclusively by government. Building on earlier work analysing processes of ‘institutional blending’ (Hodge and Adams, 2012), they show how property rights may be spread amongst different interested parties in order to ensure that conservation values can be safeguarded. While institutional blending may diminish in some cases the role of the state in rural land management, in others it may involve an increasing degree of state intervention in order to guide the creation of markets and direct market-oriented forms of governance in particular ways. The paper by Higgins et al. (2014) is interested also in the hybrid governance arrangements underpinning rural land management. Focusing on the hybrid governance strategies of institutional blending and contextual adaptation, they examine in an Australian context how and why hybrid forms of governance enable PES schemes to be workable, and the consequences for the neoliberalisation of rural environments and subjects. Using two case studies of PES in the State of Queensland, Higgins et al. argue that the intertwining of institutional blending and contextual adaptation is crucial in making each PES scheme workable. Yet, the extensive use of non-market instruments, such as regulation and extension, has ambiguous neoliberalising consequences. On the one hand, the use of non-market instruments compromises the application of neoliberal principles to rural environments. On the other hand, these instruments are crucial in the building of neoliberal landholder subjectivities. The papers in this special issue conclude overwhelmingly that while rural environmental governance is underpinned increasingly by neoliberal principles and techniques, these tend to be “tamed by on-the-ground realities” (McElwee, 2012, p. 420) as well as shaped in practice by existing institutional arrangements and policy approaches. In some cases this is disruptive to neoliberalising environmental objectives, but in others it gives rise to more complicated effects in which “ostensibly neoliberal structures are supported by decidedly non-neoliberal practices” (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012, p. 41). We argue that future research on the neoliberalisation of rural environments needs to engage in more depth with questions of how neoliberal policy prescriptions are implemented in practice, and the often complex and ambiguous effects on rural environments and actors. Doing so is likely to take “ideas of neoliberalisation well beyond its essential conceptualisations and motivations” (Hodge and Adams, 2012, p. 477), but is crucial in highlighting the adaptability as well as limits of neoliberal environmental governance.
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Vaughan Higgins Charles Sturt University, Australia
Clive Potter Imperial College London, UK Jacqui Dibden Monash University, Australia Chris Cocklin James Cook University, Australia