Out from the (Green) shadow? Neoliberal hegemony through the market logic of shared urban environmental governance

Political Geography 28 (2009) 395–405

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Out from the (Green) shadow? Neoliberal hegemony through the market logic of shared urban environmental governance Harold A. Perkins* Department of Geography, Ohio University, Clippinger Laboratories 111, Athens, OH 45701, USA

a b s t r a c t Keywords: Governance Hegemony Labor Neoliberalization Shadow state Urban environment Voluntarism/volunteerism

Recent work in critical geography describes the neoliberalization of urban social service provision through a transition from state provision to civil sector delivery. The concept of a ‘shadow state’ is deployed by some social theorists to describe this process by which nonprofits with government contracts increasingly adopt a state-oriented agenda for the execution of social entitlement programs. Possible linkages between the neoliberalization of urban environmental service provision and a shadow state are lacking by comparison. I, therefore, use qualitative data concerning three organizations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to demonstrate that civil sector groups are stepping up as local government diminishes its markets for municipal environmental labor. However, the diverse compositions of these shared governances potentially complicate the efficacy of a shadow state thesis for describing environmental provision in inner-city Milwaukee. Instead, I argue that a Gramscian interpretation of shared governance better accounts for the neoliberalization of environmental service provision as government agencies and civil sector groups relate to one another through hegemonic market logic. I argue that this provides a more nuanced picture of how governance concerning the urban environment is constructed by the government, market, and civil sectors to further shape human social reproduction. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Neoliberalization is described as a foundational shift in the capitalist political economies of Western and nonwestern states alike (Harvey, 2005; Jessop, 2002; Peck, 2001). Geographers have written about the liberalization of previously regulated markets, retrenchment of social service provision coupled with increasing workfare programs, a disciplinary state apparatus in regard to trade unionism, and a renewed emphasis on place-based competitiveness (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Peck & Tickell, 2002). These processes in their wake have profoundly reorganized the social landscapes of global urbanism (Luke, 2003). How neoliberalization impacts urban environments is less clear. Recent efforts in geography are beginning to connect neoliberalization as process to the environment in general (see Heynen, McCarthy, Prudham, & Robbins, 2007, Heynen and Robbins, 2005; McCarthy & Prudham, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2005a). Following Marx (1887/1976), these geographers base their investigations into neoliberalization on the assumption that environments are in part an ecological product of social labor under

* Tel.: þ1 740 593 9896; fax: þ1 740 593 1139. E-mail address: [email protected] 0962-6298/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.09.007

capitalism (see also Benton, 1996; Foster, 2000; Harvey, 1996; Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003). This connection is no minor intellectual achievement, because as Smith (2006) suggests, the commodification of environments is successful at making contemporary concepts of the environment nonsocial. These works mitigate this damaging trend by revealing that neoliberalization is constituted within the environment as a diverse set of socio-natural processes (including labor) that further exploit and commodify the environment in part through market deregulation and/or expansion (Castree, 2008). In this regard, the exposition of inherently uneven and disempowering spatialities constructed with neoliberalization of the environment is achieving ever-greater sophistication. But in theory and praxis it still suffers omissions. For example, are neoliberalizations potentially reorganizing resourcepoor urban environments where it seems market forces should have difficulty finding purchase? And if so, how do we characterize these changes? We do not have many answers to these questions because prior investigations have shed little light specifically on neoliberalizing geographies of inner-city environments – including parks and forests. In order to start making up this deficiency, we must look to other investigations concerning neoliberalizing transformations of social service provision in marginalized urban spaces for clues. This is an important step because the regulation of social reproduction

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through social service provision for inner-cities – formerly the contractual responsibility of the interventionist Keynesian state – is now increasingly devolved to the nonprofit sector. Wolch (1990) refers to this devolution as the emergence of the ‘shadow state’. She uses the term to describe the process whereby the non/quasigovernmental sector assumes the burden from the state for regulating labor and social service agendas/policies. In turn, the state directs these voluntary agencies with paid staffs to provide services to urban residents while simultaneously activating recipients’ roles in the polis in order to reduce the need for future welfare services (Fyfe, 2005; Fyfe & Milligan, 2003a, 2003b). Scholars have recently noted these changes for service provision in part comprise a neoliberalized shift from government to governance (Swyngedouw, 2005b). But what does this shift have to do with the production of urban environments, or more specifically, parks and trees in the central city? Basic welfare entitlements are not the same as provision for parks and trees. The former under Keynesianism – often being regulated at the level of the national state – was more comprehensive in scale and meant to provide for the immediate, material needs of marginalized people through incremental redistributions of the total social product. The latter, by comparison, was often negotiated at the municipal level and geared toward sustaining neighborhoods in which working classes could live and reproduce (Perkins, 2007). But we can still take direction from the shift away from welfare entitlement in regards to changing provision for inner-city parks and forests. This is because trees and parks were also a part of a decades-long Keynesian social contract designed to redistribute a portion of the total social product to mediate the problems with uneven social reproduction under capitalism (Heynen, 2006; Heynen & Perkins, 2005). In other words, public parks and trees also provide critical social and material benefits for urban residents who might otherwise not be able to afford such amenities on their own (for more on the benefits these green infrastructures provide, see Chenoweth & Gobster, 1990; Nowak & Dwyer, 2000). Therefore, it is imperative to determine if changes seen in the social welfare contract are also occurring in environmental provision for critical urban amenities like the (re)production of parks and trees. An increase in environmentally oriented civil sector organizations in Milwaukee and other cities across the United States during the last 20 years parallels shifts in modes of provision for other urban service sectors (for more see Cohen, 2004; Desfor & Keil, 2004). It seems this shift presents an opportunity for state agencies to deploy neoliberal environmental agendas by forging relationships with voluntarist organizations in the central city – thus forming a shadow state. In the next section, however, I argue a Gramscian analysis that connects government agencies and civil sector groups through market relations provides a more thorough analysis of the power of governance than the shadow state thesis alone. In order to address this possibility, I subsequently demonstrate that shifts in environmental provision in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are not so much about coercive state mandates as much as they represent negotiated shifts in social and environmental reproduction along the lines of ‘common sense’ market logics. Finally, I use three local examples of urban environmental governance to further exemplify the consensual and active role civil society plays in the construction of a polymorphous, neoliberal hegemony. Neoliberal hegemony through shared governance? Shifts in political-economic relations from Keynesian state intervention to (neo)liberal, market-oriented principles require the restructuring of relationships between government and civil society. Of note to regulation theorists is the supposed

diminishment – or hollowing out – of regulatory powers of the central state to coordinate social, economic, and political activity in light of the forces of globalization. However, as Lemke (2001: 202) notes, the shift is more about rearticulating the power of enhanced civil society rather than diminishing state power outright: The crisis of Keynesianism and the reduction in forms of welfare-state intervention therefore lead less to the state losing powers of regulation and control (in the sense of a zero sum game) and can instead be construed as a reorganisation or restructuring of government techniques, shifting the regulatory competence of the state onto ‘responsible’ and ‘rational’ individuals. Swyngedouw (2005b) notes this reorganization occurs because this shift away from government to governance in social service provision is a crisis-ridden transformation for segments of society. Thus government to governance technologies are necessarily generated in order to stabilize social relations during politicaleconomic upheaval by giving civil society an apparent boost in political responsibility (Jessop, 2002: 455). A growing literature exists concerning this transition from government to governance in neoliberalizing spatio-temporal contexts, particularly in regard to local economic (re)development initiatives in the United States and UK (for representative samples see Coaffee & Healey, 2003; Elwood, 2004; Gerometta, Haussermann, & Longo, 2005). Among these works, an urban governance literature has emerged based specifically on Wolch’s shadow state thesis. It is worth noting here that Wolch (1990: xvi) describes the shadow state as: .comprised of multiple voluntary sector organizations, administered outside of traditional democratic politics and charged with major collective service responsibilities previously shouldered by the public sector, yet within purview of state control. Investigations into urban governance from a shadow state perspective are particularly concerned about how coercive statist agendas potentially infiltrate civil sector institutions and lead to disempowering outcomes for marginalized people. Warrington (1995), for example, noted in the UK that the state used the voluntary sector there as a vehicle to transform social housing policy into a system of unaffordable private properties. Mitchell (2001) described a situation in British Columbia where the state directed a nonprofit to provide services to Chinese immigrants so it could simultaneously retrench its own welfare expenditures. There is reason to be concerned, however, about the unidirectional flow of power emanating from the state as characterized in governance studies that employ the shadow state thesis. As Fyfe and Milligan (2003a: 410) suggest: [The shadow state thesis] needs to be re-examined in the light of the rapidly and radically changing economic and political landscapes that voluntary organizations now occupy. In terms of the economic landscape, the increasing involvement of voluntary organizations in joint ventures with the private sector and the growing importance of the market in the delivery of social welfare, clearly raise important theoretical issues about the relationship between voluntarism and the private sector which are beyond the scope of the shadow-state thesis to address. Trudeau (2008), in his work on Hmong immigration to Saint Paul, Minnesota, recognizes this concern and calls for a relational view of the shadow state to better account for the role that groups of people and individuals achieve in co-producing dominant society’s social and political agendas. Much to his credit, Trudeau’s trenchant critique opens up an avenue for re-conceptualizing the

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relationship between government and civil society. Still missing, however, from accounts of the shadow state is how the state and civil society incorporate the market in their (re)configurations of power. We can better connect a relational view of the shadow state to markets forces if we make an explicit attempt to relate this discussion to the work of Antonio Gramsci. The state, according to Gramsci (1971), is composed of two inter-related components. One is government with its typically coercive set of political institutions orchestrated by elites. However, the coercive necessity within government apparently diminishes with the development of the state’s second component – a strong civil society. This is where political, economic, and cultural actions of elites are legitimated through the development of normative ideologies about common sense ways of governing. Civil society en masse, from its institutions to its individuals, thus provides the power of consent to political elites in what amounts to a formulation of a hegemony. Dominant ideology that founds hegemony is more than just a set of ideas about proper governing, however; it is intimately connected to the management of the material mode of production. In other words, hegemony is about negotiating and regulating access to the natural world, and by extension organizing the distribution of resources and wealth garnered from it through everyday human activities. It goes without saying then that the construction of hegemony is a deeply environmental process (see Ekers, Loftus, & Mann, 2009). Gramsci (1971) noted in his work on capitalist hegemony through Fordism, for example, that the wage/commodity relation was legitimated through market ideology as a ‘common sense’ mode of primary and social (re)production – despite the exploitation of workers and their alienation from nature. Keynesian capitalism by extension was in part a subsequent negotiation between trade unions, owners of the means of production, and political elites to continue the wage relation with guarantees of greater diversions of the social product as compensation for the working classes. Today, this contract is broken down, but nonprofit agencies deliver social and environmental services to help make up the loss. Thus the shift from government to governance is yet another renegotiation over access to resources between civil society and political elites/owners of the means of production according to dominant ideologies founded in the logics inherent to market exchange. But this time trade unions have largely been replaced at the negotiating table by other civil sector institutions like nonprofit organizations. Gramsci recognized that there exists a paradox here because capitalist hegemony through such negotiation is dependent on consent/consensus across disparate and otherwise oppositional class interests intrinsic to capitalism. The trick for Gramsci (and for us) is to better understand how coercion is turned into consent in the form of inter-class alliances. While heightened employment, wages, and benefits were the basis for compromise in the past, we have yet to fully understand how this process operates in relation to the shift toward a neoliberal paradigm of government to governance. Looking at the relational compositions and ideologies of civil society institutions can help to provide more clues to this intriguing question. Recognizable divisions are developing between and within civil society’s institutions (Milligan & Fyfe, 2005) that affect the distribution of power through coercion and consent. On one hand, there exist voluntarisms, or those voluntarist (nonprofit) organizations with professional approaches to social service provision through paid directors and expert staff. On the other, there exist volunteerisms composed of unpaid, ‘on the ground’ laborers (Kearns, 1995). Many volunteers work for voluntarist organizations to help provide and/or receive services. Other volunteers work in grassroots groups that tend to emerge and dissolve spontaneously

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around various causes and have little apparent connection to formal government agencies or voluntarist organizations. Grassroots groups often feature collective decision-making with little or no separation between service providers and recipients (Milligan & Fyfe, 2005). At first glance, the distinction between voluntarism and volunteerism is important to make. Many voluntarist organizations that employ volunteers have close relationships to government agencies. Here, the shadow state thesis is correct to assert that the coercive arm of the government can pressure nonprofit organizations and their volunteers to consent to strict rules of accountability in conjunction with competitive resource allotments. On the other hand, grassroots volunteer organizations should seemingly be immune to such agendas. Gramsci (1971) would remind us here that these latter kind of volunteer organizations hold the key to making substantive societal changes. But a second glance at volunteerism reveals that it often provides consent through governance to neoliberal hegemony – even when it operates outside voluntarist organizations with close ties to government agencies. Consent for austere neoliberal hegemony is now possible because ideology within nonprofit organizations and grassroots groups links volunteerism with active forms of citizenship. The breakdown of Keynesian hegemony means the notion of citizenship is decoupled from rights and entitlement rhetoric and described in terms of ‘‘social integration through participation in market mechanisms of production, consumption, and exchange.’’ (Lake & Newman, 2002: 110). However, liberalized market inadequacies fail to integrate everyone into this new market logic that regulates personal conduct (Rose, 2000). Thus the ideology of personal responsibility to self and community through volunteer labor is instilled in individuals as a way to compensate for lost social services (Fyfe, 2005). Here, the rhetoric of social exclusion from ‘participatory democracy’ displaces previous welfare discourses centered on political-economic causes of poverty and environmental degradation like uneven development (DeVerteuil, Woobae, & Wolch, 2002; Kearns, 1995; Wolch, 1999). Social and environmental agendas and volunteer labor need be joined up in new ways accordingly (Mayer, 2007). Voluntarist organizations with paid expert staff frequently push people to become ‘engaged’ citizens by getting them to volunteer for social and environmental causes (Fyfe, 2005; Fyfe & Milligan, 2003a, 2003b; Raco, Parker, & Doak, 2006). Cohen (2004), for example, examined nonprofit groups that enlist consumers to volunteer to plant trees as a legitimate market-based proxy for substantive environmental reform. In the process, volunteers become environmentally conscious citizens. Grassroots groups also impart the rhetoric of personal responsibility on their own volunteers. Perkins (2006) noted that watershed associations push member volunteers to seek personal solutions to surface water quality problems instead of challenging the market logic behind corporate farm products that pose much larger dangers to their water quality. It is necessary, however, to push this line of thinking further by investigating specifically how relationships between government, diverse civil sectors, and the market play out in the inner-city. Compensating for diminished municipal labor markets Working classes in Milwaukee have long negotiated with city administrators and business leaders for municipal investment in environmental amenities (Anderson, 1987). This environmental negotiation under Keynesianism represents what Gramsci (1971) referred to as ideology in relation to a dominant material mode of production. Working class politics in Milwaukee at the turn of the

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19th Century took a radical turn toward socialism based in part on the deplorable environmental conditions in which the working class lived (Beck, 1982). Consensus on environmental issues including government/capitalist investment in parks and trees was forged through a combination of violent political protests, informal inter-class negotiations, and party-based electoral politics. The new environmental consensus was more than ideological; it helped quell the labor unrest that threatened to disrupt dominant modes of capitalist production at the beginning of the 20th Century. Industry owners and politicians alike realized this and formed inter-class alliances (even with some socialists!) on a parks and forestry platform to help meet the demands of agitated workers (see Perkins, in press). Inter-class negotiations articulated strong municipal government agencies that directly intervened to improve the living conditions for urban workers. Milwaukee’s Forestry Bureau quickly became a large bureaucracy within the Department of Public Works that is composed of managers and a cadre of skilled/unskilled manual laborers directly accountable to City Hall. Parks became the charge of Milwaukee County and today the Milwaukee County Parks Director and her dozens of skilled/unskilled laborers are the charge of the Milwaukee County Executive.1 These two Milwaukee bureaucracies have used tax revenue to produce nearly 6000 ha of public parks, approximately 200,000 street trees, and 200 km of flowering boulevards during the last 50 years. These public amenities have long contributed to the social reproduction of workers and their families by enhancing their living environment (Gurda, 2000). Government provision for forestry and parks programs in Milwaukee is breaking down, however. Diminished budgets now leave less opportunity for public programs to employ municipal labor to maintain urban trees and park spaces. A renegotiation concerning government provision for parks and for trees has thus occurred over the last decade.2 The Milwaukee Forestry Bureau manager summed up the situation for me during an interview. He said that the Mayor’s Office has cut the Department of Public Works budget to the point where the Forestry Bureau lost 40% of its operating capital since 2003 – a reduction of 300,000 dollars per year. The manager has subsequently had to cut dozens of positions through layoffs and retiree attrition and by extension tree maintenance and plantings. The outlook for parks and parks workers is even bleaker. County-wide budget shortfalls have put pressure on the County Parks Department to streamline its services. A series of fiscally conservative County Executives since the early 1980s have balanced county budgets by cutting the parks budget before reducing other services like police and fire. I spoke about this with a representative from a nonprofit parks advocacy group called Park People of Milwaukee County. She stated that in 1980, Milwaukee County Parks had an annual budget of 45 million dollars, but ‘‘by 2003, after 23 years of Milwaukee County government bleeding and raping Milwaukee County parks, the tax levy for the parks was 16 million dollars.’’ The same representative related those figures to inflation: ‘‘Take the operating budget as it exists now.if you were to take the early 1980s figure of 45 million in 2004 dollars, the tax levy portion would be equivalent to about 92–93 million.’’ Milwaukee Parks Department managers responded to this loss of funding by cutting over 50% of their 400 municipal employees since the early 1980s. Unsurprisingly, both the Forestry Bureau manager and the Parks Director are quite concerned about the state of government provision for urban parks and trees. But they are also hopeful about the actions of nonprofit organizations with paid staff that they suggest are compensating for reductions in public environmental employment in Milwaukee. I interviewed representatives from some of these organizations working with the Milwaukee Forestry Bureau and the Parks Department to green the city.3

Interviewees suggest that the Forestry Bureau, Parks Department, and other government agencies are frequently assisted by nonprofit, voluntarist organizations that employ paid expert staff to plan and coordinate green projects in the inner-city. Nonprofits in fact shoulder considerable responsibility for environmental work. Greening Milwaukee, for example, works directly with Milwaukee’s Forestry Bureau to extend its ability to enhance tree canopy throughout the city. Park People of Milwaukee County helps maintain parks and is negotiating with the Milwaukee County Parks Department to dramatically increase the nonprofit’s input in parks management. Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers has largely taken over monitoring water quality in Milwaukee from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Given their relationships it seems that these civil sector organizations could be coerced by their respective government agencies to carry out specific actions as part of a specific shadow state agenda. But none of these groups hold formal government contracts for their work. Instead, they compensate for diminishing governmentsponsored environmental service provision by relying heavily on unpaid volunteer labor to get the job done. Interviewees from these groups acknowledge that their reliance on unpaid volunteerism is in part based on the refusal of these government agencies to grant them formal, paid contracts to hire more staff. State budget cuts have so diminished municipal labor markets for parks, forestry, and water quality that the void cannot be made up simply by the few paid employees of these nonprofits alone. Therefore, these nonprofit organizations are forging relationships with government agencies whereby their few paid private experts and a multiplicity of unpaid volunteers work alongside the remaining public employees on environmental projects. These are just a few examples of how unpaid volunteerism within formal nonprofit organizations is working with government agencies to supplant the municipal labor force. Heavy dependence on volunteerism in the absence of government contracts in these examples of shared governance makes problematic a strict, coercive definition of the shadow state as applied to provision for urban parks and trees in Milwaukee. Here, the relational conception of the shadow state following Trudeau’s (2008) work is perhaps more useful. In his account, civil society is understood to actively formulate institutional relationships by negotiating with the government the degree to which they accept its funding and by extension its agenda. Gramsci can help us build on Trudeau’s work – especially when we consider that the market is used as a ‘common sense’ material and ideological interface where power can flow between government agencies and civil society toward hegemonic ends. In keeping, shared environmental governances emerge when government diminishes its own municipal labor market and simultaneously generates new market spaces for nonprofits and their unpaid volunteer laborers. This exchange is ideologically legitimated through the supposed inevitability of neoliberalized, market rationality as costly government employees are ‘necessarily’ replaced by nonprofit experts and volunteer workers. But the neoliberal downsizing of government is also a material process in that nonprofits and volunteers are empowered to negotiate some of the terms for which they contribute to a renewed basis for social and environmental reproduction. Consent to neoliberal hegemony through shared governance arrangements, therefore, transfers the cost of environmental service provision away from government while fostering a neoliberalized basis for social and environmental reproduction through the promotion of active citizenship. To further clarify this process of consent, I next provide three differing examples of shared environmental governances based in Milwaukee. Each responds to an emerging market for volunteer environmental labor. The first is an organization working in the

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Midtown neighborhood that is actually an outgrowth of extra-local government agencies; a second example is a voluntarist, nonprofit organization operating in the Walnut Hill and Washington Park neighborhoods with looser ties to government agencies. Thirdly, in the Riverwest neighborhood I provide an example of a grassroots citizen coalition that seems at first glance to have little connection to the government at all. I provide the latter example to demonstrate that consent to neoliberal hegemony is possible even in volunteer groups independent of a formal nonprofit. For a map depicting the neighborhoods where the studies took place, see Fig. 1. For a summary of the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the census tracts that comprise the four neighborhoods, see Tables 1–3 below. Beyond the shadows: three examples of shared environmental governance in Milwaukee Adjacent Walnut Hill, Washington Park, and Midtown are former German working class neighborhoods in central Milwaukee that became largely African-American post 1960 (Gurda, 2000). Nearly 43% of the neighborhoods’ families live in poverty according to the 2000 census (see Table 2). Average assessed property values in these neighborhoods also tell the story of their disinvestment (see Table 3). Values were comparable to those found in Riverwest in 1975, but the period from 1985 to 1995 indicates a significant devaluation in Walnut Hill, Washington Park, and Midtown without consideration of the damaging effect of inflation during that decade. The values did rebound somewhat thereafter, but are still about 60% lower than in Riverwest. Unsurprisingly, Walnut Hill, Washington Park, and Midtown all face significant socioeconomic challenges that often take precedence over efforts to better the neighborhood’s trees and parks. Interviewees living and working in these neighborhoods provided valuable insights in this regard. Little of the information they provided suggested residents in these neighborhoods collectively plant trees or enhance park spaces as part of a grassroots effort. I interviewed two directors from the Lisbon Avenue Neighborhood Development Corporation (LAND). The primary purpose of LAND is to facilitate citizens’ committees that work to improve community health. One of the directors described the debilitating context for potential greening efforts in these neighborhoods: Crime and conditions of living is the primary emphasis, when you talk to people who are trying to live peacefully. Lack of jobs, housing stock is deteriorating, board ups. LAND borders 27th to

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47th streets, Vleit to North Avenue. In that small parameter, 241 houses are on record for being boarded up, nuisance, owner occupied who do not upkeep, or nuisance property in some form or other. The other director who works at LAND and lives in the Lisbon Avenue area also summed up the problem forcefully: People are terrified about coming out of their homes. Trees and grass are on the back burner. All of us want it, but if I can’t come out of my front door because of the people across the street, it makes it difficult to appreciate that tree. The ramifications of a lack of local grassroots volunteerism here are compounded because the city government is withdrawing its direct support for social and environmental service provision in these poor neighborhoods. According to the same director, residents frequently complain to city officials about trash pick up, street condition, and hundreds of neglected, municipally-owned vacant lots. He said: The biggest problem in our neighborhood, its not just forestry, but every department. We don’t get the overgrowth trimmed in the allies, we don’t get the city owned lots cut or shoveled on a regular basis unless somebody complains. You have to complain, and with all of the adversities that families in the neighborhood have do deal with, how much energy do they have to fight that on a day to day basis? Its just survival. Come home from a job, make sure dinner is done, and the kids are safe, then I have to deal with a city that won’t pick up the garbage or won’t cut the trees blocking the alley. All interviewees living and working in these neighborhoods suggest that the socioeconomic constraints imposed on these communities highly restrict their opportunities to volunteer for parks and trees. Instead, LAND assists grassroots coalitions as they work toward ameliorating social injustices like crime and hunger and the environmental injustice resulting from exposure to toxic levels of lead. It is, therefore, not surprising that other forms of environmental efforts here are largely coordinated by organizations from outside the neighborhood that recruit and direct local volunteer laborers. Two prominent examples of environmental transformation through volunteer training and labor occur in Walnut Hill, Washington Park, and Midtown. The ‘Urban Tree House Program’ (UTHP) is a direct attempt to train inner-city volunteers to green their neighborhoods. Lynden Hill, a vacant city block at McKinley and 33rd Streets in Midtown, is

Fig. 1. Four Milwaukee, WI neighborhoods: Washington Park, Walnut Hill, Midtown, and Riverwest. Map by author.

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Table 1 Demographic characteristics of census tracts which comprise Riverwest, Walnut Hill, Washington Park, and Midtown neighborhoods, Milwaukee, WI.

Riverwest (5 tracts) Walnut Hill/Washington Park/Midtown (12 tracts)

AfricanAmerican

Asian

Hispanic/ Latinoa

White

Otherb

23% 78%

1% 10%

17% 4%

51% 6%

8% 6%

a

Includes persons who claim at least some Hispanic/Latino ethnicity. Includes persons who claim two or more racial identities (United States Census, 2000).

Table 3 Average assessed property values (with improvements) by neighborhood for 30year period from 1975 to 2005 in U.S. dollars. Figures do not account for inflation. Data compiled from the City of Milwaukee Master Property File, or MPROP 2006.

Riverwest Walnut Hill/Washington Park/Midtown

1975

1985

1995

2005

30 years change in %

18,406 16083

47,103 33,248

54,496 26,900

148,408 59,951

806% 372%

b

the newest of five sites chosen nationally for the UTHP (see Fig. 2). The program is facilitated by America’s Outdoors, a consortium composed of representatives from the U.S. National Park Service, Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. America’s Outdoors provides seed monies and consultants that help host communities initially secure external funding and a fulltime coordinator for the Tree House Project. However, local volunteers are responsible for the long-term sustainability of UTHP activities including funding the fulltime coordinator position, maintenance of the site, and carrying forth community outreach programs to bring underprivileged children to work at the environmental learning site. Young school children from surrounding neighborhoods are brought onto the UTHP site to get their hands dirty planting trees and prairie flowers while learning more about the benefits of caring for nature in their locality. According to a representative from America’s Outdoors, this happens when ‘‘Four Forest Service sponsored interns come in every year in natural sciences and education.and do a series of four environmental education presentations for the kids.’’ Thus far inner-city children at Lynden Hill have learned to plant and care for trees on the site as well as a patch of native Wisconsin prairie. While the UTHP is geared toward generating volunteerism through childhood education, it ultimately mobilizes the volunteer efforts of adults within the local community for its continued success. This strategy has proven problematic because volunteers working for UTHP have failed to secure additional funds to build their Tree House structure that will act as the onsite nature center and community gathering space. Also, according to the America’s Outdoors interviewee, ‘‘The Urban Tree House had a coordinator, but that fell through, so it fell back on [the community] to figure out how to do this. It’s a scramble for money every year to find someone who coordinates the site, and it’s a difficult situation.’’

Table 2 Socioeconomic data by census tract. Families: Families: income Families: total in 1999 below percent in poverty level 1999 below poverty Riverwest 2153 (5 tracts) Walnut Hill/ 4625 Washington Park/Midtown (12 tracts) City of Milwaukee 136,132 (all census tracts)

Median household income in 1999a

463

22

25,909–34,750

1997

43

14,350–24,784

23,687

17

37,879

a Data represents a range of median household income values in U.S. dollars for the five adjacent census tracts that comprise Riverwest and the twelve adjacent tracts that comprise Walnut Hill, Washington Park, and Midtown. Comparison figures provided for City of Milwaukee. All data are provided by United States Census (2000). For definitions and interpretations of official levels of poverty, see Bishaw and Iceland (2003).

UTHP volunteers have also struggled with the location because the site continues to suffer from vandalism and other crimes, despite recent attempts at its beautification. The same interviewee went on to say, ‘‘.there was a murder and a body dropped there once, [and other kinds of] illicit activity on the hill because of the trees.’’ Murder and vandalism aside, the program is successful at beautifying a block of central Milwaukee. However, UTHP has an ulterior motive less charitable than local greening. The UTHP was envisioned by said Federal agencies to mobilize inner-city residents to voluntarily labor for their local environment so that they might by extension learn to care about green spaces located beyond their city. The program is justified on the basis that many children in poor neighborhoods are unlikely to grow up appreciating the value of National Forests and Parks because they do not get to visit those green spaces outside heavily built environments. The America’s Outdoors interviewee who coordinates UTHP volunteers was frank about the purpose of the site at Lynden Hill: The Forest service is trying to figure out how to get people in urban situations to act more positively or at least recognize the importance of National Forests without ever experiencing them. There is an ulterior motive; altruism is not the case. We need [urban residents’] money to keep things going. It seems on the surface that America’s Outdoors and its UTHP fit the definition of a voluntarist organization exercising the shadow state’s hidden agenda. Its coordinator explicitly acknowledged that the program is (somewhat unsuccessfully) trying to produce social and environmental governance at the level of individuals through mobilization of local volunteerism. However, the underlying structure of America’s Outdoors and the deployment of UTHP makes it necessary to acknowledge the diversity of institutions that negotiate shared governance arrangements. There is no functioning voluntarist organization (nonprofit) in this instance – America’s Outdoors is literally a partnership of government agencies that administer UTHP directly. This complicates typical accounts of the relationship between government, nonprofits, and volunteers in the formulation of governance. We can account for this dilemma if we recall that for Gramsci (1971) the state is composed of government agencies backed by diverse interests throughout civil society. In this instance, a set of government agencies band together as tax cuts and budget reductions at the Federal level have greatly reduced provision for national parks and forests. Instead of pushing coercive tactics like mandatory tax hikes for the wealthy, they promote neoliberal, market principles across class interests to potentially prevent agency downsizing. America’s Outdoors, therefore, takes advantage of the deficiencies in local labor markets for parks and trees in the inner-city to bolster its own diminished market for expert environmental labor outside of it. Most importantly here – America’s Outdoors hopes mobilizing unpaid volunteers in the city today will provide consent for funding national parks and forests tomorrow. Thus they try to ensure the perpetuation, if not expansion, of Federal programs into the future. How this strategy to extract political and economic resources out of an already resource-poor

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Fig. 2. Wintertime view of the Urban Tree House Project at Lynden Hill. Located on the corner of McKinley and 33rd Streets in Milwaukee’s Midtown neighborhood. Photo by author.

location remains to be seen, however. Just blocks away another environmental program is coordinating volunteers in neighboring Walnut Hill and Washington Park. ‘Urban Nurseries Implementing Training and Education,’ or UNITE, is a relatively new program put forth by Greening Milwaukee. In contrast to America’s Outdoors which oversees UTHP, Greening Milwaukee is not a part of any government agency. It was formally organized in 1986 to replace the costly efforts of the nowdefunct Milwaukee City Beautification Program (Durkin Associates for Greening Milwaukee, 2001). Today, the 501(c)3 nonprofit works with the Forestry Bureau to find ways to enhance canopy cover on public and private property. Recently, Greening Milwaukee began leasing vacant lots in the Lisbon Avenue area from the city for its urban nurseries. According to the UNITE ‘Project Description’, the nurseries are used to ‘‘educate and adequately train inner-city and underserved citizens to accomplish the work of planting trees in an urban environment’’ (UNITE, 2004; see Fig. 3). Young trees are purchased by Greening Milwaukee, and with the assistance of its paid coordinator, inner-city volunteers are trained to plant and care for young trees on the lots until the saplings are adopted by residents approximately a year later. The same volunteers then transplant the young trees to their new homes for the residents. Thus far hundreds of well-cared-for trees have been planted on private properties throughout the city as a result of the efforts of many young volunteers. A closer examination of the

UNITE program reveals, however, that helping the Forestry Bureau reforest Milwaukee’s inner-city is not its only goal. According to its grant applications to the City of Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s Urban and Community Forestry Program, the urban nurseries are to be considered, ‘‘our classroom, laboratory, on the job training facility and ongoing community revitalization effort.’’ (UNITE, 2004) Therefore, UNITE staff seek to provide residents with life and employment skills that will enable them not only to green their local environment, but become more employable – read functional – within the urban political economy. Accordingly, an interviewee who works for Greening Milwaukee suggested the program is designed to actively mobilize inner-city youth to become voluntary, self-serving agents of change. The program is apparently so successful in this endeavor that one of the LAND interviewees described it as ‘‘The shot in the arm that this community needs.’’ UNITE in particular demonstrates that active citizenship through environmental volunteerism serves to bolster markets for formal employment. In this regard, UNITE best mirrors the trend of neoliberal workfare of any of the cases mentioned in this study. Certainly, the program is not the same as workfare in the sense of forcing people off of the welfare dole and into jobs (sees Peck, 2001). Trees have not typically been entitlements nor does Greening Milwaukee have contracts with the state to transfer people directly into paid positions. But there are some striking parallels here. UNITE targets youth from groups frequently excluded from the job

Fig. 3. Winter view of Urban Nurseries Implementing Training and Education tree nursery on the corner of 39th and Lloyd Streets in Milwaukee’s Washington Park neighborhood. The trees are in the foreground with white ribbons tied to them. Photo by author.

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market and trains them for manual work, including following directions and carrying out arboricultural tasks. The program is, therefore, an example of a professional voluntarism that attempts to steer volunteers away from dependence on public assistance and toward wage labor markets (for more see Cope, 2001). In this manner, consent to neoliberal hegemony is constructed through the training of at-risk volunteer subjects in urban environmental skills that might provide them a paycheck in the future. It is also worth noting that this process occurs independently of any form of government coercion. Across town in Riverwest, shared environmental governance demonstrates that active citizenship through volunteerism is not always channeled through professional voluntary organizations. Riverwest is a transitional neighborhood within walking distance of Lake Michigan. To its east across, the Milwaukee River lies a white and affluent lakeshore neighborhood; immediately to its west is concentrated African-American poverty. Its socioeconomic and racial composition reflects its position between the extremes of urban wealth and poverty, but the neighborhood’s marginalized minority populations have long struggled socioeconomically. ‘White flight’ and disinvestment in its infrastructures since the 1960s and 1970s increased poverty, hunger, crime, and environmental degradation (Tolan, 2003). Today, approximately 20% of Riverwest families live in poverty and its annual median household income is several thousand dollars below the city average according to the 2000 census (see Tables 2 and 3). The neighborhood’s working class and student populations have, however, turned it into a hotbed of political activism in response to these problems that mobilize and shape its contemporary struggles for social and environmental justice (Gurda, 2000). One interviewee who lives in Riverwest and writes for its local newspaper described the neighborhood as ‘‘educated and home to many people with a liberal green slant.’’ Riverwest is, therefore, a good case study because of its apparently successful efforts to enhance green space in a location that continues to suffer socioeconomic problems. Riverwest citizens work to improve their green environment because in their words it is poorly maintained by the municipality and absentee private property owners. Several grassroots efforts by local volunteer laborers to revitalize green space have recently occurred in the neighborhood; only one is discussed here. It is the reclamation in 2001 of a small city park with broken swing-sets and overgrown invasive vegetation. The neglected tot-lot was transformed into ‘Snail’s Crossing’ through a 175,000 dollar project coordinated by a resident artist who wanted local children to help

create a safe and stimulating place to play. Adult volunteers wrote grants and received approximately one-quarter of the total cost for the project from the city, another quarter from a city block grant funding initiative, as well as a 10,000 dollar Milwaukee Arts Board Grant. The remainder of the expenses was paid for by residents including many in kind donations – most notably 450 h of volunteer labor by 1000 neighborhood residents which included the efforts of many children. Their work transformed the park into something radically different over the course of a year (see Fig. 4). Riverwest volunteers designed and built the park down to the smallest detail, including the replacement of exotic invasive species with native varieties. An interviewee who worked on Snail’s Crossing and wrote about the project for a local paper described for me its construction: Riverwest’s children helped adult artists to design the tiles in the walkways and the sculptures in its playground. Residents had fundraisers to purchase plants. Some local businesses donated trees and plants, a craftsman built and donated the wooden benches, and the city loaned us minor construction equipment.it was a couple year project, but it was done relatively easily. One strongly gets the impression while walking through Snail’s Crossing that artists and children, not city planners, redesigned and rebuilt the park. Most importantly for those who created it, the park’s artisan form represents a self-made recovery of Riverwest. In this instance, park governance emerged ‘spontaneously’ through informal channels but still in relation to the diminution in municipal provision for their local environment. Interviewees from Riverwest who worked on the Snail’s Crossing project said that they volunteered to build Snail’s Crossing because no municipal or nonprofit organization was doing it, further diminishing their status as citizens. It appears then that their strategy is based on the coercive nature of the government’s prolonged disinvestment in their neighborhood. Their actions also give the appearance of a defiant rejection of fiscally austere government principles, too. There is some logic in such an assessment because their work successfully improved their urban space and helped volunteers demonstrate that they are vital citizens of the community worth reinvestment. However, volunteerism in Riverwest – even independent of nonprofit influence – still strongly relates to the notion of conditional citizenship within neoliberal hegemony. This is because Riverwest residents’ actions inadvertently provide consent to the ideology of a responsible, entrepreneurial civil society well-

Fig. 4. The art of play at Snail’s Crossing on the corner of E. Burleigh and N. Bremen Streets in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood. Photo by author.

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documented within the literature on neoliberalism (for more see MacLeod, Raco, & Ward, 2003; Mayer, 2007). Yes, there is real, positive environmental change here as a result of negotiations between Riverwest residents and the city. But there is still a hidden danger in this kind of situation, according to Gramsci (1971), because in these instances civil society groups work for changes that fail to alter the larger market system that generates material and social inequity in the first place. In other words, the municipal government’s program of fiscal austerity is further legitimated everywhere if local groups are successful in altering their environments like the residents in Riverwest. In conclusion UTHP, UNITE, and Snail’s Crossing taken together provide weak evidence for the existence of a coercive shadow state in Milwaukee. This is an important finding because as Elwood (2002: 123) suggests, ‘‘In many accounts of the impacts of neoliberal urban governance, any struggle for control of the city has already been lost.’’ Rather than a loss of control over the city, the varied compositions of these case studies suggest that market mechanisms provide the parameters by which government agencies and various civil sector groups negotiate new articulations of environmental provision. Milwaukee’s municipal government diminished its internally supported labor market for municipal parks and forestry. This simultaneously opened up new market spaces in which environmentally oriented civil sector groups could participate. But it is not necessary for government agencies to fill new market spaces by coercing voluntarist organizations into action through funding mandates. Instead, these case studies demonstrate that the fiscal void at the municipal level can be filled without the need for expensive government contracts with nonprofits. Government agencies work together to create America’s Outdoors that encourages volunteers to work on green space through the UTHP. The voluntarist organization, Greening Milwaukee, is willing to take increased responsibility for urban trees with no guarantee of government remuneration because private donations help its UNITE program generate volunteers. Grassroots groups work without pay on parks to fill gaps created in the public employment sector in Riverwest. In this manner, the shared governances of UTHP, UNITE and Snail’s Crossing demonstrate that formerly marginalized groups of people are now constructing new urban environments with spectacular results. It must be acknowledged then that these kinds of governances do much good; all of the interviewees living and working in these neighborhoods agree that residents who volunteer do it because they feel empowered to improve their environment. But this does not mean geographers should stop investigating shared environmental governance. Gramsci (1971) would surely remind us here that it is always important to critically evaluate the transformative potential in new political practices (see also Mann, 2009). In this regard, we have to remember that consumption of social and environmental services in the neoliberal city is still predicated on – and frequently constrained by – conduct associated with active citizenship (Knight, 1993; Rose, 2000). There is the real possibility that volunteers who activate their citizenship through environmental work passively consent to an unjust political economy (Fyfe, 2005; Wolch, 1999) when abiding by its hegemonic market logic. None of the examples of shared governance discussed in this study, for example, encourage volunteers to seriously question the political economy from which the organizations sprang forth. UTHP and UNITE in particular reinforce the idea that volunteers must work to earn the benefits of a greener city. Citizenship in these two programs is construed through working hard while not questioning the reasons behind the urban disinvestment they seek to overcome.

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It is more difficult to make the case that passive citizenship was a component of the Snail’s Crossing project, given its grassroots composition. But a grassroots agenda can still include politically passive elements that fail to challenge neoliberal hegemony. Turning a tot-lot into an art park does little to make Riverwest citizens a political force for change within the greater political economy that disinvested their environment in the first place. Danger, therefore, exists in reliance on programs like UNITE and UTHP or grassroots greening because they are attractive and feelgood alternatives to the need for expensive and comprehensive urban environmental (re)investments. Instead, these strategies absolve the government from direct intervention in social and environmental service provision for society’s poorest citizens while (re)producing the culture of human and environmental marginalization via personal accountability. Another problem for environmental transformations based on shared governance is that there is no guarantee of long-term and stable forms of funding (Lake & Newman, 2002). Reliance is thus placed on the resource-strapped local community to procure the funds and labor power to educate its citizens about the importance of their urban environments. But respondents in these communities suggest that poor and minority residents in Milwaukee already have a hard time feeding, clothing, housing, educating, and protecting their children. Efforts like UNITE and UTHP face a geographically restricted, if not outright perilous future because of this. The America’s Outdoors interviewee I spoke with voiced similar concern: If you have a lot of non-profits taking the lead, and doing a good job, the county has a better reason to back off. Non-profits are doing great stuff, I just don’t want to see the public sector, the government washing its hands of the responsibility and dumping it on these non-profits, because they have more tenuous financial existences than do counties and states and feds. They are scrambling for grants. They are just wishing old people die so that they can get some money, you know? Where then is neoliberalized hegemony through shared governance leading us? It takes urbanites into ever more disjointed environmental politics that make it difficult to formally challenge the already stark differences between socio-environmental contexts. UTHP and UNITE may very well be creating environmental laborers from their volunteer base. But their bureaucratic structure and goals are, however, ill-suited to accommodate the difficult contingencies of mobilizing sufficient local labor and other resources from the inner-city throughout Milwaukee. The hybrid governance mechanisms that created Snail’s Crossing will not exist in exactly the same capacities again. They will have to be rebuilt by local leadership from scratch; too many variables create change in such ‘loose and baggy monsters’ to render them stable and permanent (Kendall & Knapp, 1995). A nonprofit here, no volunteer work there; as an encompassing environmental labor strategy it lacks coherence, consistency, and comprehensiveness. Additional research into the local contexts of market-based, neoliberal governance is necessary so we can begin to formulate comprehensive alternatives.

Endnotes 1

For extensive discussions of the bureaucratic structures of Milwaukee’s Forestry Bureau and Milwaukee County Parks departments, see Heynen, Perkins, and Roy, 2007 and Perkins forthcoming, respectively. 2 Milwaukee depends on shared revenue from the State of Wisconsin to meet its budgetary needs, receiving 4–8 times the shared revenue per capita of its suburban communities (Humphrey, 2006). This leaves Milwaukee in a precarious situation because the shared revenue stream has been reduced within the last several years by fiscally conservative, out-state Wisconsin lawmakers (Rinard, 2004). In fiscal year 2006–2007, Milwaukee received approximately 240 million dollars in aid from

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the state, a figure ten million dollars less than in fiscal year 2003–2004 (Humphrey, 2003, 2006). Future municipal budgets are also expected to be troublesome for Milwaukee as Mayor Barrett projects a revenue shortfall of 13 million dollars in 2009 (Barrett, 2008). The conservative think tank Public Policy Forum and some state legislators have been urging the County and City of Milwaukee to streamline their municipal services in conjunction with a long history of such cuts (Browne, 2004). The Forestry and Parks Departments have not been exempted. 3 This paper stems from a larger qualitative research project I conducted concerning neoliberalizing provision for green infrastructure throughout Wisconsin. I initially spoke with representatives from the City of Milwaukee’s Forestry Bureau and the Milwaukee County Parks Department to conduct the urban portion of my research. They informed me about organizations and individuals (government, nonprofit, grassroots) partnering with their agencies. I secured additional interviews with representatives from the organizations they mentioned in order to determine if a shadow state relationship exists between environmentally oriented government agencies and the civil sector. Ultimately, I conducted 36 open-ended, yet in-depth, interviews with respondents working on environmental projects. Data used in this paper are generated specifically from communications with: a program leader and another coordinator for the U.S. Forest Service Urban and Community Forestry Program; the supervisor and a Southeast regional coordinator of the Wisconsin Urban and Community Forestry Program; a coordinator from the nonprofit National Alliance for Trees; a representative from the City of Milwaukee’s Forestry Bureau; a representative from the Milwaukee County Parks Department; a director from the urban forestry nonprofit Greening Milwaukee; a coordinator from a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of the Interior called America’s Outdoors; a representative from the nonprofit Urban Open Space Foundation; the director of Park People of Milwaukee County; the director of the nonprofit Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers; a Milwaukee Alderman advocating nonprofit and grassroots urban environmental projects in Riverwest; advocate-residents of Milwaukee’s Riverwest, Washington Park, Walnut Hill, and Midtown neighborhoods; and two directors at Lisbon Avenue Neighborhood Development Corporation serving the social and environmental concerns of residents living in Washington Park and Walnut Hill. Interviewees in this study will remain unnamed.

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