Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: A decade -more or less -past the publication of the edited collection Neoliberal Environments and Neil Smith's 'Nature as an Accumulation Strategy', this forum aims to revisit and reflect on neoliberal natures, both out in the world and in the scholarly literature.In this time, there have been a number of advances in our conceptual apparatus for interpreting capital's productions of nature, ranging from financialization to vital materialism to world ecology.Further, the world has not stood still in the intervening decade.Various schemes for neoliberalizing nature have come and gone while others have launched, and the financial crisis led to widespread and often retrenched austerity even as extractivism showed no sign of abating.In light of these developments, we convened this forum to ask: what are the failures and accomplishments of neoliberal natures?Our use of the world accomplishments is not normative.We have gathered insights to reflect on the material-semiotic effects of neoliberal hegemony in the environmental register, and how critical scholars interpret, and even intervene in, those effects.The forum begins with an introduction that discusses what we see as the 'ins and outs' of the neoliberal nature's literature.That is, we ask what types of natures the authors in the literature have grappled with and what kinds of questions have been asked those arrangements.Reflecting on trends in the neoliberalization of nature and a bibliometric analysis of papers in the literature, we argue that while accomplishing much, there remain critical gaps in our explanatory frameworks driven by geography's troubling lack of ethnic and gender diversity.
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2804975806