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Part of what makes the current conjuncture so extraordinary is the coincidence of the massive economic meltdown with the implosion of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, and the reappearance of US liberal internationalism in the guise of “smart power” defined in terms of Diplomacy, Development, and Defence. This essay engages these challenges through a framework that distinguishes between “Development” as a post-war international project that emerged in the context of...

Antipode was launched into the firmament of the 1970s. We might reflect upon how well the journal and its contributors fully appreciated the historical gravity and weight of what was surrounding the project to create “a radical journal of geography”. What sort of radicalism was on offer? The language was “social relevance” from “a radical (Left) political viewpoint”. In writing to celebrate Antipode's birthday, this time in another, and similar, firmament there is still the need to confront...

Abstract:  This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world-scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de-legitimated. My answer is that a “post-neoliberal” future is...

The development economist Dani Rodrik recently declared that “the globalization consensus is dead”. The claim has momentus implications, because this consensus has steered economic policy around the world for the past quarter century. It emanates from the heartland of neoclassical economics, and defines the central tasks of the Washington-based organizations which claim to speak for the world. This essay answers two main questions. First, is Rodrik's claim true, and by what measures of...

Fair trade banana farming in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean has emerged since the late 1990s in response to a crisis. Rulings by the World Trade Organization ended a longstanding trade dispute between the US and the EU by eliminating a system of preferential access of Windward Island bananas to the UK market. What followed was a period of rapid decline in banana exports from these small islands and a widespread abandonment of banana cultivation. Those banana farmers who remain are now...

Although they receive little recognition for their contribution, peasant farmers in the global South play a fundamental role in securing the long-term global food supply. Via their self-sufficient agricultural practices, they cultivate the crop genetic diversity that enables food crops to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In this paper I draw upon empirical data from the Guatemalan center of agricultural biodiversity to investigate the concern that market expansion will displace...

In January of 2001, the TimberWest Corporation permanently closed its Youbou sawmill facility near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada laying off 220 workers. On the surface, the Youbou mill closure reinforced a pervasive sense that workers and communities in the province are increasingly vulnerable to an ever more globally integrated and footloose forest industry. But a funny thing happened in Youbou; the workers fought back. While the mill was completely dismantled and scrapped, with no...

Typically when we think of street markets we think of chaotic places full of energy and vibrating with danger and opportunity. Traders or governments create markets to meet existing and emergent demands as well as the unintended consequences of other policy decisions. It is this institutional design, this governance, this regulatory process that provides access to the market and organizes the vending space therein. Public and private entities operating in fiscally constrained environments...

Voluntary food labels that express ecological, social, and/or place-based values have been posed as an important form of resistance to neoliberalization in the Polanyian sense of protecting land, other natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market. At the same time, these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market. After reviewing the Polanyian...

In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with reference to value-chain rent theory, that...

The  rise  of  the  Social  Forum  phenomenon  has  been  heartily  welcomed,  partly  so  as to unite diverse discourses of anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist resistance under a common  banner.  There  are  debates  worth  flagging,  however,  that  draw  our  attention to  political  philosophies  (typically  binary  statist  versus  anti-statist  disputes),  visions of agency (typically networked movements versus parties), and potentials for revolutionary processes to emerge within...

The Global Resistance Reader provides the first comprehensive collection of work on the phenomenal rise of transnational social movements and resistance politics: from the visible struggles against the financial, economic and political authority of large international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to the much less visible acts of resistance in everyday life. The conceptual debates, substantive themes and case studies have been...

The research in this paper explores the institutional changes in the housing system during the period of market transition in Bulgaria, which follow suit with the greater societal transformations. The societal changes are linked theoretically with Polanyi's understanding of the transition from a non-market to a market society. His argument helps in establishing the institutional context of the macroeconomic changes in the past decade. The article then focuses on the changing sources of...

Recent changes in fisheries regulation in the U.S. North Pacific reveal how neoliberalism is constituted in practice, and the forms that neoliberalism takes when it engages with environmental management and ecological processes. Whereas neoliberalism can be taken as a political economic philosophy that posits that markets, without state involvement, can best allocate resources, the history and practice of neoliberalism show that it is not as unified as it often appears. Analysis of...

The concept of embeddedness has gained much prominence in economic geography over the last decade, as much work has been done on the social and organizational foundations of economic activities and regional development. Unlike the original conceptualizations, however, embeddedness is mostly conceived of as a 'spatial' concept related to the local and regional levels of analysis. By revisiting the early literature on embeddedness - in particular the seminal work of Karl Polanyi and Mark...

The hegemony of neoliberalism now poses a fundamental challenge to planners worldwide. Most influential in this regard has been Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' ideology and its progenies - or mutations - such as the Third Way. A close reading of their proponents (especially Anthony Giddens) and critics (Perry Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, Alex Callinicos, John Gray and others) with reference to the contrasting political-economic theories of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, however,...

Discusses a Polanyian approach to environmental planning, foregrounding the concept of ecosocialization. Global problems of urban modernity; Ecological modernization and the transformation of capitalism; Discussion on ecological Marxism and the transition to socialism; Polanyian perspective for environmental planning.

This paper calls for an explicit return to questions about the normative foundations of planning theory and practice. It argues that a simultaneous reading of Karl Polanyi with Friedrich von Hayek can contribute to developing an ethical basis for tempering market rationality with social rationality in the current global economic conjuncture. Empirically, the paper investigates recent initiatives in Nepal to provide social protections (à la Polanyi) through financial market rules. In the face...

Dominant strands of thinking in contemporary social science consider economic globalisation, the increasing role of cross-border flows and transactions in economic organisation, in terms of some combination of either limited or considerable economic impact and either positive or negative consequences for the general welfare. Little attention has been given thus far to its political consequences within those parts of the world, the developed countries of the Global North, where its impact...

Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally...