The Dictionary of Human Geography (175 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
10.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
resource economics
A practical art and field of study that understands naturaL resources as a particular class of the ?scarce goods' described by neo cLassicaL economics, and that seeks to understand the opportunities and limitations of using markets as the primary social mechanism for making collective decisions about their production, allocation and consumption. Although recognizing that resource availability is finite in an absolute physical sense, a core axiom of resource eco nomics is that any meaningful measure of a resource's availability must understand its relation to capitaL, labour and socio technical knowledge relations that can be expressed by reference to price (Barnett and Morse, 1963). A normative goal of resource economics is to improve utility maximization by attributing prices to environmental goods and services. gb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Tietenberg (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
resource evaluation
A component of the resource management cycle involving physi cal, economic and/or cultural appraisal of natuRaL resources. Evaluation generates knowledge about a resource that is used to shape future strategies towards its use, conser vation or management: it may, for example, provide a ?baseline? against which to judge the effects of human intervention; it may calculate potential commercial values of a resource for a range of possible uses; or it may be used to review the consequences and effectiveness of management strategies. Although often emp loyed as a top down administrative tool, parti cipatory use of the techniques of resource evaluation can challenge ?expert? assumptions about the value, function and condition of a resource. gb (NEW PARAGRAPH)
resource management
The knowledges and practices associated with monitoring, evaluating, decision making and intervention in environments, with the objective of ensur ing that these environments produce goods and services of value to society. Resource management activities are undertaken by a wide range of actors and institutions, includ ing private sector organizations, national and local governments, community groups and househoLds. peasant studies and poLiticaL ecoLogy highlight agriculture as the ?original? resource management activity: the farmer is a land manager who makes (highly constrained) decisions about inputs to and outputs from a plot of land. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Etymologically, ?management? conjoins two distinctive roles: the trainer or director (mana ggiare), and the careful housekeeper (menager) (Williams, 1983 [1976]). Resource manage ment is the ?applied science of possibilities? (Hays, 1959): the task of the resource manager is to ensure the orderly production of environ mental goods and services over time and space. The codification of this role and the elevation of resource management as a specialized branch of knowledge first appeared on large European landholdings: von Thiinen?s work on land rent in The isolated state (1966 [1826]), for example, developed from a con cern to determine optimal patterns of agricul tural land use on his Prussian estate (see von thunen modeL). Resource management sci ence also developed as part of the coLoniaL project, as Europeans wrestled with unfamiliar tropical ecologies and sought ways to attain their control and maximize the yields of com mercially valuable crops (Scott, 1998b). The emergence of resource management as a distinctive social task marks a historical dis juncture: it is the point at which scarcity and abundance are recognized to be the product of social organization, and society begins the active production (?husbandry? or ?steward ship?) ofenvironmental goods and services that formerly had been taken as ?free? inputs. Recent efforts to develop planetary manage ment regimes for global resources biodiver sity, global cLimate and the oceans are an explicit recognition ofthis ?underproduction of the environment? and replicate a process that occurred earlier at the national scale for many productive resources such as timber, soils, water and game (e.g. the Conservation Movement of the early twentieth century in the uSA). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Within geography, resource management has been viewed as a promising vehicle for achieving the integration of human and phys icaL geography (Johnston, 1983). Although geography programmes often contribute to the teaching of conservation and resource/ environmental management, much recent human geography is critical of the knowledge claims and ?utilitarian, reductionist, techno centric and market driven? practices of conven tional resource management (Howitt, 2001b). Encounters between resource managers and indigenous peoples highlight the particularity and ethnocentrism of the instrumentalist ?resource imaginary?, and the way in which conventional resource management works to empower those who share its epistemoLogy, while disenfranchising (and often dispossess ing) those who do not. Yet there are a stunning array of other rationalities aesthetic, spiritual, communitarian and indigenous environmen tal knowledges that may provide alternative cri teria and values for management. Recent work seeks to bridge the gap between expert and iNDigenous Knowledges via processes such as stakeholder consultation, the development of multi actor management systems (that com bine the interests of private, public and other interested parties) and community based nat ural resource management. (See also naturaL resources.) gb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bakker and Bridge (2006); Howitt (2001b). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
resource wars
Conflicts over the control of naturaL resources are frequently simply called resource wars. Through much of the twentieth century, supplies of resources to feed and fuel industrial states were a matter of concern to war planners in many imperial states. During the coLd war, American concerns over supplies of minerals and oiL were part of its military planning. A large lit erature has documented the relationship between fights to control resources and geo poLitics, although it has also pointed out that simple conflicts over resources are less fre quently a direct cause of warfare than simplis tic Malthusian assumptions of scarcity leading to conflict usually suggest (Le Billon, 2004: cf. maLthusian modEL). The recent growth of the global economy and the ability to substitute and invent new materials in industrial pro cesses has substantially reduced the concern with potential wars over many resources on the large scale. However oil may yet turn out to be the ?resource war? exception that proves this rule. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Research in the 1990s gradually connected resources with contemporary vioLence in many states in the global south. It became clear that in many places in the developing world where there were large supplies of natural resources, there was also a prevalence of violence, corruption and in some cases outright warfare (Le Billon, 2005). Research has now documented how this ?resource curse? distorts development by making the political elites who control the resource rents hugely wealthy, and in the process frequently stifles national economic innovation. It also makes clear that there are large incentives to fight to control the rent from resource extraction, which, in the absence of a strong state and available economic alternatives, frequently fuels civil wars (Bannon and Collier, 2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH) At the largest scale, these matters are now of concern in the discussion of global oil supplies and the sometimes severely distorted political structures of oil exporting states, in particular in the middLE east. This now directly connects resource curse arguments with the traditional geopolitical themes of ensuring supplies for distant markets. In particular after the Iranian revolution, and during the subsequent war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, American military power became increasingly involved in the Gulf to control the flow of oil. This has grown dramatically as a consequence of inva sion of Iraq in 2003, where the US policy in the region is now directly tied to enforcing the flow of oil, with all the potential this has for further violent conflict (Klare, 2004). sd (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Klare (2004); Le Billon (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
restructuring
Change(s) in and/or between the constituent parts of a circuit of sociaL reproduction, emanating from the dynamics of the circuit itself or from contradictions and crises within it. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Such changes may represent a response to changed conditions induced, for example, by time space compression, technical change, or conflicts between labour and capitaL in the workplace, or transmitted through the competitive conditions endemic to capitaL ism. The inherently competitive social rela tions of capitalism generate a permanent tendency to transformation or restructuring, but the term has come to be more widely used since the end of the long boom in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see crisis; modern ity). For some, it is a process closely associ ated with the transition from one kondratieff cycLe to another or from one regime of accu muLation to another or with the speed of the circulation of capital and the increasing gLob aLization of the world economic geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As such, restructuring may be thought to be synonymous with deveLopment (Streeten, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , or at least with certain forms of devel opment. But it goes beyond that. Thus Laurence Harris (1988, p. 10) points out that although there is ?no easy, obvious way to distinguish structural from other changes in the abstract . . . some periods seem to see greater and more significant shifts than others'. He identifies four such periods in the UK since the early nineteenth century: the 1830s and 1840s; the 1880s and 1890s; the 1930s and 1940s; and the 1970s and 1980s. But what marks these out as periods of restructuring? Apart from certain specific and system wide components of changes (e.g. those identified by Harris, 1988, pp. 11 14), restructuring involves not just quantitative change but pronounced qualitative transform ations of the ways in which consumption, production and exchange take place and relate to each other. Furthermore, as a set of essentially qualitative changes operating on the circuit of social reproduction, restructur ing necessarily involves transformations of the conditions in which such circuits create and find their conditions of existence. (NEW PARAGRAPH) At an extreme of structural change, such as occurred in the transformation of the former state socialist societies during the late 1980s (see post sociaLism), the social relations through which the dynamic, direction and mode of evaluation of social reproduction are shaped are themselves transformed and the circuit of social reproduction comes to operate on completely different principles, often asso ciated with profound economic disruption and profound social pathologies. The parallels between perestroika in the former Soviet Union and capitalist restructuring are marked: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Perestroika is inevitable when existing eco nomic conditions do not respond to . . . the needs of development of society and the de mands of the future. Here it is necessary to change the economic system, to transform and renew it fundamentally. For this trans formation restructuring is necessary not just of individual aspects and elements, but of the whole economic system. (Anganbegyan, 1988, p. 6) (NEW PARAGRAPH) This strategy for development fatefully for Soviet socialism presumed uskorenie, an acceleration of economic growth, and glasnost, or openness, to be achieved by the spread of democracy and local self management. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The more insidious, continuous and wide spread social and political consequences of restructuring driven by the imposition of cap italist social relations and the norms, direc tions and criteria of evaluation that go with them within the third world are dramatically illustrated in Michael Watts? (1992) harrowing account of ?fast capitalism? and the exploit ation of oil in Nigeria. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Less dramatic but still profound changes may occur within the dynamics of particular forms of social reproduction, such as capital ism (e.g. Harris, 1988). Manuel Castells (1989, pp. 21 8) suggests that certain trans formations of the capitalist mode Of PROduc tion on a global scale during the twentieth century are structural in form. Certainly, they serve to exemplify the point that restructuring is qualitative as well as merely quantitative. The Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s and the associated disruption of the Second World War ?triggered a restructur ing process that led to a new form of capital ism very different from the laissez faire model of the pre Depression era? (p. 21). The new model relied on restructured relations bet ween capital and labour whereby stability in capitalist production was exchanged by the recognition of union rights, rising wages and the development of WELfare states; Keynesian regulation and intervention in cir cuits of capital articulated primarily at the national scale; and the creation of a new set of international regulatory institutions around the internationaL Monetary fund, underwritten by the power of the economy of the USA. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The limits of this model manifest, for example, in rampant inflation, increases in returns to labour and fiscaL crises of the state were formative influences (for an attempt to assess the articulation of these formative pro cesses, see Yergin and Stanislaw, 1998) on the creation and imposition of a restructured model of the circuit of capital involving the appropri ation of an increased share of the surplus by capital based around increases in Productivity, changes in the LAbour Process and restructur ing of LAbour MARkEts in terms of: deregulation and reductions in the power of trades unions; a shift in the role of states from intervention to facilitation of capital accuMuLAtion; and fur ther deregulation and opening up of local and national spaces to global competitive processes not least through the increasing significance of globally sensitive and active spheres of re production (see economic geography), acting through global financial centres. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Restructuring may involve one or more of a number of transformations: (NEW PARAGRAPH) structural AdjustMENT, which Streeten (1987, p. 1469) defines as ?adaptation to sudden or large, often unexpected changes? to an economic geography. Such changes may, however, be forced by powerful institutions such as the World Bank in, for example, making aid dependent on profound changes in macro economic policy. Structural adjustment programmes have been designed to open up underdevel oped economies to the global economic geography in order to maximize their poten tial for development. In this sense, they may be viewed as a means through which the social relations of capitalism may be spread through the underdeveloped world in ways that make them secure for the future by insisting, for example on: (NEW PARAGRAPH) transformations in the modes of coord ination and exchange within circuits of social reproduction (by, for example, opening up economies to the pressures of Market forces and international com petition) with the objective of removing local rigidities and reducing vulnera bility to shock through means such as increasing the flexibility of markets, the provision of productive infrastructure and the development institutions orien tated to export markets; switches of capital between forms of investment (direct/indirect), sphere of circulation of capital (reproduction/ production/realization) and sector (e.g. deindustriaLization); geographical switches of capital (here/ there see new international division of Labour). Such changes clearly have substantial implications for the uneven deveLopment of places (re/dis)incorpor ated from circuits of capital (see Allen and Massey, 1988; Allen, Massey, Cochrane et al., 1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH) More narrowly, the restructuring of produc tion (e.g. Graham, Gibson, Horvath and Shakow, 1988) may have significant conse quences well beyond production itself: (NEW PARAGRAPH) changes in the process of production as a consequence of economies of scaLe, the concentration of centralized capital (see marxist economics) or transitions from one regime of accumuLation to another (see reguLation schooL); (NEW PARAGRAPH) changes in the organization of production along the production chain (see Dicken, 1998, Ch. 1); (NEW PARAGRAPH) changes in corporate organization such as those associated with forms ofintegration within production, multidivisional organ ization and decentralization in the attempt to combine corporate size whilst maximiz ing entrepreneurial initiative within the organization; (NEW PARAGRAPH) the development of tasking flexibility in production based, for example, upon economies of scope or temporal flexibility based, for example, on just in time forms of supply along the production chain; (NEW PARAGRAPH) a redefinition of a firm's core activities, so redefining its sphere of activities, with pro found implications for the size and status of its labour force; (NEW PARAGRAPH) a repositioning of the firm along the pro duction chain to deal with downstream service functions; (NEW PARAGRAPH) a geographical reconfiguration to redefine the role and functioning of individual pro ductive units ; and (NEW PARAGRAPH) an organizational restructuring involving a redefinition of the firm's internal and external boundaries. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The restructuring of production in these ways has implications for, or may be under taken through, changes in the labour process or the division of Labour, but it relates to wider processes of change within which labour is necessarily caught up, and over which it has less direct influence than changes in the imme diate conditions of work. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although restructuring is a term applied mainly to economic transformation, and is frequently driven by and is obviously manifest in the activities of individual firms and capitals, (NEW PARAGRAPH) it cannot be restricted to the economic sphere. It involves, and so is predicated upon, responsiveness elsewhere in society. Nor is restructuring reducible merely to economic dynamics. It frequently requires the support and or restructuring of the state or, as in the case of perestroika or the market based restruc turing around the discourses of monetarism in the USA (?Reaganomics?) and, to a more dramatic extent, the UK (?Thatcherism') or New Zealand (?Rogernomics?) cases, is driven by the transformation of regulatory practices instituted by the state and so generates a range of ideoLogicaL and political rela tionships and struggles (see, e.g., Walker, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . rL (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Allen, Massey, Cochrane et al. (1988); Castells (1989, ch. 1); Corbridge (1995, section 5); Walker (1997); Watts (1992/6). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

Gone to Ground by Taylor, Cheryl
Deeply In You by Sharon Page
Highlander Enchanted by Lizzy Ford
Gossamurmur by Anne Waldman
Out of Season by Kari Jones
The Mine by Heldt, John A.
Tempting the Ringmaster by Aleah Barley
Traitor's Kiss by Pauline Francis
Back to McGuffey's by Liz Flaherty