Neoliberalizing nature: the logics of de- and

re-regulation
Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University,
England M13 9PL noel.castree@man.ac.uk

Abstract This and a companion essay examine a new and fast-growing geographical research literature
about neoliberal approaches to governing human interactions with the physical environment. This
literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on
a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take
stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two essays survey the literature theoretically
and empirically, cognitively and normatively. They are written for the benefit of readers trying to make
some sense of this growing literature and for future researchers of the topic. Specifically, they aim to
parse the critical studies of nature’s neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions
posed, variously, in many or most of them: what are the main reasons why all manner of qualitatively
different non-human phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’?; what are the
principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice?; what are the effects of nature’s
neoliberalisation?; and how should these effects be evaluated? Without such an effort of synthesis, this
literature could remain a collection of substantively disparate, theoretically-informed case studies
unified only in name (by virtue of their common focus on ‘neoliberal’ policies). Though all four
questions posed are answerable in principle, in practice the existing research literature makes questions
two, three and four difficult to address substantively and coherently between case studies. While the
first question can, from one well-established theoretical perspective, be answered with reference to four
‘logics’ at work in diverse contexts (the focus of this essay), the issues of process, effects and
evaluations are currently less tractable (and are the focus of the next essay). Together, the two pieces
conclude that critical geographers interrogating nature’s neoliberalisation will, in future, need to define
their objects of analysis more rigorously and/or explicitly, as well as their evaluative schemas. If the
new research into neoliberalism and the non-human world is to realise its full potential in the years to
come, then some fundamental cognitive and normative issues must be addressed. These issues are not
exclusive to the literature surveyed and speak to the ‘wider’ lessons that can be drawn from any body
of case study research that focuses on an ostensibly ‘general’ phenomena like neoliberalism.

Keywords Neoliberalism, neoliberalisation, abstraction, ideal types, biophysical

environments, environmental fixes

I. Introduction
Why are human interactions with the non-human world being ‘neoliberalised’ across
the globe? In what principal ways does nature’s neoliberalisation operate in practice?
What are the effects of this process? And how should these effects be evaluated?
These are live and profound questions. Neoliberal policy has, for some time, been de
rigeur in many parts of the ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds as a means of managing
natural environments and biophysical resources. As controversial as it is widespread,
such policy is ripe for detailed understanding and assessment. The four questions
posed above can, if addressed systematically, offer us the tools to examine

1
comprehensively nature’s neoliberalisation in light of twenty-plus years of policy
experimentation in areas such as water management, commercial fisheries, logging,
mining and ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions (to name but a few).1 However, until very
recently, the critical mass of research necessary to construct informed answers to
these questions did not exist. In human geography and cognate subjects, examinations
of neoliberal ideas and practices tended to focus on issues such as (un)employment,
welfare provision, industrial policy and trade. Apart from a handful of academic
studies (e.g. Bauer, 1997; Ibarra, Reid and Thorpe, 2000) and some ‘grey literature’
issuing from think tanks, non-governmental organisations and the like, anyone
seeking reasoned answers to the fundamental questions of logics, processes, outcomes
and evaluations had relatively few places to look for inspiration.2
Fortunately, this has changed – and it has done so in a very short space of
time. Of late, numerous theoretically informed but empirically grounded studies of
neoliberalism and nature have appeared in scholarly journals and as monographs.3
These studies – undertaken by researchers across the social sciences, including human
geography – constitute a vital resource. We now have a body of credible (sometimes
brilliant) research that both critics and champions of neoliberalism can refer to in
assessing its environmental credentials. This research, as we will see, covers both
cognitive and normative issues. Surveyed systematically, it thus allows us to fashion

1
There are direct links between these four questions, even though some of them can be asked and
answered in isolation by researchers. For instance, knowing why specific biophysical resources are
‘neoliberalised’ does not tell you quite how it is achieved in practice. However, knowing the effects of
nature’s neoliberalisation is crucial to evaluating the phenomena.
2
This statement must be qualified in one important respect. While it’s true in the sense that literature on
the natural environment and a thing called ‘neoliberalism’ is very new, it is false in another sense. For
well over a decade published literature on the non-human world and ‘privatisation’, ‘markets’,
‘commodification’, structural adjustment, free trade and other cognate phenomena has been widely
available. This raises the question of whether ‘neoliberalism’ is merely a synonym for these now well-
known phenomena or something different quantitatively or qualitatively. None of the authors whose
work I review here answer this question systematically and nor, therefore, will I. One reader of an
earlier version of this essay argued that I needed to review geographical literature on neoliberalism
along with that on so-called ecological modernisation. I reject this argument because if ecological
modernisation is exactly synonymous with neoliberalism when it comes to nature, then one wonders
why the authors whose work I am reviewing here have rarely explored the two simultaneously (for
instance, it warrants only a passing mention in Prudham and McCarthy’s [2004] introduction to a
whole journal issue on neoliberalism and nature).
3
Rather than list all these studies in the introduction, I will discuss many of them later as an essential
element of this and the next review essay. For now it is sufficient to note that a range of case studies
have appeared in special issues of Geoforum (2004, 35, 3), Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (2005, 16, 1),
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (2004, 25, 3), and Environment and Planning A (2002, 34, 5
and 2005, 27, 2).

2
potentially robust – albeit provisional and revisable – answers to the four questions
posed above.4
In geography, the bulk of the new research into neoliberalism and the non-
human world is broadly unsympathetic to the project of ‘market rule’. Karen Bakker,
Gavin Bridge (my colleague), Jessica Budds, Jeffrey Bury, Graham Haughton, Nik
Heynen, Roger Keil, Nina Laurie, Alex Loftus, Becky Mansfield, Simon Marvin,
James McCarthy, Tom Perreault, Scott Prudham, Paul Robbins, Morgan Robertson,
Kevin St. Martin, Erik Swyngedouw and Wendy Woolford are among those who have
called the neoliberalisation of nature into question in some way, shape or form.5
Though many critical accounts of neoliberalism have employed a ‘governmentality’
approach indebted to Foucault, the above-named analysts prefer to interrogate
nature’s neoliberalisation in another way.6 Adopting what Bridge and Jonas (2002,
764) call (in the broadest sense) an “institutional political economy approach” to the
biophysical world, these and like-minded geographers have deliberately positioned
themselves outside the domains of neoliberal thinking and practice being analysed.7
This contrasts with other research – some of it by geographers (e.g. Klepeis and
Vance 2003), most of it not (e.g. Pagiola, Arcenas and Platais 2005) – that accepts the
fundamentals of neoliberal thinking while aiming to (re)design and calibrate the
environmental policies that derive logically from it.
Another key difference arises from the geographical sensibility of the authors
listed above. Unlike many studies of nature’s neoliberalisation by political scientists
or traditional political economists (say), those now being published by critical
geographers have three strengths. First, they often pay close attention to the
materiality of the non-human world: nature in its various forms figures as a
biophysical actor not a tabula rasa or neutral ‘backdrop’. This is important because

4
These questions, phrased differently, are those of: why?, how?, with what effects? and by what criteria
of value judgement to what moral-practical ends?
5
One might also add the inspirational Patrick Bond to this list (a former David Harvey doctoral
student), except that he has no formal affiliation with a Geography department today, and rarely
publishes in geography journals. This is why (tenous a reason though it might seem) I exclude his work
from consideration here.
6
Indeed, few if any geographers currently employ a governmentality approach to analyse nature’s
neoliberalisation.
7
Specifically, the authors whose work I review in this and the follow-on essay look to critical political
economy (Marx and Polanyi in particular), state theory, regulation theory and new economic sociology
as the main sources of inspiration. This does not mean that they reject each and every element of
neoliberal environmental governance. It, does, however, mean that they are unconvinced by the totality
of arguments for this mode of governance as adumbrated by its advocates in the academic and policy
worlds.

3
nature can be shown to alter the workings and outcomes of neoliberal governance
ideas, rules and mechanisms (see, for example, Bakker, 2005). Secondly, close
attention is also often paid to issues of scale-crossing and scale-jumping: the links
between different socially constituted geographical scales in terms of logics,
processes and outcomes (less so evaluation, as we will see in the next essay) are often
strongly accented, so that one or other scale of environmental governance is not
hypostatised or fixated upon as if others can be conveniently bracketed-out (see, for
example, McCarthy, 2005a). Finally, critical geographical research into nature’s
neoliberalisation covers a remarkable array of places, regions and countries. This,
potentially at least, offers readers of the literature and future researchers of the topic a
fairly comprehensive sense of why and how neoliberal environmental governance
operates today and with what effects.
In light of all this, the wider value of the evidence-based critiques of nature’s
neoliberalisation by critical geographers is, it seems to me, two-fold. First, by
analysing neoliberal environmental policies ‘on the ground’, they present us with the
volume and depth of evidence necessary to give the architects of those policies pause
for thought. Secondly, evidence-based critiques also keep those of us instinctively
opposed to the neoliberal project both honest and optimistic: for they concretise,
modify and complicate broad theoretical claims about neoliberalism. After all, in the
absence of non-anecdotal findings, critics’ explanations and complaints would remain
purely abstract with the attendant risk of becoming dogmatic.
In this and a follow-on essay (Castree, 2007) I aim to sift and sort the recent
(and already quite large) critical geographical literature on neoliberalism and nature
with a view to addressing the questions of logics, processes, outcomes and
evaluations. While, at one level, this inevitably makes my efforts derivative, at
another I aim to ‘add value’ to readers’ understanding of what the research I survey
here is telling us about its objects of analysis. When these two essays were first
conceived, the intention was to parse the literature and so perform the useful function
of providing systematic answers to the questions of cause (why and how?), effect and
assessment. My aim was to identify commonalities and differences among the
published case studies so that a wider understanding of nature’s neoliberalisation
could be achieved en route to further grounded analyses and policy prescriptions in
the future. That aim lives on in the pages below and the essay to come. It is, I think, a
worthy one for the simple reason that the literature reviewed covers a potentially

4
befuddling array of natural resources and socio-economic contexts examined at
different geographical scales. Given this fact, it is not easy to identify signals in the
noise (supposing, of course, that such signals actually exist upon closer inspection).
For readers of the literature an effort of both conceptual and empirical mapping is
required that can identify lessons learnt to-date and so inform future research on (and
teaching about) nature’s neoliberalisation.8
However, this essay and (especially) its successor have a second objective that
was not part of my original intentions but which I now regard as being equally
important. As I surveyed the new case study literature on neoliberalism and nature
produced by critical geographers, I came to realise that constructing systematic and
substantive answers to my four questions (especially the last three) was surprisingly
difficult to do. This revealed a seeming paradox. The literature I was reading by the
authors named above was conceptually lucid and empirically rich: in short, full of
insights about neoliberalism’s environmental ‘logics’, modes of operation, outcomes
and evaluations. Yet, for all this, comparing across individual pieces of research
proved to be a major challenge. The root of the problem, I will argue, is that the
authors whose work I review here are using the same terms – ‘neoliberalism’ and
‘neoliberalization’ – to refer to and judge phenomena and situations that are not
necessarily similar or comparable.9 At one level, this is unsurprising, and not a
‘problem’ at all. After all, ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is, as Brenner and
Theodore (2002) argue, comprised of many different but often interconnected
neoliberalisations in the plural that are organised at a variety of spatial scales. One
8
There is an important issue here, identified by one reader of an earlier version of this essay. It relates
to the question of how a reviewer decides what (and what not) to include in any review essay. There is
a risk that if one casts the net too wide one is reviewing literature that may only share apparent rather
than real commonalities. In the present case, I have focussed (i) on geographical research where a thing
called ‘neoliberalism’ is formally analysed in relation to the biophysical word and more specifically (ii)
on research by ‘critical geographers’ only, wherein I have taken it as read that these geographers regard
their work as part of a larger field of debate and discovery. If the latter point did not apply then the
work of specific researchers would, implausibly in the present case, be conducted as if ‘neoliberalism’
were not a reality beyond the case study in question. This would be ‘idiography’ in a narrow,
stereotypical sense that few contemporary geographers would find defensible or much of a basis on
which to erect an academic career.
9
This, if you like, is an ontological problem: the problem that what constitutes ‘neoliberal’
environmental governance is highly variable either in reality or in terms of how different analysts
represent reality in their research. But there is also an epistemic and theoretical problem that is not (and
should not be) readily resolvable. This is the ‘problem’ of different analysts having subtly and often
not-so-subtly different frameworks of analysis within the broad area of ‘institutional political
economy’. It is not such much that the frameworks are incommensurable when one comes to compare
the results of research conducted using them. It is rather that ‘translating’ between then is a major task
for readers and users of the research, like the present author. The use of different concepts to organise
the analysis, different scales of resolution, and different levels of abstraction and so on pose major
problems for any attempt at synthesis. I discuss these issues at more length in Castree (2006 and 2007).

5
would hardly expect ‘neoliberalism’ to operate uniformly across the globe and so the
fact of heterogeneity, path-dependency and divergence should be neither a surprise
nor a profound analytical issue. Indeed, the point of research should, precisely, be to
account for what Mansfield (2004a: 566, emphasis added) calls “the geographical
constitution of neoliberalism”.
But this raises two key issues. First, where one is dealing with transnational
neoliberal governance mechanisms that impact on otherwise different biophysical and
socio-economic settings, it is important that their operation and relative causal
efficacy is carefully specified by analysts. If researchers with specific biophysical,
local, regional and national interests are examining the same ‘global’ ideas, rules and
mechanisms but doing so in very different ways conceptually and methodologically,
then it becomes a major challenge to compare or relate their analyses. Secondly,
where one is dealing with sui generis forms of neoliberal environmental governance –
at the national or local scale, say – the hoary question of how far one can compare
from case-to-case in geographical research arises.10 Ostensibly similar, but causally or
substantively unconnected, forms of national and local governance can only be
meaningfully compared if there is real clarity and consistency in the specification of
the ‘neoliberal element’ of the situations. Otherwise, one might be comparing apples
and oranges while labelling them all pears or peaches. Even then, there is an issue of
how far the context in which neoliberal policies operate affects or alters those policies
so that they are not, in practice, strictly comparable to ostensibly similar ones
elsewhere (see Castree [2005a, 2006] for a capsule elaboration of the above
arguments).11
10
By sui generis I mean forms of neoliberal governance that are applied locally or nationally (even if
the inspiration for them came from elsewhere). These ‘bespoke’ forms of governance are thus
relatively or absolutely autonomous from those involving transnational governance rules and
mechanisms which cross-cut otherwise different socio-economic and ecological contexts.
11
As some geographers have maintained going back decades, ‘context’ might be seen as constitutive
‘all the way down’ so that substantive (as opposed to merely formal) generalisation or comparison is
impossible. From this perspective there are no ‘general’ answers to my four questions only ever
multiple, contingent, areally-specific ones that are, strictly speaking, incommensurable or only partly
commensurable because of the qualitative differences of the situations involved. (And this could well
be the ‘lesson’ readers should take from the literature reviewed here). However, from another
perspective comparative analysis of case studies is both possible and highly desirable but only practical
when (i) empirical researchers are scrupulous in defining their objects of analysis for both transnational
and sui generis governance mechanisms, and (ii) when the ‘translation rules’ for comparing across
apparently similar but substantially different cases have, so far as is possible, been established. As will
be seen in this and the companion essay, many of the authors whose work I review strongly resist the
‘idiographic’ argument that their ‘local’ findings have little or no translatability to something beyond
themselves. I argue that while this position is entirely defensible and desirable in principle, in practice
more work needs to be done to make case analyses conducted at various geographical scales talk to one
another. This argument, I believe, extends beyond my immediate topic of concern to include other

6
 These extended introductory comments having been made, the topical
difference between this and the follow-on essay can now be described. In the pages to
follow I address the first of the four questions posed at the outset. In Castree (2007) I
focus on the questions of process, outcome and evaluation. This essay, therefore, aims
identify the principal logics that underlie all manner of different neoliberal policies
relating to different aspects of the non-human world in different parts of the globe. It
is structured as follows. In the next section I explain the need for an overarching
critical account of why nature is being neoliberalised. I then (in section III) explain
why such an account has not, to date, been forthcoming. I argue that a synthesis of the
ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and certain ecoMarxists – as used separately by a sub-set
of the authors whose work I am reviewing – offers one such account and a powerful
one at that (but not the only conceivable account). 12 The following section sets the
scene for this synthesis by explaining what, in abstract terms, constitutes
‘neoliberalism’. Section five then links various of the empirical case studies
theoretically by exploring what a comprehensive and integrated Polanyian-Marxian
explanation of nature’s neoliberalisation looks like. This leads to the identification of
four ‘environmental imperatives’ that can be shown to underlie several of the case
studies reviewed here. A brief conclusion then follows.
As should by now be clear, I aim in this and the follow-on essay to act as an
‘underlabourer’ for the research being reviewed. In so doing I hope to set future
research in this vein on a stronger cognitive and normative footing by reflecting on
some fundamental issues that cross-cut the individual studies that will comprise it in

areas of research where putatively ‘general’ phenomena (e.g. ‘post-Fordism’, ‘postmodernity’, ‘the
network society’ or ‘the information age’) are actualised in and through diverse, though often
empirically connected, spatiotemporal contexts. Therefore, and though I cannot demonstrate the claim
here, I think my arguments in this paper apply also to much research on nature’s neoliberalisation by
non-geographers.
12
I say one critical perspective for good reason. As mentioned above, a good deal of the recent
geographical literature about neoliberalism and nature adopts an institutional political economy
approach. However, this is a broad designation that covers several specific theoretical approaches that
are distinct, whatever their family resemblances. Since it is no easy task (and perhaps impossible) to
synthesise all these approaches in other than very general terms, I focus on just one of them to show the
explanatory value of parsing the case study research that deploys it. The approach in question weds
together certain ideas of Karl Polanyi with those of Marx and several Marxists who have theorised
capitalism-nature relationships (such as Jim O’Connor, Ted Benton and Neil Smith). Because these
ideas appear selectively in different case studies by a sub-set of the authors named earlier, a consistent,
overarching theoretical account of why nature is neoliberalised is missing (or, more accuately, latent).
What is more, I also argue that two recent ‘overview’ essays on neoliberalism and nature – written by
advocates of perspectives informed by Polanyian and Marxist ideas – fail to capture theoretically the
causal differentia specifica of this mode of governing access to, and use of, the non-human world. This
leads to an identification of four main reasons why different aspects of nature in different parts of the
world are currently being neoliberalised.

7
the years ahead. The specific contribution of this first essay relates to both researchers
of nature’s neoliberalisation in general and that sub-set who draw centrally upon
Polanyian and Marxian ideas. For the former audience the utility of a theoretical,
empirically-relevant synthesis regarding the question of logics is shown, even if not
all researchers will ultimately persuaded by its substantive content. For the latter
audience, the construction of a coherent, comprehensive, and conceptually specific
argument with empirical origins and applications is attempted that might inform
future research in a Polanyian-Marxian vein.13

II. Neoliberalising the non-human world: the need to specify political economic
(il)logics
Why ‘neoliberalise’ the governance of the non-human world? As the recent research
by critical geographers shows so well, the last thirty years have seen an ever greater
variety of biophysical phenomena in more-and-more parts of the world being subject
to neoliberal thought and practice. To offer some examples: Becky Mansfield (2004a,
2004b) has investigated new fisheries quota systems in the north Pacific as a form of
marketisation and enclosure; Jeffrey Bury (2004, 2005) has examined the sell-off of
mineral resources in Peru to overseas investors; Karen Bakker (2004; 2005) has
scrutinised the post-1989 privatisation of British water supply and sewage treatment,
and also water mercantilisacion in Spain (Bakker, 2002); Morgan Robertson (2000,
2004, 2006) has looked at the recent sale of wetland ecological services in the mid-
western USA; Nik Heynen and Harold Perkins (2005) have explored why and with
what effects public forests have been privatised in ‘post-Fordist’ Milwaukie; James
McCarthy (2004) has investigated the new ‘right to pollute’ among certain firms in
the NAFTA area, and also community forest projects in North America (McCarthy,
2005b; 2006); Scott Prudham (2004) has traced the dire consequences of ‘regulatory
rollback’ in the area of drinking water testing in Ontario; Kathleen McAfee (2003)
has examined corporate attempts worldwide to commodify the genetic material of
plants, animals and insects; Graham Haughton (2002) has examined the differential
character of national neoliberal water governance frameworks globally; and Laila
Smith (2004) has explored the effects of implementing cost recovery measures in the
management of Cape Town’s water supply. These and several other recent studies
13
I feel comfortable using this couplet for reasons to be explained. In short, several of Polanyi’s
arguments about a free market economy resonate powerfully with a Marxian critique of political
ecology.

8
provide rich, context specific answers to the question posed immediately above (and
the other three to be addressed in the companion essay).
This is very much in keeping with the drift of geographical research on
neoliberalism more generally. In urban, economic and development geography (the
main disciplinary subfields where neoliberalism has been examined to-date), it has
become axiomatic among researchers that they are investigating a spatiotemporally
variable process (‘neoliberalisation’) rather than a fixed and homogenous thing
(‘neoliberalism’). ‘Actually existing neoliberalisms’ are not the same as textbook
‘neoliberal ideology’. As Brenner and Theodore (2002, 353) observe, “an adequate
understanding of … neoliberalization processes requires not only a grasp of their
politico-ideological foundations but also, just as importantly, a systematic inquiry into
their multifarious institutional forms, their developmental tendencies, their diverse
socio-political effects, and their multiple contradictions” (see also Larner, 2003). This
is echoed by Karen Bakker (2005), who recently emphasised the need to elucidate
specific variants (or modalities) of nature’s neoliberalisation, in part by attending to
the biophysical influence of nature in the neoliberalisation process. The strengths of
Karen Bakker’s and other like-minded geographers’ attention to what Peck and
Tickell (2002, 383) call “the non-trivial differences … between actually existing
neoliberalisms …” are two-fold, as noted in the introduction. First, it invites both
critics and supporters of neoliberal ideas to move beyond abstract argument and
universalist rhetoric. While one can usefully speculate about why and with what
effects neoliberalism will impact on the non-human world (and vice versa), such
speculation is no substitute for concrete analyses of “both the geographical
constitution of neoliberalism and its geographically distinct outcomes” (Mansfield
2004a, 566). Secondly, for critics of nature’s neoliberalisation, contextual studies help
to “overcome the fear and hopelessness generated by monolithic accounts of the
‘neoliberal project’” (Larner 2003, 512). As Mansfield (2004a, 569) notes, “it is [too]
easy to treat neoliberalism as … unified and coherent …[, as] ascendant around the
world”. If empirical studies can demonstrate the path-dependency, variability and
contradictions of specific neoliberalisations of specific aspects of the biophysical
world then critics have a strong hand to play. They can show how and why certain
neoliberal policies fail (or not) when they move from the drawing-board to the ‘real
world’; and these critics thus have strong grounds on which to argue for alternative
modes of governing access to, and utilisation of, the physical environment.

9
 However, there is a danger that diverse investigations of nature’s
neoliberalisation (in the plural) will obscure the common ‘logics’ and processes
operating within or between otherwise different spatiotemporal settings (Peck and
Tickell, 2002). True, there is no such thing as a generic ‘neoliberalism’ (Barnett,
2005; Peck, 2004) – even though some proponents and critics of neoliberal ideas and
practices often talk as if there is. But this does not, in principle at least, mean that we
are unable to abstract from different contexts in order to see the proverbial wood for
the trees. Nor does it detract from the fact that transnational rules and mechanisms of
environmental governance are impacting upon otherwise distinct places and
biophysical resources and so creating commonality-within-difference. Theory, in one
well-understood sense of the term, “give[s] us a grasp of one kind of complexity by
abstracting from another” (Sayer 1995, 5). It “illuminate[es] … particular structures
or relationships by holding-off contingencies that generally accompany them in
concrete situations” (ibid. 19). Can we, then, discern theoretically a set of fairly
widespread ‘logics’ underpinning nature’s neoliberalisation in its many concrete
forms?
As I will show later in the essay, it is possible to identify in the diverse studies
of several geographical analysts of nature’s neoliberalisation a set of fairly common
rationales that help explain why specific neoliberal policies have been pursued in
relation to a range of biophysical resources. These rationales are specific to no one
geographical scale but can, rather, be seen to operate at any and all geographical
scales in both principle and practice. In other words, I think one can offer a ‘general’
answer to the first of my four questions – with the rider that the answer is, by
definition, removed from the concrete particulars of any one situation (at whatever
geographical scale) and thus constitutively incomplete as an explanation of real world
events. It is, therefore, a strictly theoretical answer, albeit one arising from, as well as
potentially informing, the insights of concrete research now and in the future. What is
more, it is a theoretically specific answer in that it blends insights from the work of
Karl Polanyi, Marx and several contemporary ‘ecoMarxist’14 theorists. There are other
theoretically specific answers one could offer, but the one I provide emerges from a
significant sub-set of the ‘institutional political economy’ literature surveyed here. As
such, it illustrates (I hope) the utility of making theoretical connections between case
14
I use this term to mean Marxists who theorise capitalism-nature relationships using a range of
concepts and normative standards not just those who are ‘pro-nature’ I some way (whatever this might
mean).

10
studies that have been conducted in relative isolation despite their potential
consonance.
Before I spell-out this response, I want to do two things: first, demonstrate
how few of the authors whose empirical work is being reviewed here has done so
themselves in other than partial terms; and, secondly, offer a working definition of
‘neoliberalism’ even though this definition is not, by necessity, adequate to any one
‘really existing’ case of neoliberalisation.

III. Theoretical gaps

Some critical geographers doing empirical work on nature’s neoliberalisation leave
their theoretical perspective implicit or relatively undeveloped in some or all of their
publications (e.g. Haughton, 2002; Hollander, 2004). However, much of the research
surveyed in this (and the next) essay is overtly theoretical without ever being
theoreticist (i.e. guilty of doing theory for theory’s sake). That is, this research
frequently utilises in a formal and open manner sets of concepts designed to identify
key logics and processes operative in the specific real world contexts being
investigated. In turn, the explanations and expectations contained in theory may,
iteratively, be confirmed or modified in light of empirical findings. Though not all the
geographers investigating nature’s neoliberalisation do so, many draw upon one or
more of the three sources mentioned above to construct their ‘institutional political
economy approach’. Two of these sources have been tapped for over a decade by
human geographers wishing to ‘bring nature back in’ to their field: namely, the
original work of Marx and of epigones like Ted Benton, James O’Connor and Neil
Smith. The third source – the work of Karl Polanyi – has less of a pedigree in human
geography, having been important in the recent ‘institutional turn’ taken by economic
geographers (see Hess, 2004). I attempt a theoretical synthesis of this Polanyi- and
Marxism-inspired research here for two reasons. First, a relatively large amount of the
literature surveyed is covered by such a synthesis. Secondly, the theoretical ideas are
very abstract – more so, for example, than the ‘regulation theory’ favoured by several
geographical analysts of market-led environmental governance (e.g. Krueger, 2002).
This means that they are potentially relevant (for those who buy-into them) to a very
large number of real world cases of nature’s neoliberalisation and so are worth
codifying.

11
 In what sense are there theoretical ‘gaps’ in the research I am trying to
conceptually parse in this essay? The answer is that different authors draw selectively
upon Marx, Polanyi and recent Marxist theorisations of nature in their empirical
analyses. This is not so much a criticism as an observation. For instance, Mansfield
(2004a) makes much of Polanyi’s critique of ‘laissez faire capitalism’ but little of the
Marxist approaches to the non-human world that resonate with Polanyi’s thesis of ‘the
double movement’. Bakker (2003a, 2005), by contrast, draws inspiration from
Benton’s thinking but makes little direct reference to Polanyi or to a figure like James
O’Connor (who has greatly inspired some of McCarthy’s [2004] research). There are
many other examples I could offer.
Among the reasons for this selective use of otherwise connectable bodies of
theory is an obvious one: researchers use the specific concepts they need to analyse
the specific empirical issues that concern them. Other concepts – while they might be
indirectly relevant – are thus cast into darkness so that the explanatory connections
are only implicit. Then there are the usual limitations that apply to all research: most
of us, for contingent reasons, inevitably fail to make connections between our work
and the ever-existing tranche of as-yet-unread or unknown research by other scholars.
We are all finite beings in this regard, drawing upon a fraction of the (often
voluminous) literature potentially relevant to our empirical inquiries. A third reason is
that the theorists that geographers like Bakker, Mansfield and McCarthy draw upon
for inspiration have not themselves always made appropriate substantive links with
the work of like-minded theorists. The ‘green Marxist’ O’Connor has not, for
example, established the logical connections between his own work and that of Neil
Smith (or vice versa).15
This failure of any one case study by those geographers drawing upon Polanyi,
Marx or ecoMarxists to combine this trinity of influences in an overarching way, is
repeated elsewhere in the geographical literature on nature’s neoliberalisation. Two
recent overview essays on ‘neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism’
(McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Heynen and Robbins 2005) do not, in my view,
summarise the explanatory insights of the case study literature at all well. While both

15
Indeed, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Boyd et al. 2001), few Marxist theorists of ‘capitalism and
the environment’ have convincingly pieced together the abstract theoretical contributions of Polanyi
with those of Benton, Smith, O’Connor and other like-minded authors. Others include Elmar Altvater,
Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster. I have tried to forge some of these connections in Castree (2000
and 2002), while Benton’s (1996) general and section introductions offer some insights.

12
offer very useful road-maps for readers new to the topic, they offer few essential
insights into why the non-human world should have become a major focus of
neoliberal policy making and practice. This is surprising because both essays are
introductions to special journal issues on nature’s neo-liberalisation that contain
numerous contextual analyses by some of the authors already mentioned.16
Heynen and Robbins (ibid. 2), in their contribution to a special issue of
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, characterise nature’s neoliberalisation in the following
terms:

[It comprises]… governance, the institutional political compromises through which capitalist
societies are negotiated; privatization, where natural resources … are turned over to firms and
individuals; enclosure, the capture of common resources and the exclusion of the
communities to which they are linked; and valuation, the process through which invaluable
and complex ecosystems are reduced to commodities through pricing.

As we will see, the four features identified are all relevant to understanding how
nature is neoliberalised. The problem is that they are characterised in such general and
descriptive terms that one is at a loss to know why it makes sense for certain actors
(e.g. firms or states) to push the neoliberal agenda in the environmental domain
specifically. In other words, Heynen and Robbins fail to explain the central reasons
why neoliberalising nature (as opposed to any other phenomena) is a ‘rational’ or
desirable project for those who advocate and undertake it.
By contrast, McCarthy and Prudham (op. cit. 277) make the strong claim that
“neoliberalism is … an environmental project and … it is necessarily so”. They offer
several reasons to sustain this proposition, of which three loom large. First, they make
the point that ‘classical liberalism’ – neoliberalism’s direct ancestor – made the
natural environment centre-stage. The normative arguments of figures like John
Locke and Thomas Malthus were articulated with reference to the enclosure,
ownership and commodification of land, forests, water courses and other natural
resources. Indeed, these arguments helped to justify the spread of ‘free market
capitalism’ throughout the Western world after the long period of feudal rule came to
16
As indicated in footnote 3, there are three other special issues of geography journals that contain
essays on nature’s neoliberalisation and that fall broadly into the Bridge and Jonas designation.
However, none of these issues is explicitly about nature’s neoliberalisation and hence the introductions
to them touch upon this issue only lightly. Indeed, the special issues of Geoforum and Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism are being repackaged and reworked as a book jointly edited by McCarthy, Prudham,
Robbins and Heynen. The book
will be called Neoliberal environments and published by Routledge in late 2007/early 2008.

13
an end in eighteenth century Britain and Europe. Secondly, focussing on the present,
McCarthy and Prudham rightly argue that many neoliberal policies are explicitly
about the non-human world: think, for instance, of bioprospecting initiatives,
ecotourism, carbon-offset schemes, and fisheries quota trading. These, as they note,
have been linked to the eclipse of the interventionist state in many parts of the world.
Thirdly, again focussing on the present, McCarthy and Prudham observe that
“contemporary environmental concerns … have, in many respects, been the most …
effective political sources of response and resistance to neoliberal projects,
contending with neoliberalism as the basis of post-Fordist regulation” (ibid. 278).
Here, then, the argument is that neoliberalism is intrinsically environmental because it
has frequently sparked strong opposition among groups and organisations dismayed
by the mismanagement of the non-human world.
As with Heynen and Robbins’ arguments, McCarthy and Prudham’s are not so
much wrong as insufficiently penetrating as a summary of why the non-human world
has been the specific target of neoliberal policies worldwide this last two decades or
so. Their survey, in my view, fails to disclose the fundamental commonalities-of-
purpose that cross-cut all manner of different neoliberal prescriptions regarding
diverse elements of the biophysical world. (They also say little about how different
modalities of nature’s neoliberalisation might be identified, my subject in the second
main section of Castree [2007). This is strange because in their own empirical work,
McCarthy and Prudham (as we will see) offer deep theoretical insights (backed-up by
evidence) into some of these commonalities-of-purpose. What is required is a
specification of quite why a range of actors and institutions worldwide have regarded
the neoliberalisation of the non-human world as a project of the first importance.

IV. The abstract and the concrete: defining ‘neoliberalism’

Having questioned whether the relations between neoliberalism and nature have yet
received a full and proper theoretical specification in the critical geographic literature,
I want now to lay the basis of that specification in relation to a sub-set of the
literature. This will allow me to spell-out neoliberalism’s environmental logics in the
next sub-section from one (Polanyian-Marxian) theoretical perspective.
One shared feature of the two essays criticised above is their insistence that
neoliberalism cannot be understood in abstraction from capitalism. Thus Heynen and
Robbins (op. cit.) talk about “capital’s neoliberal agenda”, while McCarthy and

14
Prudham (op. cit. 281) note that neoliberalism makes manifest more than any other
mode of environmental governance capitalism’s environmental contradictions. This
conviction that neoliberalism is one historically (and geographically) specific form
that capitalism can assume arguably explains the references to Polanyi and Marxism
in much of the geographical literature on nature’s neoliberalisation. In The great
transformation (1944) Polanyi, famously, offered a trenchant critique of liberal or
‘market’ capitalism. However, by fixating on relatively unregulated market
transactions in more-and-more areas of social and natural life, he failed to probe the
deeper relationships these transactions expressed. Marx and his successors, by
contrast, have argued that ‘market rule’ is one possible ‘shell’ for capitalism as an
increasingly global system of making, moving, selling and servicing commodities.
The challenge then becomes linking Polanyi’s insights about ‘unmanaged capitalism’
with those of Marx and his environmentally-minded successors about capitalism and
nature. As already noted, some geographical analysts of nature’s neoliberalisation
have made some of these links. However, a comprehensive account has yet to be
constructed in terms of why nature-qua-nature should, in its various permutations, be
a major focus of neoliberal practice.
Any such account must, of course, be explicit about what ‘capitalism’ and
‘neoliberalism’ are. The fact that neoliberalism is an ‘unreal abstraction’ has already
been mentioned: only in the programmatic writings of authors like Milton Friedman,
Frederich Hayek and Richard Epstein is it a single, coherent entity. Much the same
can be said about ‘capitalism’ (hence the scare-quotes). As Gibson-Graham (1996),
Tim Mitchell (2002) and several others have argued, it is one thing to abstract from
concrete contexts in order to identify economic processes and relationships common
to those contexts. But it is quite another to then assume (erroneously) that these
processes and relationships exist ‘over and above’ these contexts as what one Marxist
called ‘an invisible Leviathan’ (M. Smith 1994). As Bruno Latour has argued
forcefully in several oft-cited publications, putatively ‘general’ phenomena (like
‘global capitalism’) are constituted differentially in and through concrete particulars.
Marx, of course, expressed this brilliantly in his later writings: the conceptual
dualities of use and exchange value, concrete and abstract labour were precisely
designed to show how commonality can exist by way of socio-geographical difference
rather than outside it. To rephrase this in Althusserian terms, both ‘capitalism’ and its
‘neoliberal’ form of expression both exist in an overdetermined socio-environmental

15
world. This means that both phenomena are constitutively ‘impure’: the clean lines of
their conceptual specification do not mirror their messy imbrication in diverse real
world situations.17
The authors who have drawn centrally upon Polanyi and/or Marx and/or
several ecoMarxists to inform their empirical work on nature’s neoliberalisation are
Heynen, Perkins, Robertson, McCarthy, Prudham, Bakker, Swyngedouw and
Mansfield. These authors – with the exception of Mansfield who has drawn little
inspiration from Marxism to-date – are all Marxist in the ‘minimal’ sense that they
appear to take the following well-known arguments to be axiomatic. ‘Capitalism’,
their research for the most part presumes, is an economic system that is predicated on
a class relation (between those who own and do not own the means of production), is
growth-orientated (Marx’s famous ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’), and
depends upon inter-firm competition, all of which, fourthly, spur a ceaseless search
for new products, markets, production techniques and raw material sources (among
other things). If this inherently unstable system is to function in the long term then the
state (local, national and supranational), and other ‘governance’ bodies, must exert
some kind of regulatory influence.
How does ‘neoliberalism’ relate to this way of producing life’s material
necessities and luxuries? Even though Mansfield (op. cit.) is right that neoliberalism is
not “an unchanging force that is applied in different contexts”, Bob Jessop (2002) is
equally right that its ideal-typical specification serves a useful purpose. As he puts it:

Ideal types are so called because they involve thought-experiments not because they represent
some normative ideal or other. They are theoretical constructs formed by the one-sided
accentuation of empirically observable features of … reality to construct objectively feasible
configurations … These configurations are never found in pure form, but their conceptual
construction may still be useful for heuristic, descriptive or explanatory purposes (ibid. 460).

Apart from Jessop himself, several critical geographers of a political economic

persuasion have defined neoliberalism in ideal-typical terms (e.g. Brenner and
17
What is the relevance of this discussion to answering the first of my four questions? It suggests that
we are forced to give a clear identity – and attribute causal powers – to phenomena that do not, in fact,
exist in the integral sense in which we specify them conceptually. In other words, the precise rationale
for, and operation of, neoliberal policies on the environment in a capitalist world is only imperfectly
captured in the abstract arguments that I will lay out in the next sub-section. Even so, because these
arguments have been variously operationalised in the case research to be discussed, they do tell us
important things about how and why nature is being neoliberalised. Their explanatory power is real, but
it is approximate rather than specific.

16
Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002) – ones that McCarthy and Prudham (op. cit.
276) appropriate in their overview essay on nature and the neoliberal project.18 This
ideal-typical characterisation usually identifies the following things as constituting
‘neoliberalism’ when one abstracts from the multiple ‘neoliberalisations’ extant in the
world (or, alternatively, when one consults the textbook arguments of the
proselytisers):

 Privatisation (i.e. the assignment of clear private property rights to social or

environmental phenomena that were previously state owned, unowned or
communally owned. New owners of hitherto unprivatised phenomena can
potentially come from anywhere across the globe)
 Marketisation (i.e. the assignment of prices to phenomena that were
previously shielded from market exchange or for various reasons unpriced.
These prices are set by markets that are potentially global in scale, which is
why neoliberalism is often equated with geographically unbounded ‘free
trade’)
 Deregulation (i.e. the ‘roll back’ of state ‘interference’ in numerous areas of
social and environmental life so that (i) state-regulation is ‘light touch’ and,
(ii) more-and-more actors become self-governing within centrally prescribed
frameworks and rules)
 Reregulation (i.e. the deployment of state policies to facilitate privatisation
and marketisation of ever-wider spheres of social and environmental life)
 Market proxies in the residual public sector (i.e. the state-led attempt to run
remaining public services along private sector lines as ‘efficient’ and
‘competitive’ businesses)
 The construction of flanking mechanisms in civil society (i.e. the state-led
encouragement of civil society groups [charities, NGOs, ‘communities’ etc.]
to provide services that interventionist states did, or could potentially, provide
for citizens; these civil society groups are also seen as being able to offer

18
Strangely Heynen and Robbins’ only list some of the features detailed below – despite a loose
consensus in the critical geographical literature that they comprise the ‘generic’ elements of neoliberal
thought and practice.

17
 compensatory mechanisms that can tackle any problems citizens suffer as a
result of the previous five things listed)19

In ideal-typical terms, then, neoliberalism is simultaneously a social,

environmental and global project. Socially it involves a (re)negotiation of the
boundaries between the market, the state and civil society so that more areas of
people’s lives are governed by an economic logic. Environmentally, even though
neoliberalism’s major theorists (like Hayek) said relatively little about the non-human
world, it is implicit in the list above that neoliberalism has profound implications for
access to and use of that world. For it involves the privatisation and marketisation of
ever more aspects of biophysical reality, with the state and civil society groups
facilitating this and/or regulating only its worst consequences. Finally, in geographical
terms, it is implicit in the features of neoliberalism listed above that the ‘invisible
hand’ should be as spatially expansive as it socially and environmentally exorbitant.
In principle, neoliberal ideas can (and for its most fervent advocates should) be
implemented worldwide, not just here or there.
Overall, neoliberalism sees the market as the best mechanism for allocating
goods and services to meet the diverse needs of actors across the globe. This is why
critics sometimes label it as ‘market triumphalism’. Though neoliberalism’s advocates
depict it as non-political – the market being portrayed as a neutral ‘social choice
mechanism’ – the reality is that it is politics by other means: what Ulrich Beck (2000,
122) calls a form of “high politics which presents itself as completely non-political”.
The market is a specific and contentious way of distributing life’s ‘goods’ and ‘bads’
among multifarious actors who differ in their sociogeographic location, their available
assets and their needs and wants (see O’Neill 1998). To the extent that neoliberalism
wants the market to be the principal way in which people derive goods and services, it
is best understood as a comprehensive mode of governance not simply an ‘economic’
philosophy and practice. It offers one, partial answer to the venerable question: ‘how
should we live?’; it offers one particular means of determining who should pay (in the
fullest sense of that word) for maintaining or altering certain states of nature; and it
does so by seeking to naturalise the market as a means for accessing and distributing
life’s necessities and luxuries.
19
Some commentators provide a much longer list (e.g. Peet and Hartwick, 1999: 52), while others (e.g.
McCarthy, 2006) offer a much shorter one. Thus, even as an ideal-type, there is some variance in how
‘neoliberalism’ is depicted within the community of geographical political economists.

18
V. Environmental imperatives
We are now in a position to explain, by abstracting from and synthesising existing
case study research, why neoliberalism is necessarily an environmental project: that
is, a project (whatever its other dimensions) that has the non-human world as a key
part of its rationale. By synthesising the various specific ways the ideas of Polanyi,
Marx and ecoMarxists are used by the likes of McCarthy and Bakker in their
empirical research, we can offer an overarching account of the principal logics at
work. I will summarise and connect the work of Polanyi, O’Connor, Benton and
Smith in turn and then identify four broad rationales for nature’s neoliberalisation on
this basis. There are other ways that this can be done, but the arguments presented
below have the virtue of being both coherent and fairly comprehensive.

Karl Polanyi
Polanyi’s ideas – which inform the recent research of Mansfield (2004a), McCarthy
(2004) and Prudham (2003, 2005) in particular – have an obvious relevance to the
topic of neoliberalism and nature. The great transformation charted the rise of free
market capitalism and explored what it did to various ‘fictitious commodities’ (and
vice versa). These latter are phenomena – like water and trees – whose socio-cultural
value, physical function or biological needs exceed that which is registered through
market transactions of discrete commodities. By treating these phenomena as if they
are ‘true’ commodities (i.e. manageable purely through price signals), Polanyi argued
that market economies are inherently contradictory. They give rise to consequences
(such as the hyper-exploitation of wage labour) that call forth sometimes strong
opposition to the ‘marketisation of everything’. Polanyi called this ‘the double
movement’: attempts to expand the scope of the market meet with resistance from
significant sections of society and so ultimately place limits on market rule. Such
resistance, he argued, can be reformist or radical. In the first case supporters of laissez
faire capitalism devise, for strategic reasons, the means to create what Polanyi called
a ‘market society’. This is a society that will allow a relatively disembedded ‘market
economy’ to function without the threat of serious civic insurrrection. Such a society
can be created through discursive-cum-ideological means (e.g. normalising
‘individual liberty’ as an ideal over against ‘social solidarity’). It also, as importantly,
requires an institutional infrastructure (e.g. creating the organisational capacity to

19
ameliorate the worst consequences of market rule, like a social safety-net for the long-
term unemployed). As Polanyi argued, the ‘free’ market is a myth: markets always
need regulating if they are to survive. In Mansfield’s (2004a, 571) words, “In [one] …
sense, the double movement is not about fundamentally challenging the market
system, but it is about altering the market system in order to maintain it”. In some
instances, however, a coalition of more radical forces may be able to precipitate what
Jessop (2002, 458) calls a ‘regime shift’ or, more profoundly, a ‘system
transformation’. We have recently witnessed such a radical coalition in Bolivia in
response to utilities privatisation and deregulation.

James O’Connor
Though Polanyi’s arguments have strong family resemblances to those of Marx, they
fail to link market rationality to a theory of capital accumulation. As Sayer (1995)
argued, while the ‘blind’ market with which we are now familiar is not reducible to
the capitalist mode of production, capitalism cannot function without an impersonal
form of commodity exchange. This is why some Marxists with interests in capitalism-
nature relationships have used Polanyi’s ideas in their theoretical work. Chief among
them is James O’Connor whose writings strongly inform those of McCarthy (2004)
and Prudham (2003, 2005), as well as Robertson (2004). O’Connor utilises Polanyi’s
arguments about fictitious commodities, the double movement and the paradoxical
need for ‘free’ markets to be managed, in the context of the late Marx’s critique of
political economy. In a series of now well-known publications, O’Connor (e.g. 1998)
identified an ‘ecological contradiction’ inherent to capitalist societies that is
potentially as important as the ‘first contradiction’ so famously identified in Capital.
This ‘second contradiction’ arises because capitalist firms pass on the environmental
costs of production to society and the biophysical world even as, paradoxically, they
rely upon the un- or underproduced ‘conditions of production’ that the latter offers
(e.g. a sufficient quantity of ground and surface water resources, clean air etc.). Thus,
whether they are direct inputs to production or waste sinks, O’Connor argues that
firms, left to their own devices, will exhaust or pollute their conditions of production.
Without sufficient self-regulation by firms or state management of their actions,
O’Connor argues that capitalist societies will suffer ‘ecological crises’. These crises,
he rightly observes, do not arise ‘objectively’ out of the biophysical problems caused
by capital accumulation. Instead, it is a contingent question whether the type and scale

20
of these problems is sufficient to generate real or perceived crises among firms, within
the state apparatus or the wider society. In any event, such crises will, in his view, call
forth more-or-less radical efforts to regulate capitalism-nature relationships at a
variety of geotemporal scales. The state is a key player in securing a regulatory fix for
these crises, be its authority national, sub-national or supranational in scale.

Ted Benton
James McCarthy (2004, 335) argues that Polanyi and O’Connor provide us with “a
shared vision of highly periodized, punctuated trajectories of capitalist development,
in which regulation becomes necessarily more complex as capital becomes able to
appropriate and transform nature … more deeply”. Part of this regulation can involve
not shielding the non-human world from capitalism but, instead, using capitalism to
offer that world protection from the effects of previous rounds of accumulation. Ted
Benton, an ecoMarxist arguably as influential as O’Connor, has tried to ascertain ‘the
difference that nature makes’ to capital accumulation. Like O’Connor he highlights
the crisis tendencies built-in to the capitalist mode of production. What Benton calls
the ‘naturally mediated unintended consequences of production’ (Benton 1991, 266;
1989) arise from ‘economic rationality’: it makes good commercial sense for
capitalist firms to externalise production costs and thus be ‘ecologically irrational’
unless conservation and preservation can turn a profit. However, Benton is also
interested in how the material properties of the non-human world influence direct
attempts by capitalists to profit from these or other nature-based activities. This
explains why Karen Bakker (2002, 2003a, 2005) has drawn quite heavily on Benton
in her research into water supply privatisation and marketisation in the UK and Spain
(Mansfield too makes much of nature’s ‘materiality’ in her research on fisheries
reregulation). If certain fractions of capital are to ‘save nature by selling it’ (McAfee
1999) and benefit commodity consumers in the process then, Bakker argues, we have
to take seriously Benton’s point that the biophysical properties of the non-human
world are often intransigent. Firms must adapt to these properties if they are to
conserve natural resources while making a profit. Yet this does not mean nature
presents absolute barriers to, and opportunities, for ‘green firms’ or traditional nature-
based ventures (e.g. agriculture). As Benton (1989) insists, all barriers and
opportunities are relative: they arise from the articulation of the non-human world
with available technologies, modes of resource appraisal and so on.

21
Neil Smith
Together, Benton and O’Connor’s work allow us to ground Polanyi’s arguments in a
theory of capital accumulation. The production, circulation and expansion of
economic value is, in their view, the key to understanding what happens to nature in
capitalist societies. Markets are the means whereby commodity producers and sellers
are brought into a relationship. But they do not, contra Polanyi, go the heart of why
the problems identified by Polanyi arise. This brings me, finally, to the work of Neil
Smith on ‘the production of nature’. In Uneven development (1984) Smith presciently
argued that the natural world is, increasingly, being physically transformed ‘all the
way down’. Where Polanyi, O’Connor and Benton depict nature as largely an
external, non-manipulable domain, Smith suggested it is being materially internalised
by certain fractions of capital as an accumulation strategy.
We can make sense of this by way of a very useful distinction between the
formal and the real subsumption of the non-human world – one made by Boyd,
Prudham and Schurman (2001) in an excellent review paper on capital and nature.
The first refers to Benton’s concern: situations where capitalist firms make money
from the natural environment by ‘circulating around’ its intractable material
properties (be it an input to, or force of, production). For instance, forestry companies
have for many decades had to find ways to deal with the long time periods needed to
grow and harvest plantation trees once old growth forests have been logged (see
Prudham, 2003, 2005). By contrast, the real subsumption of nature involves altering
its biophysical properties so that it offers enhanced possibilities for capital
accumulation. This alteration can apply to either the conditions of production or the
forces of production. For instance, in agriculture and forestry both hybridisation and
now genetic modification are two key technologies in subsuming nature to the
demands of capitalist firms. Clearly, the real subsumption of nature can only occur in
biologically-based economic sectors rather than extractive ones, like mining. Equally
clearly, it comes without guarantees: for instance, the public opposition to genetically
modified products worldwide and their as yet unknown ecological affects may well
undermine their long term commercial viability. Smith tended to gloss over important
differences like this with his blanket announcement that all capitalist nature is
produced. Even so, his ideas remain an important reminder that capitalist firms

22
remake (‘second’) nature as much as they degrade or protect ‘first nature’ (see
McAfee, 2003)

VI. Neoliberalisation and biophysical fixes

In light of this discussion of Polanyi’s, O’Connor’s, Benton’s and Smith’s basic ideas,
we can now specify why it is ‘rational’ for many different fractions of capital to take a
neoliberal approach to nature with the backing of state institutions, pro-business
political parties and advocacy groups. If, as suggested earlier, we see neoliberalism as
one possible ‘shell’ for the capitalist mode of production, then this shell offers firms,
state bodies and sympathetic staakeolders a range of ‘environmental fixes’ to the
endemic problem of sustained economic growth. I use the term ‘fix’ intentionally.
Fractions of capital face the continuous challenge of achieving and then sustaining
accumulation in the face of countervailing forces that are internal and external to the
capitalist system (e.g. inter-firm competition, economic crises, public opposition to
certain commercial practices etc.). Likewise the state, though it has multiple
objectives, must find ways to discharge its duties effectively while avoiding fiscal,
rationality or legitimation crises. In each case, a ‘fix’ constitutes a way of achieving
strategically a core objective for capital and/or the state. The first three fixes specified
below all involve certain fractions of capital using specifically neoliberal measures to
gain commercial advantage in and through the domain of the physical environment.
The fourth involves state bodies using neoliberal environmental measures to solve
problems arising within the state apparatus or the wider economy and society. The
first three fixes all require state sanction and assistance at a variety of geographical
scales. However, I only focus squarely on the state in the fourth fix because that fix is,
as it were, ‘internal’ to state institutions and basic state functions in capitalist
societies. (Note that all the fixes can ultimately be achieved only through consensual
or coercive forms of class power and may elicit responses with a strong class content
[e.g. working class rebellions] that halt these fixes in their tracks).

Environmental fix 1. The first of these fixes is perhaps the best-known. It is based on
two arguments made by those who believe in neoliberalism’s capacity for superior
ecological stewardship: first, that the economy-environment contradictions that
Polanyi, O’Connor and other critics identify can be ameliorated and even overcome;
second, that this can be achieved not by ring-fencing the non-human world (e.g.

23
through state protection) but by bringing it more fully within the universe of capital
accumulation. What its advocates call ‘free market environmentalism’ is a set of ideas
and practices that aim to conserve resources and ecosystems by allowing them to be
privatised and marketised.20 Together state bodies and private firms strategise to ‘roll
back’ direct state responsibility for environmental good and services and natural
resource management. Where such responsibility was not exercised in the first place
(as in many very poor or war-torn countries) measures are crafted so that the private
sector can discharge it from hereonin, not the state. Firms and other private interests
then step into the vacuum deliberately created. Where state bodies must, for whatever
reason, retain control over their use, these resources and ecosystems are to be
managed in market-mimicking ways. The case study literature in geography is replete
with examples of this first neoliberal environmental fix. For instance, in three
excellent essays, Robertson (2000, 2005, 2006) has shown how wetland mitigation
has fast become a commercial opportunity for the private sector. Here mitigation
firms create, and charge land developers for, wetland replacement sites intended to
compensate for wetland destruction on development sites many kilometres away. A
similar logic can be found at work in the cases studied by Mansfield (2004b) and
Bakker (2003a). Mansfield shows the long history of market-based fisheries
conservation in the North Pacific as a response to over-fishing, while Bakker shows
how new private water companies in England and Wales have sought to conserve
scarce water resources and raise water quality from a low base while earning a profit.

Environmental fix 2. Secondly, there are neoliberal measures that are not about
environmental conservation but very much about exposing hitherto protected or state-
controlled aspects of the natural environment to the full force of market rationality
and capital accumulation. In other words, these measures are about extending
capital’s formal and/or real subsumption of nature without any overtly ‘eco-friendly’
motivations. Here, then, the non-human world simply becomes a means to the end of
capital accumulation – period. Making more of this world directly available to
commercial investors than heretofore overlaps closely with what David Harvey
(2003) has called ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (see Swyngedouw, 2005). Jeffrey
Bury (2004, 2005) offers one example of this second fix. He charts the privatisation of
20
Increasingly, free market environmentalism is being actualised in tandem with ‘corporate social
responsibility’ measures. The result is so-called ‘triple bottom line’ accounting by firms: i.e.
accounting to shareholders, to society at large and to the non-human world.

24
the mining industry in Peru. Successive Peruvian government have opened-up the
national minerals sector to outside investors. Here, non-Peruvian multinationals –
responsible to shareholders and selling minerals on international markets – have
exploited a new physical and commercial frontier. The Peruvian state merely sets the
framework conditions for this exploitation and receives a portion of the revenue
generated. A similar logic is at work in agricultural trade liberalisation. As
Hollander’s (2004) study of Florida sugar production shows, the removal of state
protection for certain agrofood products under a WTO-led free trade regime provides
major commercial opportunities for some farmers (not as direct investors but as
competitors in this case). Sugar producers in the global South see the removal of state
subsidies in regions like Florida as an important means of expanding market share
(while ecofriendly Americans see the ‘return’ of the Everglades one happy by-product
of ‘big sugar’s’ demise in Florida). From the perspective of Southern sugar farmers, it
is incidental and contingent whether regional or global environmental dis/benefits
follow from free sugar trade with the USA.

Environmental fix 3. A third logic behind nature’s neoliberalisation from the

perspective of capital is that actively degrading hitherto protected or proscribed non-
human phenomena yields profits. Here, the formal and/or real subsumption of nature
is undertaken with little or no regard for public perspectives on how the non-human
world should be treated. In effect, this third environmental fix is the opposite of the
first. Here neoliberal measures promise to intensify the contradictions that Polanyi and
O’Connor make central to their analyses. Only skilfully crafted ensembles of
discursive and institutional action can regulate environmental fixes of this third kind
in the medium-to-long-term. Firms and groups of firms run the risk of serious public
and even state opposition if they are seen to make money with absolutely no regard
for the environment, public health and the like. James McCarthy (2004) has presented
a startling example of this ‘degrading nature for profit’ strategy in his recent
Geoforum essay. He shows how the Canadian Methanex Corporation (CMC)
successfully challenged the state of California’s attempt to ban its production of
MTBE, a suspected carcinogen that had leached into groundwater. Appealing to the
terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement and using the controversial idea
of ‘regulatory takings’ – which is where a firm can sue any body whose regulatory
actions are deemed to have reduced the economic value of the firm’s activities – CMC

25
won the right to pollute or to be compensated for so doing by the Californian
taxpayer. Though McCarthy’s study relates to O’Connor’s ‘conditions of production’,
environmental fix three can apply equally to the forces of production. For instance,
the state-sanctioned private cultivation of genetically modified foods in various parts
of the world – despite much public opposition – is a clear example of the forces of
production (e.g. seeds and the lands into which they are planted) becoming
neoliberalised without proper assessment of the environmental consequences having
occurred. Overall, the third environmental fix is about capitalist firms using neoliberal
measures to extend their right to use nature however it pleases them – a right Western
firms have exercised for decades under the more restrictive conditions of Keynesian-
welfare regimes.

Environmental fix 4. If the three fixes discussed above all relate to the logics of
capital, the fourth relates to the logics of the state. The state cannot avoid taking some
responsibility for the relationships between the capitalist economy, civil society and
the natural environment. This is because the non-human world provides essential
material, moral and aesthetic resources that sustain economic production and social
reproduction. Given its legal and financial power, it is normally incumbent upon the
state to ensure these resources are used appropriately (a point that both Polanyi and
O’Connor stress). This is not the place to rehearse Marxist and neo-Marxist theories
of the state (see Jessop [1990; 2002] for masterful surveys, and Jones and Ward
[2002] for a pithy account albeit in the context of urban policy). Suffice to say that the
state – especially the national state, which remains a key regulatory body in much of
the world, notwithstanding claims about its ‘hollowing out’ – must negotiate two sets
of contradictions. The first are the kinds of contradictions that Marx, Polanyi and
ecoMarxists identify: those arising from the ‘internal’ logic of capitalism and its
‘external’ confrontation with a biophysical world that is only partly subsumable to the
requirements of capital accumulation. The state must successfully manage the
consequences of these contradictions for capital, labour and the wider public while
maintaining its own fiscal stability and its credibility as a governing body. However,
as Offe (1984) argued, the increasingly complexity of state regulatory actions can lead
to contradictions (both material and discursive) emerging within the state apparatus.
In Dear and Clark (1978, 179) words, “the expanded functions of the state are
themselves a source of dysfunction and crisis”. Alternatively, in countries where the

26
national state wishes to facilitate economic development without intervening heavily
in the affairs of business, workers or civil society, it can avoid the sort of
commitments that produce the problems Offe identified. The long term risk, however,
is that the economic and environmental contradictions of capital will be inadequately
managed by firms and civil society groups when left to their own devices. The result
might be serious public unrest, leading to either regime change or system
transformation. The state might thus, despite itself, be drawn inevitably into a more
interventionist role economically, socially and environmentally.
In light of this, we can identify two neoliberal environmental fixes from the
perspective of any state body, but especially the national state. One fix is to address
contradictions internal to the state by off-loading responsibilities to the private sector
and/or civil society groups (the already-mentioned ‘hollowing out’). The other is to
avoid these internal contradictions altogether by adopting a ‘minimal state’ stance in
the first place. Examples of both fixes are relatively easy to find in the geographical
research into nature’s neoliberalisation. The first kind of fix is evident in formerly
Keynesian-welfare state countries like Britain. Once gain, Bakker’s (2003) research is
illustrative. Her book An uncooperative commodity shows how the British state faced
fiscal, rationality and legitimation crises in relation to water and sewerage
management by the late 1980s. Unable to afford the upkeep of a decaying
hydrological infrastructure, Bakker shows that British governments were failing in
their post-1945 promise to offer all citizens a clean and affordable water supply (see
also Bakker 2002 on Spanish water management). Similarly, Prudham’s (2004) study
of the contracting-out of water testing in Ontario illustrates the state strategy of
passing-on the fiscal costs of regulatory functions. Holifield (2004) – to offer a third
example – focuses more on state attempts to normalise neoliberal environmental
policies in civil society. He looks at attempts by the US Environmental Protection
Agency to redefine ‘responsibility’ among those producing, regulating and suffering
hazardous waste risks during the Clinton era. The second kind of fix is more evident
in developing countries with little or no history of state management on the scale
Western countries have experienced it. Tom Perreault (2005, 2006) and Jessica Budds
(2004) both offer the example of privatised water management in Latin America.
They chart the (contested) effort of national governments to avoid taking direct
responsibility for water supply and water treatment. Laila Smith (2004), likewise,
looks at new cost recovery measures in water provision in Cape Town in the context

27
of a post-apartheid state struggling to offer public services to whites, ‘coloureds’ and
blacks. (I should say that, with the exception of Bakker, none of these authors frame
their analysis in terms of a ‘state-environmental fix’. However, I am arguing that their
empirical analyses can plausibly be linked to this theoretical proposition).
In the case of both fixes, the state might make formal efforts to encourage
citizens to take personal or communal responsibility for the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ that
arise from nature’s neoliberalisation. Such efforts can help ensure that the state avoids
or minimises future legitimation crises in the environmental arena.
* * * * *
Together, the four fixes identified above cover a wide range of contexts in which
neoliberal policies on or towards the environment are enacted. These fixes are both
logically and substantively related, even though only some of them apply in any given
case of nature’s neoliberalisation. Taken together, they offer us an abstract map of the
logics behind various attempts by capital and the state to manage the non-human
world (and civil society groups with a direct stake in that world) in neoliberal ways.
These logics show that ‘neoliberalism’ is, in environmental terms, an apparent
paradox: in giving full-reign to capital accumulation it seeks to both protect and
degrade the biophysical world, while manufacturing new natures in cases where that
world is physically fungible. In short, nature’s neoliberalisation is about conservation
and its two antitheses of destroying existing, and creating new, biophysical resources.
It is not reducible to one or other rationale alone.

VI. Conclusion
In this essay I have constructed an evidence-based answer to the question ‘why
neoliberalise nature?’. I have done so by synthesising theoretically ideas and insights
drawn from a significant sub-set of the critical geographical literature on nature’s
neoliberalisation. The answer provided is not the only one conceivable, nor is it
necessarily correct or uncontentious (though I happen to find it both convincing and
useful). However, it does constitute a constructive engagement with a potentially
disparate body of case study research in need of synthesis, lest the whole amount to
much less than the sum of the often excellent parts. In a subsequent essay (Castree,
2007) I will address the second, third and fourth questions posed in the introduction to
this essay. In so doing, I will argue that the barriers to synthesis are currently rather
higher than they appear to be for efforts to construct an answer to the question of

28
logics. This, in large part, is because the question of logics can be answered
meaningfully in fairly abstract theoretical terms once different case studies are parsed
and contextual differences intentionally bracketed. In other words, to the extent that
otherwise different cases of nature’s neoliberalisation share a family resemblance,
they can be seen to express some common rationales. However, the questions of
processes, outcomes and evaluations (as we will see) require ‘thicker’ answers if they
are to convince: that is, ones where abstraction from, and comparison between,
different empirical cases is no mean feat. This raises fundamental issues of specificity
and generality, context and connectivity, that were broached in the introduction to this
essay and that will be explored in the successor essay.

Acknowledgements
This essay and its companion began life as one manuscript. I’m grateful to several people for
identifying the major weaknesses in that earlier piece, most especially three anonymous
reviewers solicited by Karl Zimmerer, all of whose criticisms were acute. Scott Prudham
disagreed constructively, and audiences at York University (Canada), Oxford University and
Rutgers University all helped me think through the knotty issues as best I can. Hearing
panelists’ views on neoliberalism – courtesy of Scott and James McCarthy – at the Chicago
AAG was also most instructive. I thank the British Academy for offering financial support.
As usual, the remaining flaws are all mine and I take full credit for them.

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