Neoliberal Environments: False promises and unnatural consequences

This volume explores the nexus between nature, markets, deregulation and valuation, using theoretically sharp and empirically rich real-world case studies and analyses of actually existing policy from around the world and across a range of resources. In short, it answers the questions: does neoliberalizing nature work and what work does it do? More specifically, this volume provides answers to a series of urgent questions about the effects of neoliberal policies on environmental governance and quality. What are the implications of privatizing public water utilities in terms of equity in service provision, resource conservation and water quality? Do free trade agreements erode the sovereignty of nations and citizens to regulate environmental pollution, and is this power being transferred to corporations? What does the evidence show about the relationship between that marketization and privatization of nature and conservation objectives?

Neoliberal Environments productively engages with all of these questions and more. At the same time, the diverse case studies collectively and decisively challenge the orthodoxies of neoliberal reforms, documenting that the results of such reforms have fallen far short of their ambitions.

Over the past few decades, the governance of nature has taken its most radical turn. The most influential change in economic and social regulation has seen a dramatic reprise of liberal faith in less regulated markets and minimalist states, underpinned by advocacy for extending exclusive property rights to nearly everything imaginable. This complex turn, with its countless yet uncharted implications for environmental quality and governance, is captured by the contentious concept of neoliberalism. Today, neoliberalism provides the context and direction for how humans affect and interact with the non-human world and with one another. But what does this mean for nature?

This volume brings together specific case studies that span more than two decades of experience and evidence linking neoliberalism with concrete environmental changes, politics, and outcomes in diverse, international contexts. It evaluates specific political ecologies and dynamics, and the implications of particular neoliberal reforms and enforcements, while collectively affording new contributors and readers the possibility of thinking comparatively across sectors and geographic contexts. Such specificity and comparative potential serves important analytical functions because it allows the authors and editors to craft stronger, more credible answers to the central questions of what neoliberalism is and what it entails in specific sorts of circumstances.

Nik Heynen is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia.

James McCarthy is Associate Professor of Geography at Penn State University.

Scott Prudham is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Centre for Environment at the University of Toronto.

Paul Robbins is Professor of Geography at the University of Arizona.