This volume in the celebrated Critical Introductions to Geography series introduces readers to the vibrant discipline of economic geography. The authors provide an original definition of the discipline, and they make a strong case for its vital importance in understanding the dynamic interconnections, movements, and emerging trends shaping our globalized world.
Economic Geography addresses the key theories and methods that form the basis of the discipline, and describes its “communities of practice” and relations to related fields including economics and sociology. Numerous illustrative examples explore how economic geographers examine the world and how and why the discipline takes the forms it does, demonstrating the critical value of economic geography to making sense of globalization, uneven development, money and finance, urbanization, environmental change, and industrial and technological transformation.
Engaging and thought-provoking, Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction is the ideal resource for students studying across a range of subject areas, as well as the general reader with an interest in world affairs and economics.
Oil pulses through our daily lives. It is the plastic we touch, the food we eat, and the way we move. Oil politics in the twentieth century was about the management of abundance, state power, and market growth. The legacy of this age of plenty includes declining conventional oil reserves, volatile prices, climate change, and enduring poverty in many oil-rich countries. The politics of oil are now at a turning point, and its future will not be like its past.
In this in-depth primer to one of the world’s most significant industries, authors Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon take a fresh look at the contemporary political economy of oil. Going beyond simple assertions of peak oil and an oil curse, they point to an industry reordered by global shifts in demand toward Asia, growing reliance on unconventional reserves, international commitments to reduce carbon emissions, a growing campaign for fossil fuel divestment, and violent political struggles in many producer states.
As a new geopolitics of oil emerges, the need for effective global oil governance becomes imperative. Highlighting the growing influence of civil society and attentive to the efforts of firms and states to craft new institutions, this fully updated second edition identifies the challenges and opportunities to curtail price volatility, curb demand and the growth of dirty oil, decarbonize energy systems, and improve governance in oil-producing countries.
Reveals the complexities and challenges involved in designing and managing globalized employment systems
The first sustained investigation of the workings of the global sourcing industry, its business practices, its market dynamics, its technologies, and its politics
An interdisciplinary investigation that will appeal to researchers and students in economic geography, economic sociology, business and management, labour studies, and globalization studies
Winner of the 2018 James M. Blaut Award in recognition of innovative scholarship in cultural and political ecology!
Enterprising Nature explores the rise of economic rationality in global biodiversity law, policy and science. To view Jessica’s animation based on the book’s themes please visit http://www.bioeconomies.org/enterprising-nature/
Examines disciplinary apparatuses, ecological-economic methodologies, computer models, business alliances, and regulatory conditions creating the conditions in which nature can be produced as enterprising
Relates lively, firsthand accounts of global processes at work drawn from multi-site research in Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; and Nagoya, Japan
Assesses the scientific, technical, geopolitical, economic, and ethical challenges found in attempts to ‘enterprise nature’
Investigates the implications of this ‘will to enterprise’ for environmental politics and policy
Geopolitics and Expertise is an in-depth exploration of how expert knowledge is created and exercised in the external relations machinery of the European Union.
Provides a rare, full-length work on transnational diplomatic practice
Based on a rigorous and empirical study, involving over 100 interviews with policy professionals over seven years
Focuses on the qualitative and contextual, rather than the quantitative and uniform
Moves beyond traditional political science to blend human geography, international relations, anthropology, and sociology
Water supply privatization was emblematic of the neoliberal turn in development policy in the 1990s. Proponents argued that the private sector could provide better services at lower costs than governments; opponents questioned the risks involved in delegating control over a life-sustaining resource to for-profit companies. Private-sector activity was most concentrated—and contested—in large cities in developing countries, where the widespread lack of access to networked water supplies was characterized as a global crisis.
In Privatizing Water, Karen Bakker focuses on three questions: Why did privatization emerge as a preferred alternative for managing urban water supply? Can privatization fulfill its proponents’ expectations, particularly with respect to water supply to the urban poor? And, given the apparent shortcomings of both privatization and conventional approaches to government provision, what are the alternatives?
In answering these questions, Bakker engages with broader debates over the role of the private sector in development, the role of urban communities in the provision of “public” services, and the governance of public goods. She introduces the concept of “governance failure” as a means of exploring the limitations facing both private companies and governments. Critically examining a range of issues—including the transnational struggle over the human right to water, the “commons” as a water-supply-management strategy, and the environmental dimensions of water privatization—Privatizing Water is a balanced exploration of a critical issue that affects billions of people around the world.
By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange.
This pairing enables personal modes of writing and engagement with globalization debates and forges a definition of justice keyed to the specificity of time, place, and feeling.
Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the contributors participate in a long-standing feminist tradition of upending spatial hierarchies and making theory out of the practices of everyday life.
Focusing on key resources — oil, diamonds, and timber — he argues that resources and wars are linked in three main ways. First, resource revenues finance belligerents, a trend that has become all the more conspicuous since the withdrawal of Cold War foreign sponsorship in the late 1980s. Second, resource exploitation generates conflict. As global demand for raw materials has sharply increased, competition over critical resources such as oil has resulted in a flurry of ‘resource conflicts’, from local community struggles against mining multinationals to regional and international tensions. Third, economic shocks and poor governance sharply increase the risk of war (the ‘resource curse’).
While today’s resource boom is a major economic opportunity for resource rich but otherwise poor countries, reliance on resource exports often leads to sharp and unexpected economic downturns. Not all resources are the same, however, and effective responses are at hand. Sanctions, military interventions and wealth sharing have helped bring an end to conflicts, yet only deeper domestic and international reforms in resource governance can stop the plunder of Africa and Asia.
How temporary migration programs haunt the lives of families long after they have reunited
In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families, documenting the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when reuniting with their mothers in Vancouver.
Gentrification remains a subject of heated debate in the public realm as well as scholarly and policy circles.
This Reader brings together the classic writings and contemporary literature that has helped to define the field, changed the direction of how it is studied and illustrated the points of conflict and consensus that are distinctive of gentrification research.
Covering everything from the theories of gentrification through to analysis of state-led policies and community resistance to those polices, this is an unparalleled collection of influential writings on a contentious contemporary issue.
With insightful commentary from the editors, who are themselves internationally renowned experts in the field, this is essential reading for students of urban planning, geography, urban studies, sociology and housing studies.
