Illicit economies: customary illegality, moral economies and circulation

This paper is concerned with how to think the illicit and illegal as part of economies. Economic geography has only recently begun to address this challenge but in limited ways. The paper shows the difficulties with those approaches, chief among which is a reassertion of the legal/illegal binary of products and actors that is contested by the more open term illicit economies. We draw on work in cultural economy to move economic geography beyond this impasse by seeing economy as practice. The paper develops a conceptual account of illicit economies connecting moral economy and the opacities produced by logistically complex global trade to highlight the importance of customary illegality in doing business. Customary illegality is the tolerance or practice of illicit activities by largely legal economic actors rather than just a focus on illegal goods or criminal actors. Illicitness is thus shown to be neither a property of goods nor of particular economic actors, but rather a transient quality often linked to circulation. The argument is illustrated empirically through three examples drawn from the food sector. The conclusion makes suggestions for future research that are empirical, methodological and conceptual

Made in China and the new world of secondary resource recovery

On 18 July 2017, the Chinese government informed the World Trade Organization of its intention, by year end, to ban imports of recovered mixed paper, recycled plastic, textiles and vanadium slag. In April 2018, China extended that ban to another 32 categories of used goods and materials, including scrap metal. Another 16 categories are banned from the end of 2020 and new standards applied to others. Suddenly, waste and recycling had catapulted from industries that few cared much about to the top of the agenda of the primary body governing global trade (www.resource-recycling.com – 27 March 2018) and onto the desks of municipalities and governments across the world. Why? Because in 2015 and 2016, the last available official figures show China (often via Hong Kong) imported at least 48.2 and 46.7 million tonnes, respectively, in the customs categories that include the affected wastes (comtrade.un.org)

The relationship between parental education and children's schooling in a time of economic turmoil: The case of East Zimbabwe, 2001 to 2011.

Using data collected from 1998 to 2011 in a general population cohort study in eastern Zimbabwe, we describe education trends and the relationship between parental education and children's schooling during the Zimbabwean economic collapse of the 2000s. During this period, the previously-rising trend in education stalled, with girls suffering disproportionately; however, female enrolment increased as the economy began to recover. Throughout the period, children with more educated parents continued to have better outcomes such that, at the population level, an underlying increase in the proportion of children with more educated parents may have helped to maintain the upwards education trend

Souvenir, Salvage and the Death of Great Naval Ships

This paper examines the social and physical death of naval ships as a form of military material culture. It draws on ethnographic research with veteran’s associations in the UK and US, and in a UK ship breaking yard, to explore the relationship of a naval ship’s social and physical death to memorialisation, souvenir manufacture and souvenir salvage. A naval ship’s social death is argued to animate a distributed community of ex-naval personnel, for whom it is normative to memorialise ‘their ship’, and to materialise their sociality, and residue military masculinities, through a range of manufactured souvenirs worn in everyday life. The social death of naval ships has, until recently, been largely disconnected from the sites of their physical death, or destruction, but the advent of ethical disposal policies in the UK has brought about the geographical compression of the two. The paper charts three phases of ex-naval personnel’s engagement with the destruction of ‘their ship’: pilgrimage, souvenir salvage and collective memorialisation. We argue that proximate visualised destruction makes ex-naval personnel witnesses to an object death. More generally, the paper highlights that resource recovery regimes need to be thought not through recycling and the equivalence of objects as materials, but through reincarnation. As we show, the reincarnation of ‘great things’ does not always become them

Political markets: recycling, economization and marketization

This paper considers recycling as an economic activity, locating it in debates about economization, marketization and performativity. It argues that recycling is a reflexive intervention in economic activity which extends the boundaries of markets, by internalizing objects formerly externalized as wastes and by attending to the temporal properties of materials. It differentiates between activities based on manufacturing recycled products and the activities of materials recovery linked to commodity markets in secondary materials. By taking the in vivo economic experiment resulting from the UK's Ship Recycling Strategy as its empirical focus, the paper demonstrates how recycling connects to wider debates about experimentation and the constitution of markets, and shows the importance of assaying and assay devices as market devices to the economization of recycling. It further shows that, in materials recovery, measurement is estimation and things are hard to pacify. This makes recycling difficult to stabilize as an economic activity. The consequences are considerable: notably, the possibility of economic failure can threaten to contaminate stabilized (or ‘cold’) forms of politics. The importance of contracts as a means to securing politicized markets in secondary materials recovery is indicated

The Future of Knowledge Sharing in a Digital Age: Exploring Impacts and Policy Implications for Development

We live in a Digital Age that gives us instant access to information at greater and greater volumes. The rapid growth of digital content and tools is already changing how we create, consume and distribute knowledge. Even though globally participation in the Digital Age remains uneven, more and more people are accessing and contributing digital content every day. Over the next 15 years, developing countries are likely to experience sweeping changes in how states and societies engage with knowledge. These changes hold the potential to improve people’s lives by making information more available, increasing avenues for political and economic engagement, and making government more transparent and responsive. But they also carry dangers of a growing knowledge divide influenced by technology access, threats to privacy, and the potential loss of diversity of knowledge. Our research sets out with a 15-year horizon to look at the possible ways in which digital technologies might contribute to or damage development agendas, and how development practitioners and policymakers might best respond.UK Department for International Developmen

Knowledge Sharing and Development in a Digital Age

Digital technologies are reaching ever further into remote parts of the world, changing how people access, use, and create information and knowledge. These changes may improve people’s lives by making information more available, increasing avenues for political and economic engagement, and making governments more transparent and responsive. However, they also carry dangers of growing digital divides, threats to privacy, and the potential loss of diversity of knowledge. Governments, development agencies and civil society organisations need to work together to make knowledge more inclusive and open. This calls for investment in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure, information professionals, and search and discovery tools.UK Department for International Developmen

Doing the ‘Dirty Work’ of the Green Economy: resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play