Spatializing the Ecological Leviathan: Territorial Strategies and the Production of Regional Natures

This paper explores a dual absence – the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of the state and nature, this paper combines work on the production of nature and state strategy with Lefebvre’s recently translated writings on state space and territory. By focusing on the production of territory (or state space), we explore the interaction of the state and nature in the context of the political management of social and ecological space. We unravel the spatial entanglements of the state and nature through an analysis of the British state’s territorial strategies within the West Midlands region. By considering three key historical periods within the history of the West Mid-lands we reveal how the emergence of the regional space called the West Midlands is a product of the ongoing spatial dialectics of state and nature therein

On averting the tragedy of the commons

One of the enduring facts of the human condition is that the earth's resources are finite and its environment fragile. It is also evident that human behavior is rarely based on an appreciation of these facts. While the outlook may be bleak, so are some of the proposed solutions. Reasonable people have suggested that, to survive, an environmentally enlightened authoritarian government must be adopted. This article suggests that such a solution is unworkable, in part because it fails to consider critical aspects of human nature. A framework is proposed for developing solutions compatible with human capabilities.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48163/1/267_2005_Article_BF01867519.pd

Post-capitalist property

When writing about property and property rights in his imagined post-capitalist society of the future, Marx seemed to envisage ‘individual property’ co-existing with ‘socialized property’ in the means of production. As the social and political consequences of faltering growth and increasing inequality, debt and insecurity gradually manifest themselves, and with automation and artificial intelligence lurking in the wings, the future of capitalism, at least in its current form, looks increasingly uncertain. With this, the question of what property and property rights might look like in the future, in a potentially post-capitalist society, is becoming ever more pertinent. Is the choice simply between private property and markets, and public (state-owned) property and planning? Or can individual and social property in the (same) means of production co-exist, as Marx suggested? This paper explores ways in which they might, through an examination of the Chinese household responsibility system (HRS) and the ‘fuzzy’ and seemingly confusing regime of land ownership that it instituted. It examines the HRS against the backdrop of Marx’s ideas about property and subsequent (post-Marx) theorizing about the legal nature of property in which property has come widely to be conceptualized not as a single, unitary ‘ownership’ right to a thing (or, indeed, as the thing itself) but as a ‘bundle of rights’. The bundle-of-rights idea of property, it suggests, enables us to see not only that ‘individual’ and ‘socialized’ property’ in the (same) means of production might indeed co-exist, but that the range of institutional possibility is far greater than that between capitalism and socialism/communism as traditionally conceived