Environment and Planning A 2002, volume 34, pages 759 ^ 766

DOI:10.1068/a34199

Guest editorial

Governing nature: the reregulation of resource access, production, and consumption

Governance, institutions, and resource extraction

Recent developments in political economy have highlighted the institutional nature of

economic processes. Researchers using urban regime theory, for example, have
grappled with the role of political coalitions in governing the form and rate of urban
growth. Working at a different analytical and spatial scale, regulationists have called
attention to the role of extra-economic processes in providing coherence to national
and regional economies. These two literatures contain significant differences and
should not necessarily be regarded as commensurate (see various contributions in
Lauria, 1997). Yet both are representative of an `institutional turn' within economic
geography that has encouraged the revival of `new regionalist' analyses of the relationships between institutional capacities, new forms of governance, and regional economic
development (see, inter alia Amin, 1999; Amin and Thrift, 1995; Jonas, 1996; MacLeod,
1999; MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999a; 1999b; Wood and Valler, 2001). A principal
contribution of this work is its recognition of the contested yet coherent nature of
regional economies and the ways in which economic processes are embedded within,
and mediated through, the specific practices and institutional frameworks of region and
place. At the same time, there is growing appreciation of the multiscalar dimensions
of economic transformation, the different territorial outcomes of state restructuring,
and the geographically differentiated process of reregulation in an era otherwise seen as
dominated by spatially homogenizing forces of globalization, internationalization, and
hypermobility (see Brenner, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2000).
For the most part this work has focused on urban and regional systems and has
paid relatively little attention to how political-economic processes are worked out in
the `ghost acreages' of the urban hinterlands (see, however, Antipode 1998). Moreover,
this work has tended to focus on the governance and reregulation of urban and
economic spaces to the neglect of the environmental and resource implications of
new forms of governance and social reregulation (but see Gibbs and Jonas, 2000). In
short, the focus has been more on Megalopolis than the Empty Quarter, more on
economy than environment. Yet, like the urban economy, the provisioning of urban
areas with natural resources is also a highly contested and contingent process. The
everyday politics of water (for example, groundwater pumping in the Ogallala), minerals
(oil field development in the Arctic), and forestry (closure of some US National Forests
to timber extraction) suggest that there are many potential axes of contestation in
primary commodity industries and that, absent some form of coordination, these
can challenge established geographies of resource production and consumption.
Frequently these struggles are expressed through conflicts over resource access, the
sociospatial distribution of resource rents among stakeholders, differential time
horizons in appraising the value of a resource, and the cultural significance attributed to different aspects of nature. Yet the most striking thing about resource
production and consumption is that despite this underlying tendency towards
conflict, resource extraction activities are rendered reasonably coherent for significant periods of time (Bridge, 2000; Bridge and McManus, 2000). This is because
potential conflicts are often negotiated through historically and geographically
specific sociopolitical struggles that become codified as the institutions and social

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practices within which resource extraction activities are embedded. By defining what
is economically, technologically, and politically possible at particular moments,
such institutions can lend coherence and stability to efforts to extract, process,
market, and consume natural resources. It is through these institutions, then, that
the histories (rates and trajectories) and geographies (sociospatial patterns) of
resource production and consumption are governed.
Our contention is that institutional theories of political economy (namely regulationist approaches and theories of governance) can be useful for understanding recent
shifts in the form and scale of governance mechanisms for natural resource production
and consumption. This theme issue brings together six papers to critically explore this
contention, first presented as part of a series of three sessions organized on the theme
``Natural Spaces? Governing Spaces of Nature in the New Economy'' at the 2000
Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Pittsburgh.(1) The
authors address the dynamic and evolving relationship between the new economy,
resource extraction, and the environment, through detailed examinations of the
governance and regulation of specific commodities (water, minerals, forestry, and
agriculture). Individual contributions explore, among other issues, the various ways
in which nature is produced and consumed in primary commodity industries, new
strategies and relations of resource production and consumption, emerging forms
and styles of governance, the reregulation of nature and resource extraction, and
political struggles around resource and environmental issues. Taken together, the
papers also demonstrate the breadth and depth of new theoretical approaches within
the economy ^ environment interface of human geography.
Rescaling governance: old industries in the new economy

In using the term `new economy', we do not refer to innovation-driven technological

shifts or to the emergence of a paradigmatic economic sector, but to a more comprehensive set of changes in the relationship between `economic' and `noneconomic' actors
within industrialized societies. The paradigmatic version of this shift suggests it is
composed of two related processes: economic liberalization or marketization, involving
a redefinition of the state's role away from direct resource allocation towards facilitation of market mechanisms for distributing resources; and an associated reworking
of established relationships between economic actors, the state, and civil society.
A common theoretical thread running through the papers, then, is the dialectical
process of deregulation ^ reregulation associated with the `new economy'. Since this
reworking of governance regimes frequently involves shifts in their spatial scale, papers
are concerned to examine how the new economy might be rescaling existing spaces of
governance. As Swyngedouw (2000, page 68) postulates:
``the production of space through the perpetual reworking of the geographies of
capital circulation and accumulation junks existing spatial configurations and
scales of governance, and produces new ones in the process ... . This deconstruction
and reconstruction of spatial scales which are often taken for granted as almost
`natural' units for social existence (much of which is perpetuated in some of the
geographical literature which often unproblematically singles out particular scalar
forms as the pivotal terrain for analysis) reshuffles social power relationships in
important ways.
(1) Our

thanks to Roger Keil, Matthew Gandy, and Terry Marsden who served as formal discussants
in the three sessions at the Pittsburgh meeting and whose commentaries on the papers contributed
significantly to the quality of the discussion. We would also like to thank the Economic Geography
and Political Geography Speciality Groups of the Association of American Geographers for
sponsoring the sessions.

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The six papers explore this `new economy' theme by demonstrating how it is
reworking the institutions governing resource access, production, and consumption
within mature, primary commodity industries. The choice of mature, primary industries as an entry point for examining the social regulation of nature within the new
economy is not as quixotic as it may appear. First, the direct appropriation of natural
processes in each of these sectors (as raw material, waste sink, or as in agriculture
the production process itself) renders the metabolism of nature and economy very
visible, and ensures the strategic significance of how resource access and environmental impacts are socially regulated. And, second, many primary sector industries
have traditionally reserved a large role for the state (for example, in resource pricing,
allocation, and development) that is being revised in the new economy. In some
cases (notably water and electricity) basic industries have become the new frontier
for neoliberal economic policy. The papers by Haughton and Bakker on privatization
and market formation in former state-owned and administered water utilities describe
this process. A quieter but no less significant process is seen in the rollback of state
subsidies for productive agricultural uses of land in Western Europe (see the paper by
Marsden et al), while a contradictory process can be found in the administrative
withdrawal of state lands from mining and forestry operations in North America (see
the papers by McManus and Krueger). Thus primary industries such as mining,
forestry, agriculture, and water have seen extensive organizational and institutional
change in recent years as a result of two intersecting trends: ideologically driven efforts
at neoliberal reform; and sustained social opposition to the practices of nature appropriation that lie at the core of these primary activities, along with the progressive
codification of concepts of environmental protection and sustainable development.
Collectively the papers demonstrate that the articulation of neoliberal and environmental reforms has been very uneven. The dialectic of deregulation ^ reregulation is
contingent on political struggle and plays out differently between sectors, across geographical contexts, and at different spatial scales. Indeed, market liberalization is not as
hegemonic as first appears. The papers on water market formation by Haughton and
Bakker, for example, indicate that the reregulation of natural resources takes place in
nationally specific ways even in the context of an ostensibly global trend towards
marketization. Similarly the papers by Krueger and Emel, which address the emergence
of environmental and human-rights opposition to gold mining activities in Montana
and West Papua/Irian Jaya respectively, demonstrate how alternative or counterhegemonic political discourses have shaped the form and spatial scale of struggles
over resource production.
Downsizing theory: producing governance

A primary challenge in adopting a theoretically informed approach to the political

economy of nature-based industries is to find a way of transposing the grand abstractions
of political-economic accounts into the specific events that shape the environmental
histories of particular regions: in other words, to examine ``structures, mechanisms
and events that actually constitute these processes in different places'' (MacLeod and
Goodwin, 1999, page 415). More specifically, the challenge is to show how differences
within the emerging regulatory landscapes of resource provision are constructed through
specific geographies of struggle. That is, how institutions and governance structures are
fashioned through the concrete politics of differentially constrained agents in specific
places. Such a `downsizing' of theory requires the development of an intermediary
language that can capture the messiness and contingency of everyday life while still
maintaining the coherence provided by a broader theoretical frame (see Bridge and
McManus, 2000).

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Guest editorial

Papers in this issue grapple with this challenge and respond to it in different ways.
In a discussion of the politics of timber extraction in New South Wales and British
Columbia, McManus adopts a broad regulationist approach that enables him to
separate out the technological and organizational components of timber extraction
from the institutions that shape processes of accumulation and within which these
components are embedded. He deploys regulationist concepts of regime of accumulation and mode of social regulation to explain the survival of the forestry industry in
these two different locales since the mid-1990s, despite the activities of well-organized,
environmentally based oppositional movements. On their own, however, regulationist
concepts prove insufficiently specific to capture the dynamic political processes taking
place in British Columbia or New South Wales (notably the emergence of center-left,
light-green political parties). To remedy this analytical deficit, McManus introduces
neopluralist concepts of political power as an intermediary between the abstraction
of the regulation approach and the detail of everyday environmental politics in British
Columbia and New South Wales. In this respect, McManus activates regulationist
concepts to investigate the concrete institutions and politics of local resource governance in a manner that resonates with neo-Gramscian approaches to the regulation
of urban political regimes (see Lauria, 1997). He suggests that a process of political
adjustment has taken place whereby the institutional politics and management
practices of timber extraction (which constitute the mode of social regulation) have
changed substantially to reflect and co-opt the language of sustainable development.
At the same time, however, the underlying economic and technological components
of forestry production (the accumulation system) have changed relatively little. This
should not be surprising, he argues, because neopluralist political strategies predicated on a model of distributed power through consultation with stakeholders and
negotiated outcomesface political constraints that ultimately limit their ability to
deliver socially or environmentally progressive outcomes.
A pluralist account of the political process is only one response to the question of
how to introduce agency and contingency into broadly regulationist or regime-based
accounts. Other papers look beyond formal politics and turn instead to the turbulent
terrain of social activism and the increasingly significant political space occupied by
nongovernmental organizations. In a case study of the Canyon Resources Company
and its decision to suspend its efforts to gain a permit to mine an area near Lincoln,
Montana, Krueger focuses on the mine permitting process as a point of mediation
between a regime of accumulation and regulatory politics. Reviewing the recent history
of mine permitting in the state, he asks how a regulatory system that was set up
explicitly to support resource extraction came to represent a major obstacle to the
implementation of accumulation strategies in the mining industry. By addressing
the cultural politics surrounding this piece of `real regulation', Krueger shows how
different actors discursively construct and materially enact core conceptssuch as
nature, progress, and developmentwithin existing laws, in ways that produce very
different outcomes for the mining industry over time. This provocative argument
suggests that regulation (at least in this case) was achieved less through the juridicopolitical structures per se, than through the ``landscape of politics, ideas, and cultural
reference points'' through which legislation is performed as cultural practice.
Whereas Krueger documents the history of environmental politics surrounding
mining in one specific locale, Emel explores recent social activism around international mining investments in the gold industry. Using the example of Freeport
McMoran's investment in West Papua/Irian Jaya, she examines the potential of activist
coalitions to harness investor/financier concerns in order to `green' gold production.
This account grapples with the central question of how, and at what spatial scale,

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`governance' gets produced from the diverse and often diffuse practices of individuals
and institutions. She explores whether recent environmental and human-rights-based
activism targeted at the financiers of mining projects represents an emergent governance mechanism able to produce and sustain qualitatively different (that is, more
sustainable) socio-environmental outcomes. She suggests that the forging by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of knowledge-sharing strategies with finance
capital might represent an alternative mechanismand geographical scaleof governance. Emel also uses her empirical study of financial disciplining strategies to forge a
link to ecological modernization theory. Specifically, she tackles a central tenet of
ecological modernization theory, that capitalist liberal democracy is self-repairing in
that it possesses the institutional capacity to respond to environmental degradation by
reducing its impact on the environment. She asks, in effect, whether NGO activism
represents a `more forceful ecological viewpoint' (Buttel, 2000) that has sufficient
leverage to produce socio-ecological outcomes that are quite different from those
traditionally experienced by mining communities. Her conclusions suggest scepticism
about the extent to which new institutional shifts translate into qualitative improvements in social or environmental parameters. Thus her paper critiques ecological
modernization theory for its reformist agenda and shallow political economy in which
the ``angst and conflict of previous decades (and centuries) has disappeared''.
Not all the authors choose to focus on environmental politics as a way of bridging
the gap between theoretical framework and place-specific processes. An alternative is
to demonstrate how the form and `success' of governance mechanisms is geographically
and historically variable. Marsden et al, for example, point to the contingency of socioenvironmental outcomes in the new economy by addressing the geographically uneven
nature of regulatory transition within Welsh agriculture. The authors assert that rural
spaces in England and Wales now exhibit a generalized crisis (expressed in, for example,
the overproduction of low-quality products, habitat loss, social problems, rising input
costs and falling prices) as a result of the contradictions inherent to an agro-industrial
model of rural production. They discuss the diversity of ways in which farmers are
responding to this crisis, suggesting that, through strategies of adaptation, farmers are
beginning to construct an agrarian economy in which the social and environmental
roles of agricultural practices are much more significant. The normative, policyengaged approach that the authors adopt towards this rural development dynamic
stands in contrast to the other papers. Yet in their case studiesof organic milk
production, direct retailing (farmers' markets), habitat management schemes, and
selective retreats from undifferentiated commodity production to servicing niche
markets for quality productsthe authors argue that successful environmental and
social outcomes are highly contingent on the coupling of these agent-initiated strategies
with an appropriate institutional context.
Bakker and Haughton address the contested processes surrounding the construction
of water markets, at contrasting spatial scales. Haughton discusses the international
diffusion of markets in water and sanitation services through the activities of international bodies such as the World Bank. His paper draws attention to the upscaling of
business practices by several water firms as they embark on foreign investment in water
infrastructure and services in the global South. Rather than interpret this as an
unproblematic process of global diffusion, however, Haughton emphasizes the heterogeneity of outcomes in the water sector in the face of an ideological predilection for
markets. He therefore points to the politics of water and the way that pressure to open
up water systems to private involvement is interpreted differently in different national
contexts. The paper by Bakker also addresses organizational and spatial restructuring
of water provision, but within the boundaries of a single nation-state. Building on

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earlier work on UK water privatization, Bakker's paper examines an on-going shift

from public to private sector provision of water services in post-Francoist Spain. Her
objective in elaborating this process of mercantilizacion is to develop what she terms a
political ^ ecological ^ economic understanding of water privatization. Such a grounded
understanding enables one to see now the reregulation of natural resource provision
in this case the construction of water markets is enabled and constrained not only
by the sociopolitical relations of water but also by its material, biophysical attributes
(as, for example, these attributes influence the nature of property institutions in water).
Collectively these six papers demonstrate how the reregulation of natural
resource regimes involves multiple levels of governance, and that the locus and scale
of governance that becomes concretized is contingent on political struggle. They
suggest, therefore, that no single form or scale of territoriality necessarily accompanies reregulation. The papers also demonstrate the value of moving beyond
generalized discussions of `reregulating nature' and, instead, grappling with the
sociopolitical and biophysical heterogeneity of natural resource production and
consumption. This engagement between theory and diverse concrete processes needs
to be both reflexive and iterative. That is, applications of theory to understand
resource reregulation should not only serve to illustrate how specific natures are
caught up in restructuring, but also force a critical evaluation of the analytical
leverage provided by the theoretical frame itself. Several of the papers included
here attempt to do this by using their findings to push forward the debate over
regulation and governance. Such tacking back and forth between theory and specific
circumstances is particularly necessary when working in the context of primary
industries, as many of geography's theories of political economy were developed
from studies of paradigmatic industries in other sectors.
Beyond resource geographies: towards a critical industrial ecology(2)

What of the wider relevance of these papers? We suggest that an institutional political
economy approach to resource questions has the potential to revive that part of the
discipline currently known as `resource geography'. Conventional resource geographies,
which focus on questions of natural resource and environmental management, replicate a long history of instrumental resource appraisal that has come to be associated
with a peculiarly atavistic economic geography. There are, of course, several notable
heterodox approaches that address the role of ideology, institutions, and social practice
in shaping resource outcomes and from which one can draw (examples include Proctor
and Pincetl, 1996; Roberts and Emel, 1992; Worster, 1982). Yet most contemporary work
identifying itself as resource geography plays insufficient attention to the power geographies in and through which resource production and consumption take place. Much
conventional resource geography suffers, therefore, from having at its disposal an
underpowered (or more correctly, underutilized) set of theoretical tools with which to
investigate what are socially pressingas well as conceptually interestingquestions
about the relationship between economic restructuring, resource extraction, and civil
society.
In calling for a critical industrial ecology we make no claims towards new theory.
Quite the contrary in fact, because our interest in putting together the initial paper
sessions from which this theme issue derives was to explore the analytical leverage
provided by existing theories on pressing resource questions. Our substantially more
modest claim is that the approach adopted in these six papers an institutional
political economy that is attentive to the socially constructed yet biophysical
character of nature offers a compelling framework for analysing and explaining
(2) We

would like to acknowledge and thank Jody Emel for suggesting this term.

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765

recent shifts in the institutions of resource production and consumption. Our reading
of the papers suggests four primary reasons for making this claim. First, the authors
recognize the socially embedded character of the institutions that govern resource
allocation and development. What this means in practice is that institutions like
law, property, and markets neither predate nor contain politics but are, instead,
produced through political processes that are geographically uneven in form and
scale. Second, each paper critically adopts (and in some cases extends) a constructivist perspective towards `nature' and `environment', but simultaneously insists on
nature's materiality and biophysical presence. This enables them to move beyond
mechanistic metaphors in which nature is simply `transformed' by economic activity.
It opens up a space for acknowledging the multiple and contested processes through
which knowledges about nature are generated and through which nature is actively
produced as both material artefact and discursive construct.
Third, each paper introduces a sense of environmental history into the analysis
such that current institutions of resource production emerge from previous ways of
organizing socio-ecological relations. This is more provocative than it might at first
appear, because it suggests that regime shifts may arise out of the tensions and
contradictions inherent to earlier modes of organizing and regulating activity. Just
as environmental projects are always social projects (because they require particular
sets of social relations for their realization), so too do social projects such as
resource-led policies of regional development entail a reconfiguration of local
ecologies. Prevailing socio-ecological conditions in extractive regions clearcut
forests, depleted soils, contaminated aquifers can be understood, therefore, not
only as an (unintended yet logical) outcome of the institutional arrangements necessary to implement a social project. Where they become overtly contradictory and
incapable of being contained by existing governance mechanisms, they may also be
the trigger for a new round of institutional experimentation (that is, reregulation).
Finally, this collection of papers broadens our collective understanding of the geographies of the new economy through their concretized evaluation of the significance
of contemporary restructuring and reregulation in the primary sector. It not only
demonstrates the continued socio-ecological significance of resource provision activities such as forestry, agriculture, and mining, but also contextualizes the concepts of
regimes, regulation, and governance by grounding them in material processes and
outcomes.
Gavin Bridge, Andrew E G Jonas
Acknowledgements. We would like to thank Graham Haughton, Eric Sheppard, and Andrew
Wood for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. As guest editors of this theme
issue, we would also like to extend our thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who read and
commented on this collection of papers in its entirety. Gavin Bridge would like to acknowledge
the support of the US National Science Foundation (Grant No. SBR-9874837) for funding his
research on mineral investment regimes and local environmental change. Andy Jonas would like
to acknowledge the support of the US National Science Foundation (Grant No. SBR-9512033)
and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant No. R000237997) in funding his
research on local environmental policy and urban governance. The usual disclaimers apply.
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2002 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain