Ports increasingly shape metropolitan development, yet governments often struggle to coordinate land use, infrastructure, and investment decisions related to port expansion. Fragmented authority and overlapping mandates limit planning authorities’ ability to coordinate development and align port expansion with supporting transport and industrial systems. Although strategic spatial planning has been promoted as a way of working within fragmented environments, its influence remains contingent on governance arrangements. Less is known about the roles strategic spatial planning perform in port-led metropolitan development across contexts. This study explains how different governance arrangements condition the roles of strategic spatial planning in port-led metropolitan development. Drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and forum observation, we compare the Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA) and the Rebana Metropolitan Area (Rebana) in Indonesia across 4 dimensions: institutional coordination, infrastructure and connectivity alignment, land-market governance, and the relationship between strategic visions and implementation. The comparison reveals two forms of incomplete metropolitan governance: “ governance without integration ” in JMA and “ integration without governance ” in Rebana. The study shows that strategic spatial planning mainly shapes port-led metropolitan development through facilitation and legitimation unless governance arrangements provide binding capacity over land use and infrastructure investment.
Social scientists have long debated the merits of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), often asking whether their results are valid or the approach is appropriate. This article instead treats RCTs as interventions that become entangled with the projects they study. To achieve internally valid results, experimenters impose strict research protocols onto implementers, reshaping project implementation and, under certain conditions, constraining projects’ performance. Drawing on science and technology studies, this case study of five large-scale farmer-training projects across the Global South shows how random assignment displaced implementers’ purposive targeting and segregation of the treatment and control groups over space and time interfered with implementation. The result was the production of hybrid experiment–project assemblages whose findings were technically valid but distorted. Where experimenters’ rules ruled, implementers’ expertise was constrained and impacts failed to materialize. The article argues that such dynamics have implications for how development interventions are judged and financed, advancing evaluation risk as a political-economic concern distinct from reactivity or research ethics.
Regional clusters facilitate social interaction and learning across firms. Here, we assess how social networks of firms influence their competitiveness in relation to cluster- and firm-characteristics. Using survey and administrative data, we simulate co-worker networks that, following the mobility of employees, generate links across companies. Analyzing Sweden’s ICT firms over 20 years, we find that inter-firm co-worker ties, even across companies not directly linked by mobility, predict firm performance. We document that small firms benefit more from inter-regional links and from having access to diverse networks, while local links assist firms to accumulate local knowledge in growing regional clusters.
Agglomeration is typically used to explain the benefits of central business districts (CBDs) in large urban areas, but the pandemic has called into question the primacy of CBDs. Previous studies have relied on observational data that uses past behaviour as a predictor of future behaviour. Instead, we conducted a stated preference experiment with 789 businesses to generate robust predictions about the likely future behaviour of firms. Controlling for differences between our sample and the target population in terms of firm size, sector, revenue, and location, we estimate that the average compensating rent differentials for CBD locations are positive and estimated to be $875 per sqm per annum, higher than current market rent differentials in most Australian urban areas. We take this to mean that a substantial proportion of firms strongly value CBD locations and are willing to pay a significantly large premium for the same. Our findings indicate that the changes that were observed in relation to firm location preferences during the pandemic, sometimes characterised as the “donut effect,” are unlikely to be sustained in the long term as the underlying demand for commercial real estate in CBD locations is still strong.
This commentary engages with Andy Pike’s recent book, Financialization and Local Statecraft. In it, we raise questions about the role of localism in the UK, the status of taxation and monetary policy, and the crisis of governance that stems from the fiscal landscape Pike lays out in his book. Finally, we close by addressing a question that guides Pike’s own work: “Is it national rather than local government that has taken the local public service gamble?”
Climate politics are increasingly conducted through the medium of climate finance. Climate finance in all its guises is seen to be an enabler of deals, targets and commitments vital to advancing efforts to tackle global heating as well as the means to compensate for loss and damage associated with climate change. Critical questions about who and what the finance is for and whether indeed lack of finance (as opposed to its misallocation) is the main barrier to more ambitious action are often overlooked. Through an engagement with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber’s book Climate Finance , this essay foregrounds questions of power, regulation and distribution since the reason the international community has failed to bend the emissions curve has less to do with the lack of finance running through the veins of the global economy and more its misallocation to fossil fuelled extractivist ventures in a highly unequal global economy.
Canada Lands Company is arguably the least known yet most consequential actor at the center of Canadian public land redevelopment, privatization, and commercialization. A state owned enterprise incorporated in 1956 that hit the headlines in 2023 when tasked with addressing a national housing supply shortage by selling surplus government land, Canada Lands led a lively existence across what is often framed as dormant years for the Company. Uncovering the otherwise hidden ideas and practices of Canada Lands Company, this paper engages the methodological approach of Mela D & aacute;vila-Freire, art curator and archival scholar, who argues for "reading against the archive." Translating this method into a geographical political economy of ideation, conjuncture, and context, the paper excavates decades of audited annual reports, Hansard parliamentary proceedings, and Public Accounts documents, identifying how the archives enshrine the Company's successes, erase its scandals, and enforce occlusive silences over time and across lucrative real estate markets such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.
This paper brings a renewed focus on value struggles to foundational economy research through a study of UK marketplaces. The Foundational Economy (FE) refers to the essential goods and services that support everyday life - food, housing, health care, education, transport and utilities. The marketplace, where people meet to buy and sell fresh food and other household products, was central to the municipal-led first phase of foundational economy investment in 19th-century Europe, but since been neglected, marginalised and transformed into a commercial and real estate asset. This paper highlights the importance of struggles over value to the shifting position of the marketplace in relation to the foundational and the competitive, tradeable economy. It draws on extensive multi-method research including the first quantitative survey of marketplaces' foundational roles at three case study markets. We use this data to trace successive phases of valorisation, devalorisation and revalorisation of the marketplace, examining how coalitions and alliances mobilise specific tools, models and metrics to valorise marketplaces in different economic zones. We find that these processes are contested and open to change, encountering specific place-based alternative value regimes valorising marketplaces' foundational provisioning and social roles. The paper demonstrates the potential of the marketplace and value struggles as a strategic site for place-based FE research, proposing its further development in conversation with urban movement research.
This article advances methodological debates on elite interviewing in economic geography by foregrounding context not as a set of ex ante conditions encountered in the field, but as an active and constitutive force that continuously shapes conduct throughout the interview process. Drawing on the authors’ fieldwork in China and Brazil, we show how context shapes the practices and outcomes of elite interviewing. The article contributes by recasting elite interviews as relational practices that must procedurally adapt to sociopolitical and cultural settings, and it further brings visibility to the recent debates on decentralizing theory-building from Anglo-American countries.
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, the U.S. Congress appropriated nearly $50 billion for Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) to stabilize tenant housing, while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued temporary protections against eviction. Real estate industry groups responded by mounting an aggressive legal campaign to overturn the CDC's eviction protections-a campaign that succeeded when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the order less than a year after its issuance. By that point, however, less than $8 billion-approximately 17%-of the ERA funds had been disbursed. This paper develops a structural explanation for this pattern of collective property-owner behavior: the rapid mobilization to restore eviction authority alongside comparatively limited effort to access unprecedented public compensation. Drawing on Michal Kalecki's analysis of capitalist opposition to full employment policy, the paper argues that landlords, like employers, operate within a hierarchy of class priorities in which profit-making is contingent on, and when the two come into tension, subordinate to, the preservation of mechanisms of control. Engaging the Black radical tradition and Black geographies, the analysis situates this prioritization of control within racialized systems of political domination and their spatial organization through land, housing, displacement, and mobility. Through illustrative analyses of U.S. public housing policy and the COVID-era ERA response, the paper shows how eviction-based rental systems operate as economic traps that foreclose durable exits from market dependence. The paper thus offers an explanation for persistent landlord resistance to what it terms "full housing" policy-the housing analogue to full employment-and argues that housing justice requires confronting, rather than accommodating, the mechanisms of control that underwrite profit-making in rental housing markets.
Based on ethnographic research with renewable energy companies in the United Kingdom, this article examines how developers see and produce space for solar energy extraction. In tracing these practices, I show that this work relies on a distinct mode of seeing that I term surface vision. Surface vision describes a learned, embodied, and socially mediated way of seeing that has emerged in relation to the materialities of solar irradiation. I demonstrate that prospecting for solar energy is a practice oriented less toward locating 'solar resources' and more toward assessing the conditions that make sustained extraction possible over time. Through surface vision, developers engage with and organize space around future and ongoing flows of energy, thereby extending extractive logics into new temporal and spatial registers. Drawing on critical engagements with energy geographies, GIS, and the visual cultures of extractivism, I illustrate how epistemic frameworks and technological infrastructures are mobilized by industrial actors to produce and legitimate sites of extraction, demonstrating how extractivist logics endure in, and are reconstituted by, new energy regimes.
This paper advances a geographic research agenda for the service transition, the global shift from manufacturing and agriculture toward services. Drawing on feminist geography and economic history, we show how low-end services expand across the Global North and South because they operate as a “double fix”: they absorb surplus labor to stabilize mass employment while sustaining strained systems of social reproduction. Our framework explains the core economic and social functions of low-end services, while highlighting their crisis tendencies—rooted in slow growth and labor restructuring—and the potential for service work to support more life-affirming futures.
This article examines how Peru's gold economy, at the intersection of licit and illicit circuits, has become a conduit for contemporary forms of business imperialism. Against a backdrop of rising global demand for gold and sustained capital inflows, both formal mining operations and illegal gold extraction have expanded rapidly in Peru-facilitated by weak institutional oversight, transnational corporate networks, and growing links with drug trafficking circuits. Drawing from the frameworks of extractive imperialism, informal empire, and "slow violence," the paper interrogates how multinational actors and global commodity chains reproduce historical patterns of asymmetrical accumulation, while externalizing environmental degradation, health crises, and systemic violence to the peripheral territories of Peru. Through a political economy lens grounded in Latin American structuralism and postcolonial theory, the study highlights the paradox of a country with persistent trade surpluses but chronic current account deficits-driven by low royalties, primary income outflows, and the enclave nature of its resource sector. By tracing the gold economy's integration with coca-based illicit economies and its reliance on mercury-intensive extraction methods, the paper exposes how imperial dynamics of extraction have morphed, rather than disappeared, in the postcolonial era. Ultimately, this case repositions Peru's contemporary gold boom within broader discussions on the business history of imperialism, suggesting that modern extractive regimes are less a rupture with colonial forms than their reconfiguration through financial globalization and deregulated capital flows.
Soil carbon markets are increasingly promoted as climate mitigation instruments, yet their emergence is uneven, contested, and shaped by complex socio-technical configurations. Through comparative research in Taiwan and the United Kingdom, this paper examines how these markets are actively constructed rather than pre-given, highlighting the critical but often overlooked role of mediators whom we conceptualise as pragmatic economists. Drawing on interviews, workshops, and stakeholder mapping, we show how pragmatic economists translate scientific and metrological knowledge, assemble infrastructures for measurement and certification, and align agricultural, policy, and commercial interests. Their practices extend but also complicate Callon’s concept of economists in the wild, revealing marketisation as a situated, relational, and performative process. Across both sites, we identify key matters of concern, including scientific simplification, fragmented governance, unequal power relations, and new dependencies between farmers and mediators. By foregrounding pragmatic economists, the paper advances debates on the political economy of environmental markets and underscores the need for more reflexive, ecologically attentive, and socially just approaches to governing soil carbon within wider decarbonisation strategies.
Over the past decade, governments have increasingly sought to mobilise private capital for expanding renewable sources of energy for the goals of decarbonisation and energy security. While existing research has focused on the financial and regulatory tools that states deploy to reduce investor perceptions of risk, scant attention has been paid to the role of knowledge infrastructures in energy finance. In this article, we address this gap by analysing how government energy models and scenarios are deployed to attract private sector investments for energy infrastructure projects. Using interview data and document analysis centred on a transnational expert network of energy modellers, we examine how government energy planning processes are reconfigured in response to new uncertainties and demands for risk mitigation from private finance. We develop the concept of epistemic derisking to capture how knowledge infrastructures are leveraged by states in efforts to mobilise private capital. Our findings show that energy models and scenarios are leveraged in efforts to reduce perceived risk less through their technical content than by what they signal about long-term stability in policy 'vision', consensus among energy systems stakeholders, and institutional capacity to manage change and uncertainty in energy systems. In addition, scenario outputs and project pipelines function as marketing devices within competitive financing landscapes. We explore how epistemic derisking operates within wider struggles over knowledge and authority in global energy governance. The article contributes to debates on green finance, energy futures and expertise, while raising critical questions about the limits of private finance-oriented decarbonisation strategies.
While Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have primarily been developed in Global South contexts to enhance ‘financial inclusion’, a key debate within the literature centers on whether the existence of a new form of state issued digital money presents a ‘threat’ to incumbent finance actors. Indeed, while monetary reformers see CBDCs as offering the potential to rebalance power away from the private banking sector and toward the state, commercial banks, on the other hand, see them as a potential new source of economic competition. Moving beyond this ‘zero-sum’ framing, this article develops a framework for examining how CBDCs’ disruptiveness may be contingent on an interplay of institutional design choices, context-specific geographies, and the responses of a range of actors. It applies this framework to an analysis of two pilot CBDC schemes: the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar and The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union’s (ECCU) DCash. Overall, it finds that these two CBDCs are proving less disruptive than anticipated. This is because the CBDC pilots’ ‘intermediated’ models mean that financial incumbents are emerging as central players in, and beneficiaries of, the new CBDC ecosystems. Secondly, Caribbean banking systems remain cash-heavy, meaning that CBDC use is displacing cash and coins, rather than banks’ deposits, shielding banks from disintermediation losses. Thirdly, incumbent actors have found subtle ways of undermining the CBDC rollouts, ultimately slowing down user sign-up and thus protecting the status quo. Overall, the findings highlight how CBDCs in the Caribbean appear to be reconfiguring, rather than challenging, the prevailing political economies of money.
Indonesia's new capital city construction is inducing state-led urbanization in the absence of private investments. Reports show the impacts of this process as a rapid land price increase and the government's policy to control it. However, little is known about how the residents in surrounding settlements of the new city have extracted value from this process and the implication of these speculative activities for the state-led urbanization. Critically engaging with the concept of everyday speculation elaborated in Leitner et al. in this journal, and drawing on fieldwork in East Kalimantan during the construction of the city in 2022-2024, we clarify how differentiated land titles, which have been historically established between indigenous populations and transmigrants settled in the area, are working to exclusively benefit transmigrant landowners with strong land claims, while tacitly displacing the indigenous populations. We show how the government's attempt to control the land prices further benefits the landowners entitled to full compensation. Theoretically, we show that everyday land speculation in the new city takes place without production activities, unlike the cases in Leitner et al. where urban residents extract values from spatiotemporal rent gaps produced through the livelihood activities or new rental unit construction. We argue that this dynamic ends up benefiting the government, as they also claim land for urban infrastructure development, with political support from the residents with strong land claims, and leads to further marginalization of indigenous populations.
Standards can help to improve sustainability of modern production systems. This paper studies the International Standardisation Organisation's (ISO) process of development of standards for circular economy and aims to answer the following research question: "How are international sustainability standards created and how do these processes evolve?" The concept of epistemic community is employed to understand who creates the international standards for circular economy, whilst resources (in particular, knowledge) and time of the experts are identified as important factors influencing how power relations unfold in this epistemic community. In studying the process in focus, we apply a qualitative research methodology. Overall, our findings show that knowledge of experts participating in the circular economy epistemic community is embedded in different organisational, sectoral and national settings. In addition to knowledge, the time when the delegations have joined the process matters, as well as the roles the actors take in the process. The roles that actors take help us understand how power relations unfold in the standardisation settings guided by the principles of consensus.
Numerous cities in the Global South display the symptoms of housing financialization without the vehicles through which investment capital typically circulates toward the built environment. In this paper, we put forward the notion of "ripples of financialization" to point to the extension of the speculative practices engendered by financialized building practices well beyond the high-end developments in which global capital lands via banking transactions. We do so through a case study of two lower-income neighborhoods in Beirut (Lebanon) with similar sociopolitical characteristics during the building boom (2004-2014) that followed the adoption of an aggressive national policy designed to incentivize the flow of foreign investments into real estate. Methodologically, the paper traces the practices of developers operating in these neighborhoods, showing that they exploited their positions in social, religious, and political institutions to channel capital flows into real estate development. Without directly relying on the new infrastructures of finance, developers and future homebuyers adopted "speculative attitudes" that reproduced the spatial patterns of housing financialization, effectively inducing deep transformations in how the city is built and inhabited. While reflective of Lebanon's context, these patterns are likely to be reproduced in other contexts where the adoption of the neoliberal mantra has influenced urban governance. The findings are based on surveys of all housing production in Beirut since 1996, at least 40 in-depth interviews with developers, and the embodied knowledge of the researchers, who are long-term residents of the city.
The demolition of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in 2021 disrupted Accra's central hub of electronic waste (e-waste) processing, displacing thousands of workers. This study examines how these informal economies persist and adapt to this territorial reordering through mobility, role-combination, and increased reliance on intermediaries. The reorganisation of these economies reveals the economic interdependence of formal and informal systems. We draw on interviews with informal and formal stakeholders, site observation, and relevant secondary materials to advance a 3-part framework for understanding demolition-driven displacement in e-waste economies. First, we show how informal practices persist through improvisation, sustaining material circulation under conditions of heightened precarity. Second, we demonstrate how demolition intensified new forms of mediated interdependence between informal labour and formal institutions, as access to markets, training, and safer practices became more gatekeepered. Third, we analyse the plural rationalities of value that structure e-waste economies, contrasting repair and reuse logics oriented to use-value with extraction logics prioritising exchange-value, and show how displacement reweighted the viability of these strategies under more uncertain spatial and market conditions. We argue for an inclusive governance framework that promotes environmental justice and supports more equitable integration of informal recyclers into formal systems. The study contributes to debates on urban informality, waste economies, and economic geography by theorising demolition as both a political technology of (re)ordering and an enclosure/dispossession mechanism. It also shows how displacement reorganises waste livelihoods while workers' responses sustain circulation in more fragmented and precarious geographies.
