This study analyses the transition trends of China’s spatial governance from a growth machine to an “integration machine,” from an institutional reconfiguration perspective. We propose that while the urban growth machine has dominated spatial politics in China, its institutional foundations also provide the conditions for the emergence of an integration machine. This integration machine reflects a path-dependent logic rooted in the historical Chinese statecraft of integrating fragmented grassroots communities into cohesive territorial governance — an alternative logic to capital-driven growth. Drawing on China’s Rural Revitalization, including its strategic position, policy initiatives, and local implementation, this article reveals how the integration machine is underpinned by the reconfiguration of party, bureaucratic, and fiscal institutions. Meanwhile, new challenges have emerged from the intensifying interplay between institutions and actions during implementation. By conceptualizing the integration machine, the study introduces a new perspective on territorial governance by emphasizing the institutional foundations of statecraft.
This article analyzes a paradigmatic case of green grabbing in the Argentine Andes, where 12, 351.66 ha of highland pastures historically used by transhumant pastoralists were transferred to a private tourism consortium to develop a “sustainable” ski resort. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Malargüe (Mendoza Province), the paper examines how subnational state actors act as territorial brokers, facilitating dispossession through legally sanctioned but procedurally irregular concessions, discursive green development framings, and the slow violence of fencing, signage, and private security. Conceptually grounded in political ecology and critical agrarian studies, the article introduces the notion of identity displacement to describe forms of exclusion that go beyond material dispossession, affecting cultural reproduction, social belonging, and intergenerational land-based practices. It argues that transhumant resistance −through legal mobilization, public protest, and everyday practices of territorial persistence- challenges dominant development narratives and reclaims space for alternative futures. The study contributes to current debates on green capitalism, land control, and rural governance by offering an empirically rich and theoretically grounded account of how green grabbing unfolds at the intersection of state territoriality, mobility and peasant persistence. It highlights the need to rethink environmental governance frameworks that erase mobile livelihoods and customary commons regimes in the name of sustainability.
Research on left-behind regions increasingly emphasizes place-based and neo-endogenous development, yet how digital platforms as extra-regional actors trigger and the subsequent regional transformation in left-behind border regions of emerging economies remains underexplored. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025, this paper examines the digital transformation of imported fresh fruit distribution in Pingxiang, a county-level city in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China along the border with Vietnam. It traces three phases of transformation of Pingxiang: platform-triggered grassroots adaptation, in which flexible border-trade arrangements enabled small traders to exploit digital platform-based market access; cooperative institutional experimentation, in which local authorities selectively incorporated extra-regional wholesale capabilities to stabilize distribution; and state-led infrastructural recentering, in which digital trade and distribution became increasingly organized through locally anchored, state-backed infrastructure under tighter border regulation. To explain these shifts, the paper develops cooperative experimental governance as a territorially embedded mode of governance through which state actors selectively coordinate with heterogeneous market actors to stabilize and redirect digital platform-triggered transformation in left-behind border regions. Digital platforms are thus understood as institutional triggers rather than stable developmental actors. The paper advances research on left-behind regions by showing that, in the digital era, regional transformation is shaped not simply by the formation of extra-regional connections, but by how these connections are organized, anchored, and reconfigured over time under specific border conditions.
State scientific agencies occupy an ambiguous position in environmental governance: formally mandated to deliver impartial expertise, they are simultaneously embedded in political-economic systems that press technical judgments toward developmental ends. This paper examines how that tension shaped Indonesia’s Geological Agency (GA) in its governance of karst resources at the Watuputih Groundwater Basin, North Kendeng Mountains, a case in which the Agency moved from a conservation-oriented stance to one that authorised continued limestone extraction. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography (29 semi-structured interviews, observation of a public scientific examination, and documentary analysis) and deploying Svarstad, Benjaminsen and Overå’s (2018) pluralistic power framework, we trace the mechanisms through which this institutional shift was produced. The GA’s repositioning was not reducible to leadership change or procedural irregularity. Three interlocking mechanisms were at work: the discursive reclassification of spring typology, which narrowed the definition of hydrological risk and sidelined competing academic assessments; the structural realignment of the Agency’s mandate within Indonesia’s infrastructure-led development apparatus; and actor-level networks connecting GA personnel to cement industry interests, which constrained the institutional space for precautionary judgment. The contribution is theoretical: it extends capture theory in political ecology by showing industry alignment produced without capture, through networks and ministry structures that already blur public and private interest. The analysis points to the need for institutionalised independence, mandatory conflict-of-interest disclosure, and community-accessible audit mechanisms in state bodies whose technical assessments determine the fate of ecologically sensitive territories.
Post-growth scholarship has often celebrated craft as a privileged site for imagining postcapitalist and post-growth transitions. Yet this discussion remains largely Global North-centred and empirically underdeveloped, drawing mostly on small-scale, elective and niche craft economies rather than large craft sectors where artisanal labour constitutes a major livelihood system. This paper addresses this gap through the case of Jaipur’s craft economy, one of the world’s largest concentrated craft economies. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with craft-sector experts, field visits to craft fairs and markets, participant observation at a socio-ecological enterprise, and documentary analysis conducted between 2023 and 2024. We examine how Jaipur’s craft sector enables, constrains and complicates post-growth-compatible forms of territorial development. To do so, we develop a support-structure diagnosis, understood as an analysis of the institutional, material, financial, cultural, geographical and historical conditions sustaining, transforming or absorbing craft economies into dominant growth-oriented circuits. We map three interrelated support structures operating across multiple scales: top-down institutional structures, bottom-up and intermediary structures, and local conditions. The article shows that Jaipur’s large-scale, decentralised and historically embedded craft economy unsettles simple distinctions between local and global, formal and informal, traditional and entrepreneurial. It requires a more situated understanding of relocalisation, alterity and market integration in post-growth debates. We identify four dynamics through which support structures interact: encouragement, collaboration, suppression and friction. Theoretically, equity, central to post-growth economies, remains a concern for Jaipur. Scale, heterogeneity of informalisation and decentralisation, and multiple axes of power in Jaipur’s craft ecosystem open up a productive challenge for post-growth scholarship.
