Geography, nature, and the question of development

Abstract

During the last decade, geography has gained new salience as a development factor in the public imagination and policy realms, through the work of scholars located outside the discipline. Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs have popularized the idea that a physical geographic backcloth, first nature, profoundly shapes the conditions of possibility for global economic prosperity or poverty, and sustainability. Geographical economists have built microfoundational accounts of second nature: how uneven geographies emerge on a uniform biophysical backcloth. ‘New’ development economists, now profoundly critical of neoliberal globalization, argue for both Keynesian and Hayekian alternatives. Notwithstanding their differences, these communities of scholarship share a sociospatial ontology that underwrites a stageist, teleological conception of economic development, to be made possible by globalizing capitalism. A geographical, relational/dialectical conception of the relationship between the economy, space/time and socionature, within a broadly political economic conception of societal change, creates space for multiple development trajectories and livelihood assemblages, deconstructing the global North as the natural locus of definitions of the good life and expertise about what constitutes development.