Abstract
AbstractThere is no single ‘great’ commodity frontier whose exploitation under current socio‐technical conditions could fuel capital accumulation at the global scale. According to Jason Moore, this represents the ‘end of Cheap Nature’ and signals a terminal crisis for capitalism as we know it. In this article we complicate this assertion by showing how, in the context of global environmental governance frameworks of carbon control, a diverse range of actors situated at multiple scales are intensifying the use of cities and their hinterlands for the production/transgression of localized commodity frontiers. We draw on scholarship on uneven geographical development, state‐led restructuring and eco‐scalar fixes to present two case studies from different segments of the carbon cycle in the global South. The first case demonstrates how the introduction of waste‐to‐energy technology in Delhi facilitated the generation of ‘carbon credits’ while waste matter itself became a commodity. The second discusses attempts by the Brazilian state of Amazonas (Amazônia) aspiring to shift from rainforest exploitation to financialized conservation supported by the ‘green global city’ functions of metropolitan Manaus. These cases demonstrate that although the global carbon‐control regime may enable accumulation, implementation remains speculative, and localized commodity frontiers provoke social resistances that jeopardize their durability.
Highlights
Prospects of unlimited economic growth, such as those promised by the ‘commodities boom’, the sustainable ‘green economy’, the ‘new economy’ and global technological revolution, have given way to a vista of unyielding crises that threaten to extend well into the twenty-first century
The rescaling of governance regimes is an integral component of attempts to territorialize ‘socio-ecological ixes’, which rework the ‘ways in which landscapes are produced, how human and nonhuman organisms and socio-natural relationships are transformed, and how labour processes are restructured in order to address or ofset entangled social and environmental crises of capitalism through conjoined productions of space and nature’ (Ekers and Prudham, 2015: 2438, original emphasis)
Cities are ‘irmly on the climate change map’ (Bulkeley and Broto, 2012: 1; see Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006) of these schemes, and we argue that many examples of eco-scalar ixes, the objectives of which are to identify and produce localized commodity frontiers, are rolled out at the city or regional scale by growth coalitions comprised of actors situated at multiple scales
Summary
Prospects of unlimited economic growth, such as those promised by the ‘commodities boom’, the sustainable ‘green economy’, the ‘new economy’ and global technological revolution, have given way to a vista of unyielding crises that threaten to extend well into the twenty-first century. We conclude the section by advancing the argument that the end of Cheap Nature represents a major limit to capital accumulation and, in response, multi-scalar growth coalitions are intensifying eforts to restore conditions that are favourable to accumulation by producing and transgressing localized commodity frontiers in city-regions.
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