Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Using economic geography to reinvigorate land-change science
Darla K. Munroe ⇑, Kendra McSweeney, Jeffrey L. Olson 1, Becky Mansfield
Department of Geography, Ohio State University, 1036 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 23 September 2013
Received in revised form 28 November 2013
Keywords:
Land-change science
Economic geography
Embeddedness
Teleconnections
Global production networks
a b s t r a c t
In this paper we review the implications of neoclassical economic framings within the interdisciplinary
field of land-change science. We argue that current pressing global environmental problems, such as land
grabs, loss of critical carbon sinks and the increasing importance of corporate actors in land-use decisionmaking, necessitate a reconsideration of neoclassical conceptualizations of what the economy is, who
economic actors are and how they make decisions, and how environment–economy linkages operate
in a globalized world. We argue that concepts from economic geography can help land change science
move beyond neoclassical framings. The first concept is that the economic (including markets, commodities, and rational decision-makers) is neither separate nor universal, but is historical and socially
embedded. The second is to use these notions to understand the spatial organization of economic activity.
The framework of global production networks, in particular, will help land change scientists conceptualize and represent teleconnections. Using economic geography to move beyond neoclassical economic
framings will bring a fresh approach to economic change that holds much promise for invigorating land
change science.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The growing liberalization of trade and finance over the past
decade has accelerated global economic change. New economic
possibilities are, in turn, changing the pace, scale, and dynamics
by which natural resources—land, minerals, carbon—are metabolized in economic systems. Consider, for example, how the world’s
most remote forests are increasingly enrolled into carbon offset
markets; how the rising demand for meat is concentrated among
a burgeoning urban middle class often far removed from sites of
production; how foreign capital finances ‘‘land grabs’’ that erratically transform landscapes of smallholder production into ‘‘flex
crop’’ monocultures; or how the remittances from low-wage
migrants are changing the production possibilities of landscapes
half a world away. These examples demonstrate new ways in
which environment and economy are interlocked to an unprecedented degree, even as they challenge our basic ways of thinking
about those connections. After all, these processes unsettle
standard binaries of global/local, exogenous/endogenous, and
rural/urban. Further, they destabilize standard categorizations of
land-change agents (e.g., households, firms, or policy makers)
because real world decisions about resource use are increasingly
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (D.K. Munroe).
Current address: Department of Geography & Geology, University of Wisconsin,
Whitewater, United States
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0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.12.005
made by complex webs of actors operating simultaneously at multiple scales.
Land change scientists are well aware of these challenges and
the urgent need to address them (Rounsevell et al., 2012). They
recognize that fixed categories of ‘‘land use’’ and ‘‘land user’’ are
no longer tenable (Rindfuss et al., 2004; Rudel, 2007). Further, they
grasp that the land-change science (LCS) community’s ability to
understand and predict these new economic–environment linkages is essential to the field’s future and global relevance (Lambin
and Meyfroidt, 2011), especially in the face of growing demand for
better climate models and more integrated accounting of land sustainability (Young et al., 2006; Erb et al., 2009). To date, however,
hard-won empirical insights regarding these new forms of economy–environment linkages have arguably not been matched with
equal efforts to re-conceptualize these linkages. For example, landchange scientists have striven to reconcile orthodox approaches to
markets with attention to the role of customs, institutions, heterogeneous users, etc. (Geist and Lambin, 2002). In so doing the field
effectively straddles a conceptually wide gulf, yet it continues to
rely almost exclusively on neoclassical definitions of what the
economy is, who economic actors are, and how those actors, in
turn, make decisions about resources. Adherence to neoclassical
framings endures despite growing frustration at their inability to
accommodate the world’s growing complexity. In light of this
impasse, some land change scientists have been calling for new
approaches to broaden these framings (Rasmussen and Reenberg,
2012).
D.K. Munroe et al. / Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
In this paper, we argue that one way to answer this urgent need
is to gradually replace land-change scientists’ reliance on neoclassical economic models with a far more nimble and flexible conceptualization of economic process. Such a re-conceptualization draws
from well advanced developments in so-called ‘‘institutional’’ economic geography.2 That economic geography could, in effect, come
to the conceptual rescue of LCS may not come as a surprise. After all,
economic geographers and LCS share common interests in how
economic processes play out across space and time. Further, the
economic geography (EG) literature is known to many in the LCS
community, and there have been several calls for greater rapprochement between the two fields (Jepson, 2006; Klepeis and Vance, 2003;
Roy Chowdhury and Turner, 2006; Robinson et al., 2007). What has
not been explicitly recognized by land change scholars, however, is
that economic geographers (and scholars in cognate fields) have
spent the past two decades or more specifically innovating beyond
neoclassical approaches to economic processes. The result is a
conceptual freshness towards economic change that holds much
promise for invigorating land change science.
Two contributions of economic geography stand out as especially relevant and ripe for adoption within the LCS community.
First is the notion that economic activities are embedded within
the sphere of social processes rather than alongside it. We argue
that recent developments in LCS to operationalize teleconnections
as a concept (Liu et al., 2013; Seto et al., 2012) will benefit from an
explicit consideration of how actors, activities and flows across
sites are embedded within social and institutional contexts, and
in turn, produce dynamic geographies.
Embeddedness fundamentally challenges how we think about
space and spatial relationships. Thus—and second—this idea brings
with it an understanding of economic agency and the geography of
economic activity that is very different from neoclassical
approaches, and offers productive avenues for the exploration of
environment–economic relationships.
Before we can elaborate further on these points, however, it is
incumbent upon us to clearly lay out just how LCS insights have
been profoundly shaped—and, we argue, constrained—by neoclassical conceptions of economic process. We do not presume to offer
a comprehensive overview of either LCS or economic geography.
Rather, we describe what we feel to be key priorities for enriching
LCS with EG, based on our own experiences and challenges as LCS
scholars.3
2. LCS and neoclassical approaches to economic/environmental
change
2.1. LCS and scientific advances in economic–environment linkages
Because land-use and land-cover change occur at the interface
of social and natural systems, the field of Land Change Science
(and specifically the Human Dimensions of Global Change community within it) is inherently interdisciplinary, including among its
ranks geographers, ecologists, political scientists, and others
(Turner et al., 2007; Lambin and Geist, 2006). The field has also
historically been refreshingly multi-method, characterized by rich
empirics generated through intimate, long-term engagements with
specific spaces and actors. This has fostered the emergence of a
comprehensive program of monitoring, modeling, synthesis and
scenario-building that underlies the field’s interdisciplinary research (Turner et al., 2007) and is arguably its core strength.
2
Institutional economic geography (IEG) approaches analyze markets as ‘instituted’ or resulting from social processes. There is overlap between this tradition and
institutional analysis, but IEG is not to be confused with natural resource governance
narrowly.
3
Of the four authors of this manuscript, two of us contribute centrally to LCS
research. We wish to provide a sympathetic critique from within the community.
13
To date, the field has made vital conceptual and empirical interventions into the study of global environmental change. Three in
particular stand out for their global impact within academic, policy, and popular circles. The first has been to highlight the capacity
of local users to sustain resource systems, changing how the
international community thinks about the role of local people as
environmental managers (Andersson and Ostrom, 2008; Ostrom,
1990, 1994, 2000, 2005; Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006; Oye and
Maxwell, 1995; Young et al., 2006). Second, LCS has drawn
much-needed attention to the complex webs that span social and
ecosystem spaces. For example, twenty years of scholarship on
‘‘forest transitions’’ have shown how economic and political shifts
can initiate environmental renewal on abandoned landscapes
(Grainger, 1995; Mansfield et al., 2010; Mather, 1992; Mather
et al., 1999; Perz, 2007; Rudel et al., 2002; Turner and Robbins,
2008; Walker, 2008). Third, LCS has been central in challenging
categorical and aspatial understandings of land cover by emphasizing the patchy, incremental, nonlinear and even reversible ways in
which land change occurs over time (DeFries et al., 1999). For
example, Drummond and Loveland (2010) illustrate the diversification of eastern U.S. forests, supporting a greater range of users
and activities than ever before. Likewise, Irwin et al. (2009) call
attention to ‘‘urban–rural spaces,’’ where the confluence of
transportation improvements, economic restructuring, rising real
incomes, and natural amenities lead to qualitatively new types of
urban–rural interdependencies.
All of these contributions have been broadly based on conceptualizations of economic change that are characteristically and recognizably ‘‘neoclassical.’’ That is, explicitly or not, they are grounded
in twentieth century understandings of what counts as economic,
specific approaches to studying ‘‘economic agents’’ (Barnes,
1988), and normative explanations about the direction and nature
of desirable change. Below, we go over the specific ways in which
neoclassical thinking permeates land change science, and reference
the ways in which neoclassical framings can straightjacket scientific inquiry in an era of unprecedented economic and environmental change.
2.2. Homo economicus
Central to neoclassical economic analysis is the atomistic,
autonomous actor, Homo economicus. This actor—whether an individual, a household, or a firm—is understood to weigh the information to which it has access to arrive at an optimal solution given
constraints—i.e., individuals or households maximize utility and
firms maximize profit subject to their budgets. The fact that these
decisions may be made in a ‘‘social’’ context is understood, in the
sense that actors make decisions that are influenced by ‘‘non-economic’’ information or pressures, such as the incentives to collude,
peer effects, or the effects of familial relationships (Manski, 2000).
But such phenomena, often conceptualized generically as ‘‘preferences,’’ are generally assumed to be exogenous to the economic
moment—important, to be sure, but conceptually separate from
the economic realm. Thus, social processes are invoked to explain
deviation from strictly rational economic behavior. Accordingly,
neoclassical analysis draws clear boundaries around the measurement of economic phenomena, and strives for deductive reasoning
and the derivation of first principles, abstracted from the contingencies of a given context (Peck, 2005).
Homo economicus is recognizable in LCS’s pervasive focus on the
decision-making dynamics of land/resource users. To be sure, LCS
often complicates standard neoclassical methods by recognizing
‘‘bounded rationality’’ (or the idea that users are rational up to
some limit of information) and attending to the heterogeneity of
agents (e.g., different preferences for risk-taking or natural amenities). Nevertheless, the ultimate and common research priority is
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D.K. Munroe et al. / Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
to understand individual decision-making regarding land and resource use (Miller and Page, 2010; Parker et al., 2002; Robinson
et al., 2007; Evans and Kelley, 2008) through standard analytical
focus on hypothetical ‘‘average’’ or ‘‘representative’’ agents
(O’Sullivan and Haklay, 2000). Analysts are thus empirically and
conceptually constrained by the necessary assumption of an
average agent, and the corollary assumption that outliers are
deviations from an analytically tractable norm.
2.3. Market mechanisms as key policy levers
Following from the focus on rational decision-making by representative agents, another characteristic of neoclassical approaches
is the largely unquestioned acceptance of market-based mechanisms as the key levers through which to combat undesirable
environmental change. This is because environmental degradation
is framed as an externality of social activity (a social cost not naturally borne by individual actors), and thus the role of policy is to
‘‘internalize the externality.’’ Firms, households, et al., may be
incentivized—through market signals and the policy initiatives that
may drive them—to invest in communal forest management initiatives, to buy carbon offsets, or to buy proteins that represent the
most efficient feed-to-meat ratio (chicken over beef, for example)
(Corbera and Brown, 2008). An increasingly common form of
incentivization is payment for ecosystem services (e.g., REDD+
programs), whereby land users or land managers receive compensation for the opportunity costs of not undertaking actions deemed
environmentally degrading (Jack et al., 2008).
Furthermore, because land management and land-use decisionmaking is the stepping-off point for understanding past change
and predicting particular futures (Global Land Project, 2005), major
policy interventions are typically targeted at immediate land users
(Turner et al., 2007). Despite LCS scholars’ recognition of the ways
land users are constrained and enabled by their social, political,
economic and environmental contexts (Geist and Lambin, 2004),
empirical priorities still privilege the land user in ways that echo
up through policy circles (NRC (National Research Council;
Committee on Global Change Research), 1999). Moreover, key
decisions made by other influential actors, such as particular
politicians or corporate actors, are most often left unpacked (Rudel,
2007).
2.4. Neoclassical approaches to space and time
Also foundational are neoclassical understandings of space and
time, which shape the science of land-change in pervasive if
under-appreciated ways. This is evident in three distinct traditions
commonly found in LCS analysis. The first is to envision scale as
nested: e.g., the global is formed by the aggregate of the regional;
the regional is the aggregate of the local and so on. As analysis
‘‘scales up’’ from the local to the regional or beyond, the direct
importance of processes that occur at those scales are understood
to become literally more distant in their effect on local land users
(Gibson et al., 2000). One essential by-product of this spatial nesting is the way that it encourages analysts to regularly conflate
spatial scale with agency. In other words, agency is understood
to be specific to the scale of analysis. Most often, this means that
what is ‘‘local’’ (e.g., whether a farmer plants trees or corn) is conceptualized a priori as ‘‘endogenous’’ and therefore the analytical
moment and focus. What is ‘‘extra-local’’ or occurring at ‘‘higher’’
spatial scales (regional, national, international), such as prices,
markets, policies, or infrastructure decisions, is understood to
derive from the effects of agents acting outside of the local context
(Kaimowitz and Angelsen, 1998). Therefore, local and extralocal
influences on environmental change are often mapped onto ‘‘proximate and ultimate driving forces’’ or ‘‘direct and underlying
causes’’ (Geist and Lambin, 2001), implying distinct geographic
spheres in which various factors operate.
As a result, when empirical attention to the influence of markets, infrastructure, institutions, policies, etc., is brought to bear
on local problems, they are often conceptualized as ‘‘exogenous’’
to the system under study, and therefore ‘‘beyond’’ the scope of local decision-making land users (Lambin et al., 2003). For example,
land change scientists often understand globalization as a condition in which ‘‘. . .local situations and events [are] influenced by
external, often unpredictable factors that they can only control in
very limited ways’’ (Göbel, 2006:264). In this way, local agents—
while analytically prioritized for their immediate influence on land
change—are nevertheless considered little more than imperfect filters/mediators of policy or price signals ‘‘from outside.’’
The tension between endogenous and exogenous makes it difficult to represent and conceptualize processes and actors that connect distal landscapes. To deal with this challenge, LCS scholars are
increasingly deploying the notions of ‘‘teleconnections’’ and ‘‘telecoupling’’ as a way to recognize that the underlying causes of landuse change in one place are often located in a distant place (Seto
et al., 2012; Brondizio and Roy Chowdhury, 2013; Liu et al.,
2013) (see more below). Despite the potential of these approaches,
however, they have yet to move conceptually beyond analytical
techniques that require system ‘‘closure,’’ or the derivation of equilibrium conditions. In other words, they require a bounded, local
system into which external forces are seen to enable or constrain
actions. For this reason, they are arguably limited in their analytical ability to understand, for example, how cities are ‘‘spaces of
flows’’ (Castells, 2000): flows of food, fiber, energy, labor and waste
that tie cities to far-flung spaces far beyond their recognized borders. To date, land-change scientists have tended to conceptually
package such relationships as ‘‘globalization,’’ which is all too often
is invoked as a process (Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011), when it is
instead an outcome (Coe et al., 2008; Bridge, 2002). Land grabbing—by which global finance capital ‘‘comes to ground’’ in heterogeneous landscapes worldwide—poses a similar challenge. While
the distal connections that make land grabbing possible are recognized by LCS scholars (Kastner et al., 2011), the analytical moment
is profoundly constrained when the putatively atomistic peasant is
in fact sharecropping for Monsanto, effectively profit-maximizing
by proxy for this multinational firm. One cannot ‘‘close the system’’
to conduct economic analysis when the system itself is produced
through cascading activities of actors intimately connected across
great distances.
A second, related characteristic approach to space in LCS has
been to understand local as specific and the global as universal.
Thus local processes appear unique, heterogeneous, even anomalous, whereas global processes are seen as broadly applicable
(Geist and Lambin, 2002). As a result, general ‘‘laws’’ or ‘‘truths’’
about economic–ecological processes are typically understood to
emerge from the meta-level aggregation of heterogeneous case
studies (Perz, 2007). Case studies that diverge from the ‘‘grand
theory,’’ then, are analytically set aside as outliers or exceptions.
This local = specific/global = universal cleavage profoundly impacts
how the LCS community understands generalizability. By searching for grand narratives, opportunities to connect place-based
insights across multiple analytical sites is lost (Lambin and Geist,
2006). Approaches to forest transition theory (FTT) provide a useful
example of this analytical sequence. FTT theory emerged from the
recognition of patterns in national-level forest cover data (over
decades/centuries) demonstrating a persuasive and attractive
relationship between economic change and forest cover change
that holds in many contexts (Mather, 1992; Meyfroidt and Lambin,
2011; Rudel et al., 2002, 2005). But increasingly, more and more
‘‘exceptional’’ sites are being identified around the world that do
not conform to FTT (Nagendra and Southworth, 2009b). To date,
D.K. Munroe et al. / Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
these case-study exceptions are treated as anomalies without portable insights for land-change dynamics, rather than as opportunities to rethink core processes affecting all sites (see Mansfield et al.,
2010).
A final, characteristically neoclassical element of LCS
approaches to space and time is manifest in the dominance of
modernist and developmentalist accounts of change. Modernization theory conceives of economic and environmental change as
normatively unilinear, unidirectional, and in which the experience
of the global West/North (developed nations) is typically
understood as the desirable and appropriate path through which
other, less developed countries are anticipated to pass en route
to the condition of being ‘‘developed’’ (Perz, 2007). Many
land-change scientists, of course, profoundly reject such a worldview, and may repudiate the notion that the western world’s
experience is to be emulated (Turner and Robbins, 2008). Existing
paradigms, however, can belie this commitment, often in subtle
ways. For example, Kuznets-inspired analyses compare nationallevel data and effectively place countries along a trajectory of
development (Roy Chowdhury and Moran, 2012). Such analyses
set up the experience of developed nations to represent the
‘‘future’’ for developing nations just as the experience of developing nations, conversely, represents our own past. In short: space
proxies for time. This substitution of space for time infuses much
LCS work (see, e.g., Foley et al., 2005; Rudel, 1998).
The traction that space/time interchangeability may have once
offered LCS is increasingly hitting empirical and conceptual
roadblocks. For example, reforestation in North America is a
product of technological innovation in agriculture and progressive
environmental regulation demanded by an educated and affluent
public, as adherents to modernist concepts would predict. But
underappreciated is how this improvement is co-produced by the
sharp increases in trade in agricultural and forest products (Bridge,
2008), exploiting falling transportation costs, lower wages and
‘‘land grabs’’ by global agribusiness elsewhere (Mills Busa, 2013).
The U.S.’s increases in forest extent are thus partially a result of
other countries’ environmental degradation. The changes in
environmental and economic conditions of one country cannot
be analyzed in isolation from one another because they are in fact
tightly coupled over both space and time. While many scholars in
LCS recognize this dynamic, sometimes known as ‘‘co-evalness’’, or
the simultaneity and co-production of countries’ experiences (Roy
Chowdhury and Moran, 2012), the problem lies in how it might be
operationalized. To date, LCS is finding it difficult to get analytical
purchase on this issue (Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011).
Such ongoing ‘‘unequal ecological exchange’’ (Bridge, 2008) also
lays bare the ways in which economy–environment relations are
power-laden. For most in the LCS community, these power differentials are adequately attended to by neoclassical approaches that
recognize the ‘‘constraints’’ faced differentially by actors who
otherwise operate on a level playing field (see, e.g., Parker et al.,
2002). For example, Aldrich et al. (2012) present an excellent
example of the dynamics of ‘‘contentious land use’’ in the Amazon
and show that struggles over claims to land lead to more deforestation than if land managers were acting in isolation. We submit
that such processes are not unique to violent frontiers; social
injustice and inequality are pervasive in environmental decisionmaking (Turner and Robbins, 2008).
2.5. Resource scarcity is increasing
A final and emblematically neoclassical concept manifest in
land change science is the conviction that resources are finite.
For many scientists this is an uncontestably hard fact—there is only
so much lithium on the planet, only so much arable land. As a
result, resource scarcities are necessarily growing with the growth
15
of the human population as our planet’s endowments are being
divided up, after all, among more and more people. Scarcity is
therefore seen as inevitable. As a result, scarcity narratives (in
which looming crises in the availability of resource x in place y
are emphasized) underpin much work and animate most funding
requests. Indeed, scarcity narratives appear de rigueur in justifying
the need for research to grant-making agencies, and in representing proposed work as just-in-time and policy-relevant.
As axiomatic as the scarcity narrative is, however, land change
scientists also acknowledge that absolute scarcity is rarely at issue;
rather what matters is relative scarcity—which can be overcome by
institutional adaptations (Lambin et al., 2001). A crucial second
insight has been recognition that markets and technological
innovations also can produce scarcity in resource-rich areas (Turner
and Robbins, 2008). But recognizing that scarcities can be
overcome and/or that they are socially produced is only a partial
corrective because despite overwhelming examples of looming
scarcities, we are also accosted by seemingly innumerable examples of looming surpluses (of atmospheric carbon, of temperate
forests, of human labor). In effect, we cannot miss the ways in
which scarcities are always being made and un-made.
2.6. Neoclassical approaches dominate science and policy
At this point, the reader might ask: Why are neoclassical
approaches so dominant within LCS, especially given that they
appear to be closing off the possibilities for moving the field
forward? Two factors in particular appear important. For one,
neoclassical economic ideas have been hegemonic within global
policy circles for decades; it has been vital, therefore, for LCS to
speak this language if the field aspires to global relevance (as it
does, and should). For example, thirty years of market-based
environmental governance have led to the dissemination and
entrenchment of particular approaches to ‘‘get the prices right’’
as not only the most effective but indeed the only possible solutions to environmental problems (although the specific policies
they inspire may take dramatically different forms depending on
institutional context) (Bumpus and Liverman, 2009). The UN’s
Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Forest Degradation
(REDD+) program, which is designed to simultaneously address
climate change and poverty elimination through carbon accreditation programs, is a clear example of the way in which multiple
social goals (e.g., biodiversity conservation, economic development, women’s empowerment) are pursued through apparently
efficient market mechanisms.
Another consideration is that the interdisciplinarity of LCS
demands a framing that is amenable to both natural and social scientists. To date, neoclassical economics has played this role well.
This is because economics remains the only branch of social science to offer natural scientists recognizable process models, i.e.,
representable as dynamical equations, such as the general equilibrium models in which both human and natural processes can be
comparably parameterized. Furthermore, neoclassical economists
have been creative at adopting computational methods (Tesfatsion
and Judd, 2006) and in tweaking the behavioral assumptions of
utility- or profit-maximization (Kahneman, 2003). Despite the
impression of conceptual innovation in these developments, there
has been a consistent adherence to the basic neoclassical tenets
outlined above (Martin and Sunley, 2007).
3. Transforming land-change science with concepts from
economic geography
We argue that the conceptual innovation needed by LCS can be
found in recent advances made economic geographers. Their
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D.K. Munroe et al. / Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
Table 1
Conceptual distinctions between neoclassical economics and economic geography.
How economy is defined
How agents are envisioned
Resource distributions
Political considerations
Policy approaches
How scales relate
Direction of change
Generalizability
Neoclassical approaches
Economic geography
Economic activities are analytical separable from the social
realm
Homo economicus is the central analytical focus
Resources (especially land) are finite
Actors experience an even playing field but different
constraints
Market solutions to environmental problems are privileged
Space is nested (with land-use decisions at local scales often
analytically privileged)
Economic development is desirable, linear, and
unidirectional
The ‘‘local’’ is the site of specificity; the global is the site of
generality
Economic activities are embedded within the social and
cannot be abstracted out
Multi-sited actors defined by power differentials
Scarcities of any kind are socially produced
Playing field is always uneven; inequality is historically and
socially produced
Solutions lie in multiple institutional and market sites
Space is a process; no level is privileged
experience is highly relevant because of shared traditions uniting
the two fields, including the fundamental spatiality of their work,
and common roots in neoclassical economics (Bridge, 2008; Turner
et al., 2007). In fact, the crossroads at which LCS finds itself today is
highly comparable to that faced by economic geographers decades
ago. At the time, discontent with orthodox economic approaches
and frustration with economists’ grasp of space and place drove
considerable innovation within economic geography (Bridge,
2008). Much of this innovation was initially conducted within
the subfields of industrial geography and thus did not reach those
in the emerging LCS community. Important exceptions include
work in rural and agricultural geography by Marsden et al.
(1996) and others. Since the 1990s, a growing number of economic
geographers are responding to calls to locate environmental processes more centrally in their work. The result is a growing number
of analyses that engage environment–economy relationships,
including Mansfield (2003), Bumpus and Liverman (2009), and
Leichenko and O’Brien (2008). While promising, some practitioners
have argued that the field has not advanced sufficiently, particularly in terms of developing its synergies with colleagues in the
environmental sciences (Bridge, 2002). Hindering more substantive engagement between the LCS and economic geography (EG)
communities (even when they share an academic department!)
is divergence in approaches to the economy (Clark, 1998). The
insights of each tradition can be difficult to reconcile, and deep
differences in academic culture make effective dialog difficult
and undermine the ability of each to appreciate and incorporate
the other’s insights.
We suggest here that this détente could be breached by engagement with concepts developed within EG, which can greatly
enhance the explanatory and predictive power of LCS. We do not
wish to suggest that EG as a field is somehow bounded or
monolithic. In fact, one of the strengths of EG is its high degree
of theoretical and epistemological plurality, combining as it does
approaches that range from neoclassical, to institutionalist, to
Marxist, to poststructuralist and beyond (Yeung, 2003). In part because of this epistemic flexibility and breadth, economic geographers have been able to develop heterodox understandings of
economic processes that have come to be broadly shared among
economic geographers of many stripes (and which are increasingly
taken up in economics and related fields). Primary among them is
the commitment to envision the economy less as a formal and discrete sphere of interaction and more as a dimension of all social
life. Economic geography, then, fundamentally questions how we
selectively define what is ‘‘economic’’ versus other aspects of social
life, including the political, cultural, social and environmental. In
other words, anti-essentialist ideas in economic geography imply
that processes such as consumption and production (inter alia)
cannot be broken down into a strictly economic component, while
Open systems; no known end points
Spatial and temporal contingencies are part of any ‘‘general’’
explanation; global is in the local
Fig. 1. Neoclassical economic approaches (top) assume an economic sphere that
may be influenced by, but is conceptually distinct from, other dimensions of the
social realm (e.g., cultural or political factors). Economic geographers (bottom) have
argued that ‘‘economic’’ processes are arbitrarily defined and embedded within the
larger social world.
leaving other factors, such as the effects of culture, to be theorized
and/or modeled separately (Martin, 2000).
We recognize that these notions may appear esoteric and methodologically intractable to those in LCS. In what follows, therefore,
we offer a form of disciplinary translation: we break down economic geography’s contributions into discrete and tractable concepts that are likely to be most relevant to land change science,
especially in terms of overcoming persistent conceptual roadblocks
within the field (see Table 1). Throughout, we identify points of
empirical connection with the intention of accelerating the up-take
of EG concepts into LCS.
3.1. The economy: from separate sphere to socially embedded
In a fundamental contrast to neoclassical approaches, scholarship in EG questions how those processes that we think of as ‘‘economic’’ are but a particular type of relationship embedded within a
larger web of social interactions, including human–environment
relationships. In other words, there is no ‘‘socioeconomic,’’ only
the ‘‘social.’’ For example, economic geographers have drawn
attention to the artificiality of the boundaries between the allegedly economic and non-economic, by pointing to the ways in
which interpersonal (seeming ‘‘non-economic’’) dynamics, such
as trust and communication, are critical to the transaction of business (Granovetter, 1985; Peck, 2005) (Fig. 1).
Similarly, transactions that appear to be guided only by the
‘‘invisible hand’’ of the market are shown to be constantly
D.K. Munroe et al. / Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
produced through (often conflictive) negotiations between a variety of state and non-state entities that might not otherwise appear
to be ‘‘economic’’ actors (Amin, 2004; Barnes, 1988; Barnes and
Hayter, 2005). Further, non-human entities are recognized for
‘‘pushing back’’ against their enrollment in the social world. Water
and carbon, for example, have been shown to repeatedly confound
their rationalization (Bumpus and Liverman, 2009; Bakker, 2007).
When economic activity is so fundamentally the product of interdependence among multiple and heterogeneous actors, and so
shaped by cultural, political and environmental processes, former
isolation of those activities within a discrete sphere becomes
untenable and must be replaced with their conceptual embedding
within the social.
To achieve this embedding requires thinking about the ‘‘economic’’ as something that is specific to a particular space and
time—and yet is not ‘‘idiosyncratic’’ in the ways posited in LCS.
That is, because of the temporal/historical specificity of economic
activity, economic geographers emphasize the importance of
understanding how what is considered economic is instituted, or
comes to function, in a given context. For example, the conceptualization of economic actors as independent beings subject only to
financial constraints was an idea that arose in the West from a
specific, post-World War II era characterized by optimism, American imperialism, and unprecedented global economic growth
(O’Sullivan and Haklay, 2000). In other words, markets are never
‘‘pre-given’’ (i.e. natural and universal) and the lesson is that we
must always attend to the processes underlying their development
and the development of other forms of exchange (barter, reciprocal
kinship relationships, etc.). In this view, economic specificity is not
idiosyncratic variation from the universal market model, but is
always the inevitable conjuncture of processes that constitute
patterns that stretch across space and time.
Thinking of markets—whether for land, commodities, access
rights, or pollution credits—not as naturally occurring but rather
as the ongoing and dynamic production of social relations has vital
conceptual implications. For example, space ceases to be a
backdrop for social action. Rather, commodities are produced, distributed and consumed through geographical relationships: connections of people, firms, institutions and resources through
space are the process (Coe et al., 2008). Where there are capitalistic
markets, there is a history, and the imprint of particular actors
(Mansfield, 2004), in creating and maintaining those (market)
institutions (Hayter, 2003). Therefore, the presence or absence of
recognizable profit- or utility-maximizing actors is an outcome of
past processes both within and connecting across specific geographical locations (Bergmann, 2012; Barnes and Hayter, 2005);
‘‘markets’’ (or ‘‘market failures’’) themselves cannot, then, be the
explanation of current trends, much less an unproblematic solution
to environmental problems.
LC scientists clearly grasp many elements of the embeddedness
concept, as aspects of this notion are found across much existing
work. For example, LCS research has highlighted the importance
of cooperation among highly diverse land users with divergent
goals who negotiate access to multiple environmental goods
(Nagendra and Southworth, 2009a; Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006).
Indeed, Ostrom (2005) and others show that coordination and collaboration in land-use institution-building often happens under
surprising circumstances—a far cry from the atomistic notion of action envisioned by neoclassical economists. Further, several LCS
scholars have found that nonmonetary concerns often trump
financial benefits in shaping land-use decisions (Koontz, 2001;
Matthews et al., 2009), pointing to the inadequacy of economic logic alone for understanding landscape change. Other work emphasizes the critical role of corporate actors in shaping land-use
change and policy (Rudel, 2007). In sum, LCS as a community
already recognizes there is much about so-called ‘‘economic’’
17
behavior that obviously incorporates the social. That being said,
for these insights to become fully un-tethered from neoclassical
economics requires two further analytical steps that, to our knowledge, no LC scientist has yet taken.
First, building on LCS’s acknowledgement of the diversity of social–environmental relationships, the next step is to recognize that
variation itself is not anomalous but rather fundamental to how
land use works. In other words, there is not a general or global
pattern (from which local cases may deviate) that can either be
discerned or expected. Rather, it is variation itself that should be
expected, and the analyst should then explain how and why common processes take particular and even unique forms (see for
example, Parker et al., 2008). Doing so recognizes that specific contexts and histories are always part of explaining how particular
processes ‘‘come to ground’’ as they do: economic–environment
dynamics should be understood to be essentially diverse.
After accepting that market-based economic development is an
inherently spatial process whose patterns reflect the diverse manifestation of economic processes in particular contexts, the next necessary step is to recognize that the economic playing field is never
level. As we have noted, LCS scholars have recognized differences in
the distribution of wealth and resources over space, and understood
that particular actors are enabled or constrained by larger political
and/or economic contexts. This represents, however, only partial
‘‘buy in’’ to economic-geography concepts. As a form of social
relation (see above), however, it is imperative to push this understanding further to ensure that economic activities are always
understood to be marked by the relational play of power between
actors; this is inherent to the dynamic and cannot be escaped (Peck
and Sheppard, 2010; Smith, 2008). Take, for example, the staggering expansion of soybean production in the Argentinian Chaco.
Zak et al. (2008) identify ‘‘climate, technological and socioeconomic’’ underlying drivers. While not inaccurate, lumping multiple
processes under the label ‘‘socioeconomic’’ may obscure the critical
roles of trade, financial institutions, and global agribusiness investment strategies in transforming this landscape, in part by enabling
the alienation of land from smallholders and indigenous peoples.
Taken together, then, these insights form the core of an alternative approach to economy–environment relations that can allow
LCS to integrate into their science a model for how the economy
works in practice. Consider, for example, the degree to which the
development of carbon markets reflects ongoing negotiations between international organizations, NGOs, nation-states, and various industrial actors (Bumpus and Liverman, 2009). Similarly,
Agrawal et al. (2008) argue that effective forest management goes
far beyond the local land-tenure arrangements (e.g., secure title
equals long-term investments in ecological goods). Rather, their
work shows how forest communities are by necessity deeply
familiar with the global trade in commodities such as biofuels;
these connections, in turn, reference and enroll an ever more heterogeneous international policy community (comprising multiple
state and nonstate actors). Interrogating how economic activity
in practice occurs through social relationships and social interactions requires attention to the interdependency of the various
types of actors, leveraging the local environment in conflict and
in cooperation.
From an acceptance of and commitment to the embedded nature of economic processes through which land-use change occurs,
we now turn to conceptualizations of the spatial organization of
those changes.
3.2. Teleconnections: from nested scales to stretched and layered
networks
Central intellectual traditions in LCS historically prioritized local processes. The earliest studies focused on using field-based
18
D.K. Munroe et al. / Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
Fig. 2. Conceptualizations of scale and teleconnections. (a) Constitutive hierarchies.
Spatial scales as nested containers of interaction (adapted from Gibson et al., 2000).
Hierarchies are constituted by local processes and actors. Global processes result
from the aggregation of lower level actions. (b) Sites as networked. Telecoupled
human–natural systems (adapted from Liu et al., 2013). Local sites are more or less
contained systems but are networked to other sites through flows of interactions.
Production–consumption relationships cause spillovers (social or environmental) to
other locations. (c) Teleconnections and the resulting ‘‘power geometries.’’ Global
production networks (adapted from Coe et al., 2008). Interactions between
producers, consumers, and institutions are often both direct and indirect. International flows have local impacts and local actors will influence and/or be influenced
by national and international institutions. Scales are constitutively produced
through flows across actors; scales stretch through overlapping extents. As such,
teleconnections will be governed both formally and informally by constituent
actors in the system at all scales.
methods, ethnography and economic modeling to contextualize
(and ‘‘socialize’’) the remote sensing pixel (Liverman et al., 1998).
Though there always has been attention to environmental and
social processes that flow through the empirical boundaries of a
local study area, accounting for these extralocal forces reinforced
a nested scales conceptualization of space (Gibson et al., 2000)
(Fig. 2, panel a).
More recently, there has been a growing interest in the LCS
community to consider ‘‘globalization’’ which has resulted in an
emphasis on ‘‘teleconnections.’’ In climate science, teleconnections
refer to a response in, for instance, temperature or precipitation in
one location linked to a physical process operating in another location. The term has since been taken up by land-change science to
recognize how the underlying causes of environmentally significant land-use change may span great distances (Seto et al.,
2012). For example, new Chinese forest conservation policies
may be associated with increased deforestation in Laos, or even
in Argentina.
Current research in LCS on teleconnections emphasizes that
concepts like sustainability applied to a site or region must be adjusted to account for flows of energy, food, fiber, capital, people
and waste in and out of that site (Erb et al., 2009; Liu et al.,
2013; Seto et al., 2012). These studies emphasize the need to
understand the material impacts of global trade (Liu et al., 2013)
and to develop and coordinate policies so that land use is allocated
in an efficient manner globally (e.g., maximizing yields while minimizing environmental impact) (Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011).
While this new effort to link local land change to the extralocal
is an important development, empirical attempts to measure the
effect of teleconnections without consideration of embeddedness
reify concepts of space as container (Fig. 2, panel b). Analysts are,
in effect, simply accounting for flows in and out of that container
(Amin, 2002). This intellectual trap is most evident in REDD+ language: if a country conserves forest locally, but its importation of
forest products leads to deforestation elsewhere, that is displaced
deforestation or ‘‘leakage’’ (Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011). And
while considerable effort is made to quantify spatial interdependency in forest cover (Kastner et al., 2011), normative discussion
quickly focuses on technical details to derive more precise
accounting of socioeconomic and environmental ‘‘trade-offs’’ (Liu
et al., 2013).
In contrast, many economic geographers employ a ‘‘global production network’’ approach (GPN) (Coe et al., 2008). Comparatively, the GPN framework focuses on some of the same concepts
as the teleconnections approach: identifying and explicating layers
of spatial interaction, and highlighting ways in which local
decision-making is shaped and constrained by the institutional
context. As in the teleconnections framework, the flows between
production and consumption are made explicit so that two end
‘‘nodes’’ of the network are considered, as well as any intermediate
stages along the way. Examining this network provides a specific
insight into how the commodity chain operates, allowing us to
consider how value is distributed across space (Fig. 2, panel c).
One key distinction, however, is that the actors within this network
may have different degrees of embeddedness in a local context; i.e.,
they may be more or less able to leverage local resources or to act
across international borders. Doreen Massey coined the phrase
‘‘power geometry’’ to make the point that:
. . .different social groups and different individuals are placed in
very distinct ways in relation to those flows and interconnections (Massey, 1993: 61).4
4
She does not explicitly speak to environmental problems here, but how various
environmental features are enrolled into value chains will also depend on how actors
are positioned across contexts.
D.K. Munroe et al. / Geoforum 52 (2014) 12–21
Thus, particular actors or stakeholders have relatively more
influence on what or who moves, how they move it, and how the
gains or losses resulting from these movements are distributed.
Second, in GPN frameworks, the institutional context might differ at the sites of production and consumption, and there may be
multiple layers of this regulation. Negotiation between these varied institutional actors could constrain or enable land users at
the site of production. Most critically, this framework allows us
to theorize the influence of any number of intermediaries (e.g.,
TNCs, NGOs) that link producers to consumers. In this way, the
GPN approach (Coe et al., 2004) provides a framework to conceptualize and understand international integration and its often asymmetric impacts on social and economic development (Henderson
et al., 2002; Benner et al., 2011). A GPN approach, therefore, necessitates investigating how and for whom access to global resources
and dependence on local resources changes, with the possibility
that for some people and places, increasing interconnections generates fewer, rather than more, options, thereby creating greater
dependence on local resources and thus greater vulnerability. Current LCS approaches are unable to deal with such asymmetries,
positing instead that global interconnections necessarily create
livelihood options beyond local resources and reduce the risk of
relying on such resources (Liu et al., 2013: Table 4).
Were LCS scholars to adopt a GPN approach to global interconnection, LCS would be better positioned to address key phenomena
associated with land change today, such as the accelerated pace of
global land speculation. Similarly, GPN would help to address the
dire lack of analysis of the behavior of corporations, whose spatial
decision making is often key, for example, to road building and
deforestation in the tropics (Rudel, 2007). Moreover, GPN could enable more careful attention to the ways in which the expansion of
markets and changes in policy often go hand-in-hand with the lobbying activity of private sector actors (Jepson, 2006).
GPN, then, provides tools for understanding the strategic evaluation by transnational actors of possible land investment opportunities in distal locations. In some instances, major shifts in
geography can be observed by one corporate actor, such as the impacts of Monsanto on the development and implementation of
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) (Cocklin et al., 2008). In
other cases, there are long-term historical legacies, such as the
ongoing role of tobacco companies dating back to a colonial era
in Tanzania (Geist et al., 2008). From the perspective of local land
systems, distal rural areas may compete with each other for investment, and thus land acquisition could represent another global
‘‘race to the bottom’’ whereby a desire for lowest-cost land acquisition by TNCs pushes back against local land-use institutions and
environmental conditions, potentially undermining food security
locally or regionally (Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011).
When we adopt a GPN approach to thinking about teleconnections and the resulting land-use changes, we can then ask, how do
teleconnections transform landscapes? Rather than thinking about
teleconnections as the exception to otherwise local change, or the
local as deviation from a generalized global relationship, we reorient analysis to consider local situations as constituted through
their relative positions within processes stretching across varying
spatial extents.
4. Conclusions
This paper presents a personal read of the potential intersections between LCS and EG. We argue for greater engagement,
focusing on the conceptual contributions that EG can make to
LCS frameworks. Several contemporary processes exemplify the
need for conceptual reworkings in LCS. The world’s urban and rural
systems are characterized by unprecedented interdependence. The
19
valuation of natural resources for financial and nonfinancial benefits as part of climate change adaptation and mitigation occur
through social interactions among various state and private actors.
Questions loom on the horizon regarding how to balance food production and conservation goals in a socially and environmental
desirable manner (Munroe et al., 2013). Understanding these processes requires new scrutiny of economy–environment relationships, and critical reflection on whether our current methods are
sufficiently flexible for engaging these challenges in rigorous ways.
LCS as a community has considerable policy relevance as one
arena through which geographers can make an impact in larger debates. To date, however, LCS is relatively silent on several pressing
issues produced by global economic integration. These concerns
include how and for whom access to and dependence on resources
is changing, how market interconnections are produced by particular actors in particular contexts, and what these powerful actors
stand to gain. We recognize, however, that work along these lines
will be difficult, and much is at stake. In addition, some of these
ideas are currently epistemologically irreconcilable.5 Yet, because
this work is necessary, we hold out hope that effort toward this
end is possible.
Therefore, one central priority would be to match the LCS community’s ongoing empirical efforts with comparable emphasis on
conceptualization. We emphasize that this need not lead to allencompassing models of everything (Lee, 1973). Rather, more explicit examination of current conceptual assumptions could shed
light on the tradeoffs in terms of what research questions can or
cannot be answered. For example, models that assume local
land-change to be ‘‘endogenous’’ while changes in policies or markets are ‘‘exogenous’’ can only yield limited insights on corporate
actors, new polycentric institutions and other 21st century trends.
Because land-change science is a multidisciplinary field, there
has been considerable openness to adopting new perspectives
and approaches, and borrowing liberally from multiple disciplines
(Robinson et al., 2007). We hope LCS can build on this openness by
greater engagement with concepts from EG, even though—or indeed because—these perspectives challenge some of the core
assumptions of LCS work to date.
Acknowledgements
This research received support from the U.S. National Science
Foundation, Award # 1010314, ‘‘CNH: Collaborative Research:
Explaining Socioecological Resilience Following Collapse: Forest
Recovery in Appalachian Ohio.’’ We received useful feedback on
earlier versions of this manuscript from Robin Leichenko and Dawn
C. Parker. Finally, the authors would like to thank three anonymous
reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
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