Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations Introduction to the Special Issue

摘要

Privatization is an increasingly prevalent and polarizing theme within broad political debates about economic development, inequality, and social justice. This special issue contributes to developing a geographical analysis of privatization by examining its role within the larger project of neoliberalism and analyzing its significance for remaking contemporary nature-society relations. The term privatization is often used to describe a transfer in control and/or ownership of business and industry from the public realm to the private. The privatization of Russian state-owned enterprises in oil, electricity, telecommunications, and so on in the post-Soviet era is a prime example. This type of privatization is really a variant of a more general process of limiting access to resources through enclosure, in which things are made into property that can be owned, controlled, and transferred. The enclosure of land in England and Scotland in the eighteenth century, as described by Marx, is the archetypal example of this form of privatization. While these two processes (ie a shift from public to private and a more general process of enclosure) appear in some ways distinct, what connects them is that they are both about allocation of resources through practices of ownership and control, and in particular control vested in private entities.