Towards a cultural political economy of the illicit

Abstract

This article intervenes in debates on the illicit in economic geography, notably in the tensions between cultural and political economic approaches. First, it assesses critiques of political economic evaluations of the illicit. It then offers a ‘trading zone’, drawing upon both cultural and political economy, and argues that the two economic epistemologies are complementary, not mutually exclusive. The article instates political and ecological missing links in cultural political economy to foster multidimensional analyses of illicit practices in discursive, material and ecological registers. It concludes by discussing the broader implications of a cultural political economy of the illicit for economic geography.

Global destruction networks and hybrid e-waste economies: Practices and embeddedness in Guiyu, China

“…Comparably, Guiyu serves as a link between the absorption of waste from developed countries and supply of raw materials to manufacturing sectors in the PRD, which re-inserts e-waste materialities and values into GPNs after processes of dissembling, reassembling and re-evaluation. In tracing the connections, circulations, and exchanges between GPNs and GDNs, which are mediated by meanings, values, identities, and social practices, this paper not only corroborates with political economic accounts of the illicit, in testifying that illicit economies are inherently connected to global capitalist economies (Gregson and Crang, 2017;Hudson, 2013;Inverardi-Ferri, 2018), but also attests to Inverardi-Ferri's (2021) view that the cultural economy paradigm and political economic tradition can be conceived as complementary rather than mutually exclusive in researching illicit economic practices.…”

“…An embeddedness perspective centred on socio-cultural practices, as well as the territorial contours and political ramifications of these practices, opens up space for tracing and untangling the hybrid actor-networks of heterogeneous materials, relations, performances and practices within GDNs. It foregrounds the diverse practices, identities, subjectivities, and experiences of situated actors and their cultures in building up an e-waste economy (Inverardi-Ferri, 2021).…”

“…Finally, this approach also sheds light on the growing interest among human geographers in illicit economic activities, the scholarship arguing that illicit economies constitute a normal part of global capitalist economy, rather than a marginal and unusual anomaly (Gregson and Crang, 2017;Hudson, 2020;Inverardi-Ferri, 2021). For example, research on informal recycling, a typical form of illicit practices, has contributed to the agenda of moving economic geography beyond the dualisms of legal/illegal and cultural/economic by 'seeing economy as practice' (Gregson and Crang, 2017: 206).…”

“…Drawing on a case study of an (in)famous e-waste processing hub, namely Guiyu town in Guangdong Province, China, this study interrogates the local dynamics and global-local articulations of e-waste GDNs through an analytical framework that combines a practice orientation and the lens of embeddedness. We argue that to study socio-cultural practices from the lens of communities, places, and actors provide important bottom-up, grounded analysis that is complementary to top-down political-economic geographies of e-waste (Hudson, 2004;Inverardi-Ferri, 2021). Meanwhile, a practice-embeddedness view can potentially enrich the repository of empirical studies employing the conceptual toolkits of GPN/GDN.…”

Deal-making, elite networks and public–private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance

“…They are, however, growing features of urban governance reforms such as Unsolicited Proposals, with accompanying formalised processes (cf. Inverardi-Ferri, 2021). Corruption under neoliberalism was defined as having insider knowledge, thus probity rules kept the private and public apart (preventing, for example, bidders talking to the public agency issuing the tender).…”