Nature’s infrastructural turn: natural capital, austerity and the governance of trees

Keywords: Green infrastructure, natural capital, financialization, trees, austerity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 48

Abstract

This paper will argue that urban nature has experienced an infrastructural turn over the last decade, making trees, rivers and parks amenable to the same political economic dynamics as traditional grey infrastructure. Indeed, it could be argued that this is the overarching purpose of green infrastructure, aligning urban ecological systems with government strategy on economic growth and development. Focusing on Greater Manchester, this paper will argue that trees have been instrumentalized, financialized, infrastructuralized. This infrastructuralization of nature has transformed existing governance arrangements, which is not only adapting environmental management to austerity but delivering it through green infrastructure planning and design. In particular, the paper will consider how the natural capital approach, which Greater Manchester is pioneering as DEFRA’s urban case study, is being hard-wired into green infrastructure delivery, economizing the language of environmental policy, bringing different actors into relationship, and providing a technical basis for the political undertaking of public sector reform. At a time when the urban political ecology agenda is increasingly being pushed to the hinterland to avoid charges of methodological cityism, the production of urban nature in the heart of major urban centres has never required more critical attention. While infrastructure has long been interrogated as a key mediator in the production of nature, different questions, concerns and analytics come to the fore when nature itself has been turned into infrastructure, with profound implications for urban democratic politics.