Economization and Beyond: (Re)Composing Livelihoods in Maine, USA

Abstract

Effectively engaging questions of sustainable regional development requires a substantive rethinking of the pervasive categories of ‘economy’, ‘society’, and ‘environment’. Çaliskan and Callon's analytical approach to “economization”, a tracing of the material-discursive production of the economic, is one important starting point for such work. Taking the contemporary field of economic development in the state of Maine (USA) as a case study, and drawing on fifteen recent interviews with a wide array of development professionals in this region, I pursue a critical analysis of regional economization and its accompanying constructions of society and environment. While affirming the economization concept as a useful tool for ethicopolitical analysis, I challenge this strategy at its limits. The tracing of successful framings and their overflows risks performatively affirming these constructions by assuming that the composition of collective well-being takes the ultimate and successful form of an ‘economy’. Analysis of economization must be accompanied by other explorations of the ways in which the work of regional economic developers might be articulated. I propose a reading of development processes and struggles in terms of the composition of livelihoods—destabilizing economy, society, and environment and beckoning toward a ‘transversal’ politics that might open up possibilities for unexpected alliances and alternative regional development pathways.

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