Chapter 21 - Geographical Imaginations of Pension Divestment Campaigns

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Doreen Massey’s early and ongoing dedication to understanding the inherent interconnection of the “social” and the “economic” in the production of space, place and scale made her an economic geographer ahead of her time. Her interests and commitments were heterodox and wide-ranging; she refused to be confined by sub disciplinary conventions that still channel economic, labour, urban and feminist geographers along particular topical, conceptual and theoretical lines, and she was deeply engaged with the ongoing work of probing foundational assumptions (what Castree (2004), at once critical and celebratory, called critical human geography’s “shibboleths”). Her formative work on spatial divisions of labour; her insistence on the relational nature of place, space and identity; her concept of “power-geometries”; and her elaboration of the notion of geographical imaginations ranged across thematic concerns. These concerns included economic (“industrial”) restructuring, urbanization and the world city, the concept of space in social theory and political philosophy, and neoliberalism and conjunctural politics. Her work is also grounded, unafraid to speak to regional- and national-level processes, globalizing trends and “the urban” from a localist standpoint, whether in London, Manchester, a Cambridge science park, or on a train to Keswick in England’s Lake District.

Given this breadth, it is perhaps unsurprising that economic and labour geographers (myself included!) – most notably in the last decade or so, after building on the insights in Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984b) – often acknowledge, but seldom fully engage, Massey’s work. In this chapter I want to explore how Massey’s articulation of geographical imaginations relates to her concept of power-geometries, and the utility of these ideas for exploring the pension divestment movement (that is, the movement to pressure pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry because of the need to combat climate change). I examine a subset of arguments for and against divestment grounded in legal debates about fiduciary duty, and explore how Massey’s approach can be used to highlight the dynamics of institutional power that these debates reveal – and the political strategies for interrogating and reshaping those dynamics.