Confronting the Challenges of the Post-Crisis Global Economy & Environment
I accepted the invitation to Chair the 2010 Conference of the Royal Geographical Society in April 2009. The global financial crisis was raging. Capitalism, which had nearly ground to a halt in September 2008, had been saved by determined intervention but credit markets were effectively frozen and economies across the world had plunged into recession. Looking ahead a year and a half to the Conference, the obvious choice was not merely to centre its theme around research agendas directly related to the crisis but, most importantly, to look forward to the challenges to be confronted as the global economy began to move out of crisis. How would geographers, both human and physical, respond via their research questions to those challenges, and to what extent would they be able to set cross-disciplinary research agendas prompted by the crisis and by subsequent economic and societal readjustment?
In the intervening year, as recovery has slowly began to take hold - albeit at very different rates across the global economy - the nature of those challenges, both practical and intellectual, have become clearer. For the social sciences, as Sylvia Walby in a paper for the Academy of Social Sciences has recently argued, their failure to predict the financial crisis and to articulate the risks of ‘over-financialisation’ implies the need to develop a post-crisis research agenda centred firmly around the changing interrelationship of finance with social institutions. That is to say, focused not only issues of regulation, governance and legality but also civil society aspects of financialisation such as consumerism and its alternatives. For the environmental sciences, related issues have concerned the impact of the crisis and the uneven recovery of economies on the politics of both climate change research and global emission targets. Transition pathways to low-carbon economies have simultaneously become more vital yet more problematic.
A year after my acceptance of the Chair it is now clear that the UK economy, post-crisis, will inevitably be restructured to have less dependence on financial and business services, and will need to rely to a greater extent on other sectors - such as the creative industries – to drive future growth. The burden of debt and an aging society will reconfigure public services, and UK universities and our own discipline within those institutions will be repositioned. The challenge of developing new environmental industries within a low carbon economy will have to be grasped, and policy makers will inevitably focus on promoting more sustainable and resilient growth within a ‘smart economy’.
Each of these issues, and more, will be covered at the Conference by high-profile plenary session guest speakers. Richard Florida, University of Toronto, will lead off the Conference on Day 1 (Sept 1st) speaking on the creative industries and their role in the post-crisis global economy. On Day 2, David North, Director of Community & Government at Tesco plc, and ex Home Affairs Private Secretary and Senior Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, will address issues of sustainable consumption and development . On Day 3 the Rt Hon Paul Boateng will draw on his recent experience as British High Commissioner to South Africa 2005-09 to consider the impact of the crisis and uneven recovery on the Global South. However, in keeping with the long and valued ‘bottom up’ traditions of the Annual Conference, there will also be a rich and widely varied range of research-group organized sessions covering all aspects of contemporary geographical enquiry.
I look forward to your participation in what promises to be, a lively, topical and engaged conference, which will draw geographers both from the UK and from many other countries.
Professor Neil Wrigley, Conference Chair, University of Southampton