Speculations and Reorientation

Water is a precious resource, and river systems across the world are under threat from over-extraction, mismanagement, poor farming techniques and climate change. In Part One of this episode, we explore the systematic and deliberate mismanagement of the Murray-Darling with Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells, whose 2021 book Sold Down the River: How Robber Barons and Wall Street Traders Cornered Australia's Water Market develops a novel understanding of the financialisation of the Murray-Darling Basin water market, which is discussed in detail. We finish this discussion on the subject  of Post-Neoliberalism, which touches on novel questions regarding possible future ways to manage the Murray-Darling within a reformed global system. This will then be the focus of Part Two of this conversation.

While many have declared the death of neoliberalism since the 2008 Financial Crisis, what we have actually seen is a deepening of neoliberal logic and practice. Neoliberalism is, as George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison point out, an invisible doctrine. It seems to rule everything, but it rules from nowhere. The following is an interview with the German Political Scientist Dieter Plehwe, one of the world's foremost thinkers on what became known as the Neoliberal Thought Collective