Emerging neo-liberalising processes in New Zealand's land-based sector: A post structural political economy framing using emergence diagrams

The paper draws on Post Structural Political Economy (PSPE) to narrate and interrogate the emergence of neo-liberalising processes connected with New Zealand's land-based industries. It departs from conventional representations of economy, government and industry, by creating Emergence Diagrams (EDs) as a narrative technology. The diagrams are a methodological intervention in knowledge production that brings meso-level theorising and meso-level empirics into the same framing. The EDs are directed towards enlivening thinking and discussion about practices, possibilities and choices in New Zealand's investment environment as part of a conversation that the future might be otherwise. The paper begins by setting out the PSPE approach, indicates current thinking on emergence, and what it can offer in re-appraising evolving market systems. It then addresses and extends recent theoretical work in economic geography on neo-liberalising processes into a meso-level theoretical framing that can be used with meso-level empirics. The paper then considers steps in narrating situated accounts of emergence in the New Zealand context with the long term aim of reinvigorating the generation of and use of social knowledge. It establishes first, the insistent governmental market-making aspirations and action affecting the sector. Second, as a contextualising strategy to disturb standard accounts and to reveal the diversity and variegated nature of neo-liberalising influences, the main privatising moment of each industry in the sector is set in an overview of emerging features. Third, mindful of the new and often counter evidence of the preceding steps, the EDs of the apple and dairy industries are then constructed to reveal multiple dimensions of the collective assembling activity of market-making. The paper concludes with reflections on the potentialities of emergence narratives and the use of EDs in the development of enactive capabilities and politics in economic geography.