Reshaping Economic Geography? Producing Spaces of Inclusive Development

The World Development Report 2009 discusses a crucial development challenge—that of understanding spatially uneven development. The report lays out a series of policy responses to spatial unevenness that are intended to mobilize the growth-enhancing advantages of unbalanced development while ensuring inclusive development. However, the report mobilizes a narrow view of economic development that is disconnected from place, politics, and society. In geography, which lends its name to the report, economies are theorized as embedded—as produced in and through space, rather than merely on it. Geography and spatial patterns are constitutive coproducers of political-economic processes, not just outcomes. I elaborate how a critical geographic understanding of an “everywhere embedded economy” (Peck 2005) highlights the inseparability of economic processes from the social, political, historical, and geographic contexts which give them meaning. I connect the idea of embedded economy to a consideration of centrality of care to a humane and inclusive development. I argue that the report’s emphasis on labor mobility as a key mechanism for enhancing development ignores the global division of care work that is itself built on the invisibility and undervaluation of care in mainstream versions of economic development. I conclude that “thinning borders” will not resolve questions of inequality but rather will allow those who are more powerful to exploit the resultant power differentials expressed in migration and care deficits across the globe.