Remittance-scapes: The contested geographies of remittance management

Abstract

The management of remittances represents a multi-billion industry that is concerned with how these flows can be tapped into by a wide range of institutional, state and private sector actors. This article advances the concept of remittance-scapes to signal the extensive work that is implicated in constructing remittances as development finance across four relational spaces of remittance management, namely, remittance preproduction-, production-, circulation- and reception-scapes. While human geographers have played a key role in unpacking many of the geographies of remittance management, I argue that thinking of remittances through the -scape provides new theoretical and empirical avenues to researching remittances.