Everyday geoeconomics: The belt and road initiative in Oceania

Abstract

Academic writing on geoeconomics often neglects the lived experiences of local scale actors. This commentary develops the idea of ‘everyday geoeconomics’ to broaden the conceptual and methodological tools available to scholars when examining state-led geoeconomic initiatives. Everyday geoeconomics includes a range of local responses to policies. It can be used to view these social practices as forms of text that are as important as formal, practical, popular texts referred to in critical geopolitics when analysing the spatial dimensions of economic change. Deemphasising lived experiences in geoeconomic work denotes the return of power/knowledge in human geography after its deconstruction within critical geopolitics. The commentary is enriched by reference to China's Belt and Road Initiative, a state policy held up as a model geoeconomic strategy. The work situates the Belt and Road Initiative in Oceania, where popular and academic debate has polarised around a statist discourse of China's presence as a positive or negative force. This polarisation relegates the lived experiences of residents and newly arrived Chinese as irrelevant to the Belt and Road and leaves us with an incomplete understanding about how those transactions and reactions are shaping global politics.