The South Carolina "Lowcountry," known for its antebellum history, has been rapidly transforming from a landscape shaped by an agricultural and natural resource economy to one also shaped by a real estate economy. In this chapter, we explore the role of specific actors in materializing the exurban vision through the planning process: specifically, we examine the formation of for-profit and nonprofit neoliberal environmental governance regimes in the ecologically sensitive landscapes of East Edisto and the Savannah River Preserve. Through a political ecological approach, we used participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis to explore how these neoliberal actors in environmental planning-both within nonprofit and for-profit entities-develop a moral discourse that shapes how people will live on the landscape. In contrast to literature suggesting that the commodification of nature in contemporary neoliberalization results in a "tragedy of the commons," we found corporations and civil society filling a gap where state governance has been diminished in the neoliberal context, motivated by their "emotional responsibility" for the future of local cultural traditions related to the natural landscape.
CITATION STYLE
Watson, A., & Skaggs, K. (2016). Death by a thousand cuts? The moral terrain of neoliberal environmental governance in the South Carolina Lowcountry, USA. In A Comparative Political Ecology of Exurbia: Planning, Environmental Management, and Landscape Change (pp. 147–178). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29462-9_7
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