The Dictionary of Human Geography

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higher proportion of all new housing. Most pid

residents are relatively affluent, using aterri-

torialitystrategy to distance themselves from

perceivednegative externalities. rj

Suggested reading

Barton and Silverman (1994); McKenzie (1994).

privatization An increase in private owner-

ship, control and action relative to public own-

ership, control and action. This may occur in

three main ways. Assets and activities can be

transferred from the public sector to the pri-

vate sector (e.g. when a state-owned company

is sold to private shareholders or the cleaning

of a public building is contracted-out to a

private company); private interests can

increase their influence in the public sphere

(e.g. when private retailers are given greater

control over the uses ofpublic spaceoutside

their shops); or private provision may grow

faster than public provision (e.g. if more pri-

vate than public housing is built in an area, the

local housing stock becomes relatively more

privatized). Privatization is often understood

as one element of the rise of neo-liberalpol-

itical economy(seeneo-liberalism).

Privatization has been prominent in many

countries since the 1980s. Three major drivers

of privatization can be identified. The rise of

New Right politics during the 1980s in several

Western countries (notably the USA under the

Reagan administration and the UK under the

government of Margaret Thatcher) was asso-

ciated with economic policies that emphasized

marketsolutions and the rolling back of the

state. This led to major sales of public assets

(from utility companies to housing) and an

expansion of private provision of services

through contracting out and competitive ten-

dering. A second phase of privatization was

associated with thestructural adjustment

programmes require by theinternational

monetary fundas a condition of much of its

lending to low-income countries. The third

driver has been the collapse of statesocialism

and the reintroduction of capitalist relations of

production in former state socialist countries

(cf.post-socialism).

Geographers’ interests in privatization focus

on the unevenness of the process and its out-

comes within and between countries, on the

effect of privatization in generating wider pro-

cesses of socio-spatialrestructuring,onits

implications for understandings of statespati-

alitiesand on the privatization of space itself,

through the growth of such things as semi-

private shopping malls and urban gated

communities, and the sale of public land to

private developers.

A binary view of privatization as a straight

switch from public to private may be over-

simplified. It risks neglecting the role of the

‘third sector’ of voluntary organizations,ngos,

civic associations and the social economy,

which are neither wholly public nor narrowly

private. In addition, marketization – the intro-

duction of internal trading and quasi-markets

in the public sector, reductions in state subsid-

ies to the private sector and the growth of user

charges for public services – blurs the bound-

ary between the public and the private, as does

the widespread use of public–private partner-

ships in thegovernanceof social and eco-

nomic development.

Privatization has been an important source

of capitalaccumulationand corporate prof-

itability since the 1980s, but it has also been

the target of major political protests. The pri-

vatization ofwaterdistribution in low-income

countries has been of particular concern to

protestors, because of the negative effect of

charges on poor households’ access to clean

water. jpa

Suggested reading

Han and Pannell (1999); Mansfield (2004);

Painter (1991); Shiva (2002).

probabilism A thesis about the relationship

betweencultureandnature, which proposes

that while the physical environment does not

determine how human societies will react to its

influence, it renders some responses more

likely or probable than others. Probabilism

thus aims to occupy a philosophical position

somewhere betweenenvironmental deter-

minismandpossibilism. While debates over

this issue were most characteristic of late-

nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centurygeog-

raphy, recent reassertions about the power of

the environment to channel human history in

certain directions – such as those of Jared

Diamond (1987) – have reopened aspects of

the debate in some quarters (for a critique,

see Judkins, Smith and Keys, 2008: cf.

cultural ecology; political ecology).

Despite its abstract clarity, in historical terms

probabilism was perfectly compatible with the

possibilist geographies associated with the

French School of human geography led

by Paul Vidal de la Blache (see Lukermann,

1965). dl

Suggested reading

Spate (1968).

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_P Final Proof page 585 1.4.2009 3:20pm

PROBABILISM