JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 22 Issue 1 Page 145-176 | http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2016.641 | jwsr.org World-Ecology and Ireland: The Neoliberal Ecological Regime Sharae Deckard University College Dublin
[email protected] Abstract Since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the socio-economic particularity of neoliberal capitalism in its Irish manifestation has increasingly been critiqued, but little attention has been paid to neoliberalism as ecology within Ireland. This article conducts an exploratory survey of the characteristics of the Irish neoliberal ecological regime during and after the Celtic Tiger, identifying the opening of new commodity frontiers (such as fracking, water, agro-biotechnology, and biopharma) constituted in the neoliberal drive to appropriate and financialize nature. I argue for the usefulness of applying not only the tools of world-systems analysis, but also Jason W. Moore’s world-ecological paradigm, to analysis of Ireland as a semi-periphery. What is crucial to a macro- ecological understanding of Ireland’s experience of the neoliberal regime of the world-ecology is the inextricability of its financial role as a tax haven and secrecy jurisdiction zone from its environmental function as a semi-peripheral pollution and water haven. More expansive, dialectical understandings of “ecology” as comprising the whole of socio-ecological relations within the capitalist world-ecology—from farming to pharma to financialization—are vital to forming configurations of knowledge able not only to take account of Ireland’s role in the environmental history of capitalism, but also to respond to the urgent ecological crises of the neoliberal present.