Geographies of Production II: Political Economic Geographies: A pluralist direction?

Within economic geography, it has been argued that political economy approaches have diminished in both prevalence and influence to the detriment of both the sub-discipline and to human geography as a whole. This report challenges such a perspective, arguing that political economic geographies remains very much vibrant and engaging in contemporary economic geography and in the way in which economic geographers engages with the nature of the contemporary global economy. It argues that the perceived retreat of political economy approaches corresponds more to a diversification of the ways in which political economic thinking is integrated into more recent economic geography, acknowledging that this does reduce the apparent coherence around a singular articulation or approach to geographical political economy. However, it also seeks to demonstrate through reviewing recent pluralist theoretical work that political economic geography has broadened its theoretical framework and thus made significant contributions to ongoing debates around the geographies of production within the sub-discipline that had not previously been the object of political economic analysis.