Everyday geographies of market transition: Agro‐science, socio‐technical relations, and the contingencies of market making in peri‐urban Lhasa, Tibet

Abstract

<p> <span>State-promoted and market-oriented horticultural production has fundamentally reshaped land use and agricultural economy in peri-urban Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. This paper examines two scenarios amidst this transformation. In the first, peri-urban land has been valorised for vegetable production through the erection of greenhouses and the introduction of agronomic science. However, Tibetans refrain from participating directly, preferring to lease the land to Han migrants, and citing structural inequalities between Han and Tibetans and Tibetan work ethic as explanation. In the second, the municipal government is more proactive in introducing agro-science and providing technical training to enrol Tibetans. However, the participation of Tibetans is selective and partial, contingent on the same non-market rationalities that Tibetans invoke to justify non-participation in the first scenario. This paper explicates the diverging modes of participation for Tibetans by engaging with the Callonian approach on economisation and marketisation, and interrogating how socio-technical relations established among humans, material infrastructure and agro-science culminate in variegated calculative and non-calculative agencies. Focusing in particular on the structural relations and cultural conventions that frustrate the unilinear enactment of a market order, this study contributes to the geographies of marketisation in two ways. First, it works with an analytical framework centred on the ongoing dynamic of framing, overflowing and reframing to argue that the marketisation approach can be expanded to account for the encounters between market agencements and local socio-cultural contingencies. Geographically, second, it also contributes to the agenda of interrogating diverse market variants and the richness of economic differences in real space-times. © 2023 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers).</span> <br></p>