Developing methods for future-gazing economic geographies

Abstract

While the future and temporality have received increased attention in economic geography in recent years, there is a need for further understanding of how this creates opportunities and challenges for our methods. Based on our independent research on environmental markets, this paper discusses the methodological challenge of studying markets-in-the-making while taking the force of the future seriously. We first suggest ways of engaging imaginaries as an empirical entry point for studying futures and emergence in economic geography. Secondly, we argue for further experimentation with mixed methods approaches as a means of diversifying methodological engagement with futurity. Finally, by distilling distinct themes from existing empirical research, the paper presents concrete guidance on how to bring ‘present futures’ to the fore when examining marketisation. In doing so, this paper seeks to advance debates on how economic geographers can better engage methodologically with a world in flux.

Introduction

As in the recent past (see Anderson and Adey, 2012), at present, the future has emerged as a particular area of interest in economic geography. This is exemplified by works on the role of futures in understanding regional economic development (Gong, 2024), concerns over the future of work (Reid-Musson et al., 2020), and the management of uncertainty by firms (Fuller, 2023). Change and temporality are by no means unexplored issues in geography or adjacent disciplines (Ho, 2021). Nonetheless, as the notion of technocratic neoliberalism is being increasingly superseded by debates on ‘polycrisis’ (Barnes, 2023), change and turbulence are explicitly influencing our current work and becoming ingrained in popular consciousness.

However, even as our current conjuncture calls for the study of changing and uncertain markets, discussion of appropriate methods for researching these conditions appears somewhat limited in economic geography. In this piece, we discuss ontological, methodological, and thematic (coding) considerations that pertain to the study of markets-in-the-making and futurity. How should geographers collect and analyse data related to emergent economic phenomena while attending to the future? If indeed the world is becoming more uncertain and existing economic patterns unstable (Barnes, 2023), we assert that methodological insights from studying emerging markets will have wider relevance not just for different theories of market making, but also for economic geographers more broadly.

Our contribution is the product of comparative discussions around how we individually examined efforts to construct environmental markets, the roles that particular futures played in each case, and the potential for further disciplinary engagement with markets-in-the-making. Concurring that economic geographers need to develop methodologies for studying the future (Gong, 2024), our contribution first integrates this perspective with debates on performativity, imaginaries, and markets (cf. Christophers, 2014). The subsequent sections discuss the main concern of the paper, which is to develop concrete methods for studying economic futures while explicitly acknowledging their ambiguity and contestability. After a discussion of how to expand the method toolbox, the final section provides a selection of suggested themes for coding data related to economic futures.

Market ontologies

Economic geographers have made a concerted effort to move beyond abstract notions of markets towards grounded and empirically rich analyses, where markets are understood as ‘social and political constructs always “in the making”’ (Berndt et al., 2020: 14). These works have largely orbited two theoretical poles: critical political economy and performativity/socio-technical approaches. Reflective of an increased analytical focus on ideas, concepts and narrative in economic geography (Benner, 2024; Peck et al., 2025), academics working in both these traditions acknowledge the co-constitutive role of discourse in informing processes of becoming or what we might call emergence.

Authors deploying critical political economy – grounded in causal social structures – provide one avenue to make sense of markets and the emergence of economic phenomena. For Cahill (2020: 41), existing capitalist markets need to be understood as constituted through socio-spatial ‘ensembles of institutions, rules and social relations’, which are shaped by established power structures and favour particular actors (e.g., states or large firms). Within this framework, he also notes the generative role of ideas for market making. Similarly, those working in the sub-field of cultural political economy offer relevant attempts at integrating constructivist thinking with the materialism of theorists like Polanyi or Marx. From this ontological perspective, forms of sense and meaning making (culture) are understood as foundational to the institutional evolution of the economy (Sum and Jessop, 2013). While there has been limited geographic application of cultural political economy to explore marketisation (but see Kleibert, 2021), the approach advocated by Sum and Jessop (2013) understands ‘imaginaries’ (discursive ensembles with material supports) as central to the constitution of ‘emergent economic orders’ (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008: 1156).

Taking inspiration from Callon’s (1999) application of actor network theory (ANT), scholars have explored ‘arrangements of people, things, and socio-technical devices that format products, prices, competition, places of exchange, and mechanisms of control’ (Berndt and Boeckler, 2012: 204). Rather than strictly following a ‘pure’ ANT approach, ¹ economic geographers have deployed ‘performativity’ as a key category for describing how components of social reality are established as ‘economic’ or governed by ideas, discourses, and imaginaries of economics (Berndt et al., 2020; Berndt and Boeckler, 2012). Contributions concerned with ‘economization’ emphasise the social construction of economic phenomena, where successful market framings and calculative practices depend on particular discursive and material infrastructures (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010). This making of markets is theorised as an ongoing process, reliant on the agential capabilities of human and non-human actants (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010). Attention, here, is often placed upon how ‘market scripts’ (Berndt et al., 2020), such as neoclassical economic theory, actively work to format the unfolding nature and functioning of market configurations. Christophers’ (2017) work on how the yield curve works to constrain and enable particular forms of future economic activity is an excellent example of the utility of this approach to think beyond the present.

In seeking to consider the role of futures for market making, we concur with calls for productive synthesis of thinking from performativity studies and structural political economy approaches (e.g., Berndt and Boeckler, 2023; Berndt and Wirth, 2019; Cahill, 2020; Christophers, 2017; Hall, 2018). Even as political economists tend to oppose the horizontal ontology of ANT and a priori acknowledge the importance of causal structures, performativity and political economy scholars converge by de facto privileging discourse in analysing emergence. We understand that scholars seeking to empirically examine market-making practices need to be attendant to imagined futures and their role as a distinctive variegated force with material consequences (Gong, 2024; Sum and Jessop, 2013). Further conceptual pollination at the overlap where ‘weaker’ performativity approaches (cf. Christophers, 2014) meet a culturally sensitive political economy seems to us to be a productive means with which to theoretically grapple with the varied ways in which future imaginaries impact market making in the world today. While political economy can provide an evolutionary macro-level understanding of structured relations of power and capital accumulation, performativity approaches assist in illuminating the calculative practices and devices that help mediate specific temporalities. In the next section, we turn to consider how geographers might be best placed to engage the future methodologically.

Methodology, marketisation and futuring

Each of the authors of this contribution carried out empirical work exploring environmental markets in varied states of construction – with two of us independently analysing market-orientated biodiversity compensation schemes, in Chile and Colombia, and the other examining the financialisaton of marine life. In these works, ‘present futures’ (Anderson and Adey, 2012; Beckert, 2013) emerged in pronounced ways. For example, in the face of significant uncertainty, enthusiasm around market-making practices was often driven by yet-unrealised promises of environmental and economic gains. Relatedly, specific market designs appeared to bake in particular versions of the future during their institutional construction. In response to calls for greater methodological transparency in economic geography (Barnes et al., 2007; Barnes and Christophers, 2018; Bathelt and Li, 2020), here we discuss our experiences pertaining to the practicalities of researching future imaginaries in relation to market development, and offer potential means to further capture the role of futurity in such studies.

If one examines the techniques adopted by those that have explored markets-in-the-making, there certainly appears to be a strong preference for qualitative inquiry (see Cardwell, 2015; Christophers et al., 2020; Guermond, 2020; Miller, 2014; Ouma, 2020). Such methods, associated with an intensive case study approach, lend themselves well to genuinely exploratory research, where the objects, relations or structures under investigation need to be uncovered and mapped out (Sayer, 2010). Arguably, the emergent ontological status of markets under construction necessitates the use of open qualitative research methods, providing greater flexibility and the space to be pointed in new empirical and analytical directions.

Our research designs reflected economic geography’s established reliance on key informant interviews (Leichenko, 2018). For the purposes of data collection, we adopted a mixture of purposive and snowball sampling techniques to draw upon both the social networks of interviewees – individuals known – and the knowledge that interviewees possessed regarding other actors engaged in facilitating (or impeding!) market development. While tried-and-tested, this approach proved an effective means of accessing first-hand accounts from actors engaged in the necessary work required for marketisation, while also uncovering themes related to futurity. The semi-structured interview can be used as an effective tool to provoke reflection from research subjects on possible futures (Törrönen, 2018) and temporal perceptions more broadly.

Our studies that examined markets for biodiversity compensation both explored the politics of lawmaking as central to processes of marketisation (cf. Potts, 2020, 2024). This implied engaging with the state, which is ‘an often underacknowledged actor in market-making processes’ (Kleibert, 2021: 319). In the absence of realised large-scale markets, however, the data collection in effect became focused on market antecedents – legal, bureaucratic and technical arrangements – that laid the ground for markets to later emerge. In the Chilean case, this involved document analysis of transcripts of parliamentary discussions, as well as minutes from intra-ministerial meetings and ministerial consultations with non-state actors. This approach was particularly productive in illuminating the micro-politics surrounding the legislative birth of a market, uncovering efforts to discursively conceal marketisation in the context of a violent history of military rule supportive of a neoliberal programme, which combined with the social uprising (Estallido Social) of 2019–2020 and broader histories of civil society resistance. This, critically, shows that rather than markets as such, the focus on markets-in-the-making allowed us to study the actions that the expectation of changing markets set in motion.

Beyond more conventional strategies, there is also scope for economic geographers interested in marketisation and futurity to integrate alternative methods that have had limited application in the field. In particular, studies of market making have so far had limited engagement with quantitative data sources (Ouma et al., 2018). Acknowledging that critical epistemologies and quantitative approaches can be fruitfully combined (Wyly, 2009), economic geographers could easily draw on quantitative and mixed approaches when researching unfolding markets while also informing their findings based on critical theories’ assumptions. Quantitative methods provide some obvious benefits by allowing researchers to clearly illustrate patterns in different visions of the future and show dominant imaginaries. Furthermore, quantitative results can provide a basis for further qualitative investigations that can help explain quantitative patterns.

For example, researchers can use Q-methodology, which adopts qualitative and quantitative components by asking a small sample of research participants to rank a series of statements in a structured way and subsequently reduce answers to underlying factors (Moros et al., 2020; Schutter and Hicks, 2019). Despite its origins in positivist epistemology, there have also been efforts to bring Q-methodology into critical conversation with critical discourse analysis (Sneegas, 2020). Considered deployment of this approach can support efforts to bridge economic geography’s ‘qualitative-quantitative research gap’ (Bathelt and Li, 2020: 103) and would be particularly useful in examining how research subjects’ perceptions of the future converge, what participants see as conditioning market development, and different speculative visions. With similarly inherited positivist assumptions, experimental vignette studies, which resemble conventional survey methods but specifically measure participants’ responses to different scenarios (see Aguinis and Bradley, 2014), could also be considered as a way to establish structured assessments of how actors relate to particular market futures. This could, for example, be used to measure what actors find to be more or less likely scenarios and how they may act under various scenarios.

Moreover, McLaren et al.’s (2023) recent work on the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence demonstrates a further means to engage the future methodologically. These authors used deliberative multi-stakeholder workshops to explore perceptions of greenhouse gas reduction technologies under competing political-economic scenarios, facilitating comparative and collective reflections on imagined futures. Geographers can also draw upon the use of this method in the field of futures studies, where successive workshops have been used to provide a forum for researchers and participants to iteratively co-produce scenarios (Ramirez et al., 2015) – this may go some way towards challenging the power relations inherent in having researchers dictate which futures are discussed. Another, maybe more controversial suggestion, could be to draw on fictional writing (Rabbiosi and Vanolo, 2017). This would allow researchers to use conventionally collected data as a starting point for writing future scenarios of how markets may unfold. By offering a means of speculating (Swedberg, 2021), fiction can be used as qualitative extrapolation based on existing data and the researcher’s theoretical assumptions.

As formally the final step, key motives need to be identified after data collection. The final section therefore presents a non-exhaustive set of themes that can be used as an inspiration for analysing how heterogeneous futures affect markets.

Future themes for market geographies

In this final section, we assert that research on market making can be further advanced by drawing upon areas of thematic convergence within a growing field of ‘future geographies’ (Anderson et al., 2020). In doing so, we foreground future-orientated themes that connect to the analytical frameworks discussed above and existing works on marketisation. Echoing Ryan and Bernard (2003), the thematic codes suggested here should be seen as heuristic tools that researchers can use to read their data.

While we have emphasised the significance of ideas about the future, there is also scope to consider material future-making practices in the here-and-now. The future of markets can be analysed by looking for prefigurative practices, which implies using micro-level tools that mimic the macro-level goals that actors seek to obtain (Elliott, 2024). While much of this work is radical and concerned with post-capitalist horizons (e.g., Minuchin, 2021), concerted efforts by actors to establish and normalise distinct practices within markets, with a view to generalisation, can be explored in a diversity of settings. Certainly, these tendencies can be identified in relation to environmental markets (Asiyanbi and Lund, 2020; Langford et al., 2023), but also blockchains (Dylan-Ennis et al., 2023) and alternative market-mediated relations of cooperation (Lynch, 2020). Importantly, researchers can look for these in different places, ranging from the prefigurative politics of individual assets to exploring how market antecedents, which we highlighted in the case of biodiversity offsetting in the previous section, prefigure a future for new markets (cf. Bernards, 2022).

Researchers can also look for what we refer to as the inertial force of the future, which signifies the capacity of promises, visions or predictions to inhibit forms of change in the present. In this way, the formation or interpellation of certain ideas about the future can successfully work to perpetuate existing socio-economic structures. Collard and Dempsey’s (2022: 1560) work on liberal environmental statecraft in Canada is instructive here: ‘Liberalism is’, they pointedly note, ‘(. . .) a set of promises, a temporal ideology that always points to the future, by telling us that recovery, reconciliation, and even repair are just around the corner’. By working to propagate an imagined future, where profound socio-environmental contradictions have been resolved through contemporary win-win solutions, the state works to secure and shore up the present. As the environmental Kuznets curve is a prime example of how a linear notion of time excuses current environmental destruction with reference to an elusive sustainable future (Collard and Dempsey, 2022: 1549), linear theories of economic development and inequality risk justifying injustices in the present by referencing future progress. There is an established history of development narratives that situate certain parts of the world in the past, while others are presented as the future (see Slater, 1993).

While the inertial force of the future may create a sense of tedium, scholars working on actually existing markets can further integrate notions of temporality by exploring its antithesis, surprise (Simandan, 2020). Surprising moments can reveal assumptions about how markets should have operated, how framing/overflowing unfolds (Callon, 1998), and how political struggles around the work required for markets is comprehended. Finding moments of surprise in one’s data can also be an entry point to empirically respond to Berndt and Boeckler’s (2023) programmatic call for engaging with the failures of marketisation. Since surprise, whether personal or social, tends to be memorable (Simandan, 2020), it may also be researched and identified with relative ease.

Another strategy for reading future-making is to explore how routinised practices are mobilised to create the ‘new’, acknowledging that, rather than emerging ex nihilo, desires for particular futures are often animated by reconfiguring present routines (Descheneau and Paterson, 2011). Even as practices around market making may embody promises of accelerated or discontinuous change, they can also serve to stabilise or even reinforce existing economic relations and practices, which can be articulated as a material or an ideational reinforcement. In the case of the ‘Blue Economy’, Christiansen’s (2021, 2024) analysis of the Quintana Roo coral reef insurance and the Seychelles Blue Bonds illustrates this dynamic explicitly. While these forms of financialization are promoted as highly novel by bringing parametric insurance to ecosystems and thematic bonds to oceans, these financial deals borrowed heavily from established conventions and practices for parametric insurance and sovereign credit ratings.

Furthermore, while economic geographers have productively examined markets as arenas where opposing social and economic rationalities overlap (Berndt and Wirth, 2019), or as sites of social struggle and contestation (Cohen, 2018; Ouma, 2020), researchers can look for contrasting relations and perceptions of time. As an example of how such constructions might differ, Simandan’s (2018: 38) distinction between the notions of an ‘imminent future (minutes to months)’ and a ‘distant future (years or decades)’ is helpful. The social construction of future temporalities represents another ideational sphere where meaning making is likely to be differentiated, serving to legitimate or invalidate particular market actions across specific timeframes (Gong, 2024).

An important question that follows is how these different timescales become socially embedded. While some timescales may be experienced and enacted on a strictly individual basis, others rest in social institutions, potentially even foreclosing the future of the market through legal sanctions. Being situated in space (Ho, 2021), different timescales are also material as illustrated by the disconnect that can emerge when different economic processes as well as naturally necessary reproduction times diverge (Sum and Jessop, 2013), a feature that is particularly explicit in the case of environmental markets. Here, the green bonds market is relevant since it embodies at least three distinct timescales that are differently embedded in social arrangements: First, there is the legally sanctionable temporality related to coupon payments and the maturity date of bonds; second, there are the bond issuers’ commitments to use proceeds for purportedly green activities but whose impacts are not necessarily synchronised with bond repayments; and thirdly, individual issuances can become affective metonyms that support the institutionally reinforced desire to make the green bonds market grow as a whole on a more vaguely defined timescale (Christiansen, 2024; García-Lamarca and Ullström, 2022; Thompson, 2023).

A final theme to look for concerns how actors speculate on the actions, imaginaries, and calculations of others. Sociality always inhabits speculation (Bear, 2020; Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022), but this intersubjective element should not merely be reduced to a question of the materialisation of diverging or converging futures. Instead, metaspeculation can happen regardless of actors’ commitment to any particular imaginary’s perceived truth value. The quintessential example of this is the Keynesian image of the financial investor whose decisions are shaped by how they assess others’ assessments of asset valuations (Derbyshire, 2020). This logic can however be extended to other cases as illustrated by investors’ speculations on central banks’ speculations on unemployment and inflation or city officials’ speculations on property developers’ speculations (Fields, 2023). Even when they differ, multiple expectations can be mutually constitutive, which demands a sensitivity in one’s data towards the iterative and networked nature of imaginaries.

Conclusion

Contributing to vibrant literatures on future geographies and market making, our present piece has primarily sought to initiate a methodological dialogue to inform work at the intersection where these fields meet. While conventional qualitative options have been – and are likely to remain – important for studying markets-in-the-making, economic geographers can go further by expanding their approach to future imaginaries, potentially through the use of fiction as a means of extrapolation or by deploying quantitative and mixed methods to tease out potential market trajectories. While the former may conventionally be associated with constructivist methodologies and the latter with positivism, we contend, following Wyly (2009), that these correlations are contingent rather than inherently necessary. While this leaves room for using these methods and maintaining critical epistemologies, underlying ontological assumptions should condition how data is subsequently interpreted. Proceeding to the phase of analysing collected data, we built on extant research to create a non-exhaustive list of different temporal themes that researchers can look for in their data. We hope this piece helps to foster dialogue on economic geographers’ methods for studying the future of markets, which may, under ideal scenarios, also enable geographers to take part in changing economic trajectories.