Category: Talks and conference papers

For a geography of possibility for the 21st century Philippines

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Three ways of noticing

The UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) proudly present this month’s Heo/Geo Lecture with Dr Kenneth Cardenas as speaker. This will be on Monday, 14 September 2026 at 5:30PM (Philippine Time) / 5:30AM (Eastern Standard Time) via Zoom.

In this talk I suggest three ways of seeing possibility in the political economy of the early 21st century Philippines. I articulate a version of geography as it attuned to unevenness and difference, uniquely positioned as a mode of knowledge for reading against ‘damage-centred’ accounts of neoliberalism, underdevelopment, and inequality. Specifically, reflexive, careful attention to scale and abstraction, as dimensions to how we theorize about the Philippines, can help sensitize us to how projects of concentrating wealth and power had never fully consolidated in this place, and to the ways that non-, anti-, and post-capitalist practices co-constitute its economic and political life. 

Through completed and in-progress research on capitalism and state formation in the Philippines, I illustrate (1.) attention to long timescales, (2.) small spatial and institutional scales, and (3.) unlikely comparisons across places, periods, and commodity relations as elements to a research repertoire in the aid of noticing possibility.

To participate in the lecture, use this link to register. 

The Philippines at the 2025 AAG

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

The 2025 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers will feature more than 30 papers and presentations about the Philippines, and/or by researchers from the Philippines.

With the permission of their authors, I made a schedule of these works, as a public resource:

Link to Google Docs version

Link to PDF version: prints as two A4 pages

Central bank-led capitalism, remittances, and rentier consolidations in the Philippines

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Update, 28 June 2025: read the full article here.

I will be presenting this paper at the 2025 Annual AAG Meeting as part of a session titled Accounting for Space 2: The role of the state in financial infrastructures, and develops work I had first presented at Accounting for Space: A critical accounting / critical geography mini-conference, York University, 20 April 2023.

A final, peer reviewed form of this work is included in a special issue of Geoforum on the theme Accounting for Space.

Abstract

From 2001, remittances from overseas Filipinos allowed the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to amass record US dollar reserves through market operations, and to successfully target inflation while keeping policy rates low. This saw a dramatic shift in the country’s political-economic position, historically marked by balance-of-payments crises and external indebtedness.

These conditions of low interest rates and dollar surpluses allowed the largest Philippine conglomerates to retire foreign and/or dollar-denominated debt in favor of longer-term, lower-rate, domestic, and/or peso-denominated debt. The market for these new issuances, in turn, was an oligopsony composed of the banking affiliates of the same conglomerates and their trust operations. This created new inter-conglomerate dependencies scaffolded by this shift in the debt market, and by BSP regulations limiting related party lending.

Meanwhile, the real estate arms of the same conglomerates expanded their underregulated quasi-lending activities, allowing for high rates of return from and the displacement of risk onto homebuyers. Much of the demand for real estate is driven by the same remittances from overseas Filipinos.

These developments have had the cumulative effect of supporting the maturation of a domestic capitalist class, and its consolidation around rentier advantages in banking, real estate, and infrastructure. The BSP has successfully managed risks that in the past have led to crises for domestic capitalists, and recent downturns have disrupted neither their composition nor their core interests. However, this system is also displacing risk onto a precarious homebuyer class, and creating new risks from the consolidation of an interdependent, value-extracting oligopoly.

“We must systematically ‘de-Marcosify’ Philippine society”

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

On the embedded precursors and unintended consequences of Edsa Republic privatizations

This article revisits the privatizations carried out after the Edsa Revolution, emphasizing historical context, the agency of Filipinos working within technocratic and bureaucratic spaces, and institutional path-dependence. It shows how a moralized understanding of the state’s role in the economy was rehearsed and developed by the revolutionary Aquino government (1986–7) through the reorganization of the Government-Owned or Controlled Corporation (GOCC) portfolio. Focusing on the Presidential Commission on Government Reorganization (PCGR), it traces how the design and objectives of privatization reflected both “people-powered” ambitions, as well as a distinct, historically-embedded ambivalence toward public enterprise. In turn, these departures from mainline neoliberalism shaped a key feature of the Edsa Republic: the continuity of rentierism as the dominant mode of accumulation, despite the apparent rupture of revolution.

I presented this paper at the 2024 Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Seattle, and builds on my 2022 presentation at the Philippine Studies Conference in Japan.

A version of it was published on Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints as The EDSA Republic as moral liquidator: Embedded origins, unintended consequences.

Access the full article through Project Muse here.

My thanks to my co-panellists Inigo Chotirawe Acosta, Johnny Bassett, and Claire Cororaton, and to our reactor, Dr. Taihei Okada.