Flow Interventions in Place

This last substantive chapter develops, deepens and extends the critical perspectives in Part III by extrapolating the principles specified in the previous chapter to the long-term and global scale. This significantly re-spatialises flow by insisting that flow is increasingly becoming instrumentalised not only with respect to individual performance and wellbeing, but also with respect to wholesale hegemonic agendas that threaten to undermine the positive psychological foundations of flow by weaponising flow in the service of economically and politically motivated objectives. I first explore the Janus-faced nature of flow as being simultaneously a steppingstone toward twin goals of individual wellbeing and planetary sustainability, and ripe for co-option into broader structures of power that reinforce rather than reset current hegemonic interests and inequalities. Subsequently, this is elaborated through ecotourism initiatives that are discursively targeted towards sustainability outcomes, but which conscript flow into the perpetuation of neocolonial power asymmetries through international development agendas. Hence, the commodification of both flow and Nature are framed as twin neoliberal accumulation strategies and the need for flow research to be informed by an explicitly critical moral geographical understanding is proposed, with implications for all flow researchers and practitioners.