Economies of abandonment is Elizabeth Povinelli’s framework, developed in her book of the same name (2011) (cite: Povinelli, 2011), for analyzing the systems through which late liberal governance withdraws support from populations while managing the appearance of care. The concept names not a single act of neglect but an organized distribution — an economy — of where resources go and where they do not.
The “economy” in the term is precise. Abandonment operates through calculable systems: infrastructure funding that bypasses specific communities, health policies that individualize collective harms, welfare regimes that impose compliance costs designed to exhaust applicants. These withdrawals are not failures of governance but its active mechanisms. What makes them economic is the logic of rationalization that accompanies them: narratives of individual responsibility, market inevitability, bureaucratic constraint, or fiscal necessity convert political choices into apparent natural facts.
Povinelli shows that abandonment does not require malice. It requires only that institutions continue to function according to their own logics — logics that distribute life chances unevenly while producing explanations for why this distribution is necessary or unavoidable. The economy of abandonment is self-sustaining: the more a population is abandoned, the more its deterioration appears as evidence that further investment would be wasted.
emsenn uses this concept across multiple letters, particularly in analyzing COVID policy and the Stop Cop City movement: how collective care infrastructures are dissolved into individualized responsibility, and how the withdrawal of public health protections is narrated as the restoration of personal freedom.
Related terms
- Elizabeth Povinelli — who develops the concept
- Late liberalism — the governance regime that produces economies of abandonment
- Organized abandonment — Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s complementary concept
- Cruel optimism — the affective attachment that sustains abandoned subjects
- Necropolitics — the politics of death that abandonment enacts