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Effectively engaging questions o f sustainable regional development requires a substantive rethinking o f the pervasive categories o f 'economy', 'society', and 'environment'. Qaliskan and Callon's analytical approach to "economization", a tracing o f the material-discursive production o f the economic, is one important starting point for such work. Taking the contemporary field o f economic development in the state o f Maine (USA) as a case study, and drawing on fifteen recent interviews with a wide array o f development professionals in this region, I pursue a critical analysis o f regional economization and its accompanying constructions o f society and environment. While affirming the economization concept as a useful tool for ethicopolitical analysis, I challenge this strategy at its limits. The tracing o f successful framings and their overflows risks performatively affirming these constructions by assuming that the composition of collective well-being takes the ultimate and successful form o f an 'economy'. Analysis o f economization must be accompanied by other explorations o f the ways in which the work o f regional economic developers might be articulated. I propose a reading o f development processes and struggles in terms o f the composition o f livelihoodsdestabilizing economy, society, and environment and beckoning toward a 'transversal' politics that might open up possibilities for unexpected alliances and alternative regional development pathways.

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