Religion and governmentality: Understanding governance in urban Brazil

In this paper I argue that geographies of religion are fundamental to understanding governance and social order in contemporary urban space. More specifically, I show how Foucault’s notion of governmentality characterizes regimes of power beyond the state apparatus, positing that religion and churches also produce and maintain the knowledges, truths, and social order associated with governmentality and self-regulated governance. By considering the geography of religion literature within the context of Foucualt’s work, I illustrate the importance of religious and spiritual practices to contemporary urban space, and the roles they play in producing and maintaining governance and socio-political order. My purpose is not to suggest that governmentality has been misapplied as a theoretical tool for understanding the state and political power, but to show how the term actually describes power more generally, including spiritual moments in addition to political ones. Drawing from my case study in Fortaleza, Brazil, I substantiate my theoretical argument using empirical examples, showing how governmentality is produced through religion and churches and the relationship between spiritual practices and governance in everyday space.     

The consolations of ‘neoliberalism’

Recent work on neoliberalism has sought to reconcile a Marxist understanding of hegemony with poststructuralist ideas of discourse and governmentality derived from Foucault. This paper argues that this convergence cannot resolve the limitations of Marxist theories of contemporary socio-economic change, and nor do they do justice to the degree to which Foucault’s work might be thought of as a supplement to liberal political thought. The turn to Foucault highlights the difficulty that theories of hegemony have in accounting for the suturing together of top-down programmes with the activities of everyday life. However, the prevalent interpretation of governmentality only compounds this problem, by supposing that the implied subject-effects of programmes of rule are either automatically realised, or more or less successfully ‘contested’ and ‘resisted’. Theories of hegemony and of governmentality both assume that subject-formation works through a circular process of recognition and subjection. Both approaches therefore treat ‘the social’ as a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental rationalities. This means that neither approach can acknowledge the proactive role that long-term rhythms of socio-cultural change can play in reshaping formal practices of politics, policy, and administration. The instrumental use of notions of governmentality to sustain theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization supports a two-dimensional understanding of political power—which is understood in terms of relations of imposition and resistance—and of geographical space—which is understood in terms of the diffusion and contingent combination of hegemonic projects. Theories of neoliberalism provide a consoling image of how the world works, and in their simplistic reiteration of the idea that liberalism privileges the market and individual self-interest, they provide little assistance in thinking about how best to balance equally compelling imperatives to respect pluralistic difference and enable effective collective action.     

Surveillance and state-making through EU agricultural policy in Hungary

This paper explores how the implementation of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and agri-environment measures in particular have been used to increase state oversight into rural affairs and land use in Hungary. The governmentalities of the agricultural sector through Europeanisation include stringent inspections and controls as part and parcel of accountability drives around the disbursement of subsidies. Agricultural surveillance mechanisms and processes are recounted here as holistic, perpetual and immediate, composed of the remote, administrative, as well as embodied physical encounters. Through ethnographic engagement with the Hungarian state’s interactions with its farmers during inspections, the forms and consequences of neoliberal governmentality are given life in a post-socialist context. I elucidate the numerous subjectivities involved in these encounters, and how bureaucratic and administrative requirements underlie the rise of private consultants, where social capital and informal networks are of great importance for the successful navigation of the agricultural system. On the part of farmers, subsidies’ accountability systems were lived as unjust, giving rise to speculation around the ‘real’ intended purposes of agri-environment legislation, which in turn undermines the expert authority of the state and heightens skepticism towards the European ‘project’.     

Development for a postneoliberal era? Sumak kawsay,living well and the limits to decolonisation in Ecuador

Latin American development is being rapidly transformed, with popularly elected governments embarking on reversals of neoliberalism informed by autochthonous notions of human wellbeing. Through a detailed examination of the origins and application of one development model, this article examines the constraints on and limits to postneoliberal development in terms of state-civil society relations and as a form of postcolonial governmentality. Interpreting Ecuadorian sumak kawsay (living well in English) in relation to embedded political cultures, specific opportunity structures, and the dynamic between contentious and electoral politics highlights the extent of room for manoeuvre in rethinking development. As a form of governmentality and pastoral power, Ecuadorian ‘postneoliberalism’ incorporates a constitutional commitment to social rights, collective citizens and the rights of nature. The paper also reveals the difficulty of making a definitive break from neoliberalism, which remains pervasive in practice, conceptualisations and state formations. Moreover, although various forms of anti-colonial ‘border thinking’ were proposed by social movement’s contentious politics, the paper argues that sumak kawsay works to sustain postcolonial conditions of development.     

A grievable life? The criminalisation and securing of asylum seeker bodies in the ‘violent frames’ of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders

The life of those seeking asylum from persecution and other human rights abuses has become interminably precarious. As minority world governments deploy various apparatuses of security to govern the circulation of ‘unruly’ populations, the world’s most vulnerable people have been reconstituted as security threats. In this paper I trace this ‘transfer of illegitimacy’ and criminalisation of asylum seeker bodies in the context of the Australian government’s newly deployed Operation Sovereign Borders. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality as a domain of security and Butler’s articulation of recognition, precariousness and grievability, I explore both the subjectivities formed as a function and technique of securing Australia’s borders and the way this framing produces a certain governed reality that ‘acts upon the senses’ to delimit public discourse. I argue that the range of discursive and non-discursive practises that make up Operation Sovereign Borders has dire implications for those seeking asylum in Australia. Not only do these practises constitute a social crafting where conditions for a flourishing life are diminished, but this crafting of precarity is carried out in the name of securing citizens lives. The life of the asylum seekers is a life unrecognised in the violent frames of Operation Sovereign Borders.     

Greening western China: A critical view

The dominant narrative in a growing literature about China’s environment conceptualizes a series of recent large-scale ecological construction projects, particularly in western China, as evidence of a teleological graduation into eco-rational modernity, in which environmental improvement and economic growth are intertwined in a virtuous, mutually reinforcing circle. Such ecological modernization narratives take for granted both a crisis of ecological degradation, and the premise that the “greening” of the state will have environmental improvement as its primary outcome. The article reviews recent research on ecological construction projects to protect forests and grasslands in China’s west, which have been identified as major components of China’s ecological modernization goals. It demonstrates the limitations of an ecological modernization framework for analyzing these projects, and argues instead for a critical political ecology analysis, which examines the distributive effects of these projects and employs an analytic of governmentality. Ecological construction is more productively understood as a set of discursive practices that authorize differential interventions through processes of internal territorialization, rework the relationship between different categories of citizens and the state, and produce subjects, whose desires may or may not align with those desired by state institutions.     

Why do smallholders plant biofuel crops? The ‘politics of consent’ in Mexico

Recent studies have addressed the social and environmental impacts of biofuel crops but seldom the question as to why rural producers engage in their production. It is particularly unclear how governments worldwide, especially in middle-income countries such as Brazil, Thailand, and Mexico, could enroll so many smallholders in biofuel cropping projects. Conventional views see yields and economic returns as main drivers for smallholder participation in biofuel production but ignore the role played by power and politics. This paper analyses the rapid biofuel expansions (oil palm, jatropha) in the southern Lacandon rainforest in Chiapas (Mexico) and their partial failure (jatropha) from a political ecology perspective. Our findings indicate that biofuel expansions in this region not only occurred for productive reasons, but also because biofuel programmes provided prospects for political gains through strengthened rural organisations. In contrast with emphasis on state coercion and local resistance—common in political ecology—the biofuel expansion relied, in this case, upon a ‘politics of consent’ in which both the state and rural organisations, albeit in a power-laden relationship, sought to achieve their own goals by supporting the planting of biofuel crops. These findings suggest the need to rethink how particular approaches within political ecology apply Gramsci’s notions of power and hegemony and, more broadly, to consider the importance of politics in explaining why certain forms of agricultural production become dominant.     

Negotiating neoliberalism: Conservationists’ role in the development of payments for ecosystem services

This paper critically engages with the role of conservation practitioners as ‘expert intermediaries’ in the development of payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes in the UK. Centring on the case study of the Wildlife Trust’s Pumlumon Project in Mid Wales, the paper connects the advance of neoliberal governance strategies to the experiences and attitudes of conservationists, charting a more personalised geography of how PES has gained traction here, beyond its dissemination as an anonymous discourse or top-down imposition. In methodological terms, the paper combines ethnography with the insights of governmentality in order to demonstrate how conservationists have made sense of, and subsequently engaged with processes of neoliberalisation. This is set out as a means to attain a grounded perspective on the advancement of PES, but equally to appreciate how the hegemony of market-style governance is accepted and advanced by the conservationists involved.     

Environmental governance through guidance: The ‘making up’ of expert practitioners

Political power has received curiously limited attention within the vast literature on environmental governance. This article addresses this research lacuna by employing a particular perspective on power – governmentality – to examine the environment as a site for the contestation of power and authority. Our empirical focus is the ‘making up’ (after Hacking (1986)) of expert practitioners through an apparently innocuous governance strategy: the publication of non-binding guidance documents. Qualitative document analysis is undertaken to elucidate how the identities of expert practitioners are constituted in guidance documents published under the auspices of powerful actors (the World Bank, the Danish Ministry of Environment and the Dutch Commission for Environmental Assessment) operating at various geospatial scales and within particular political contexts. The publication of guidance is interpreted as a purposeful attempt to problematize and reframe practices. The skills, values and conducts that expert practitioners are expected to reproduce and the desires and aspirations of those that would govern are analyzed and discussed. These vary widely in the case study guidance, from the constitution of the practitioner as agential policy entrepreneur radically intervening in political systems in developing countries in the guidance published under the auspices of the World Bank to the expert practitioner as a mediator of supranational political influence, and hence national authority, in the Danish case. The analysis raises a number of conceptual and empirical questions about the strategy of governing through guidance, and the article concludes with recommendations for further research to better comprehend the taken for granted miniature of the machinery of environmental governance.     

Contesting the market-based nature of Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services programs: Four sites of articulation and hybridization

Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs pay rural landholders for hydrological services, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and improvement of agroforestry systems. The intention of the programs’ initial funders and designers was to create a PES program that would introduce market efficiency into environmental policy and “green” the market by creating and recognizing the economic value of healthy ecosystems. This article traces the complex processes through which this ideal type conceptualization of market-efficient environmental policy was subverted and the practice altered to more closely fit national interests, rural realities and alternative conceptions of the ‘value’ of socio-nature. This article examines how the market-based notions of the programs’ designers were hybridized at four distinct sites of articulation: (1) the federal politics of poverty alleviation in Mexico; (2) rural social movements with distinct conceptualizations of ‘conservation’ and ‘development’; (3) the institutional and cultural context of the ecosystem services being commodified; and (4) the socio-natural knowledges and grounded practices of rural Mexico. This analysis is based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted with program participants, intermediary organizations, and designers. The article draws on a growing critical literature on market-based mechanisms and minutely examines the process through which the Mexican national PES program was altered at multiple scales and in multiple forms, from the rhetoric of political speeches to the specific elements of the policy’s design and from the theoretical tinkering of neoclassical economists to the quotidian practices of rural environmental managers.     

Governmentality and security in the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The article examines the background to PEPFAR and its reauthorization in Washington DC in 2008 through the conceptual lens of governmentality. Building on existing work, it interprets PEPFAR as a programme for securing the welfare of populations. It also qualifies and extends this work in the following ways. Rather than representing a break with the history of geopolitics, it argues that PEPFAR emerged out of accommodations between geopolitics and governmentality. This point is developed through two takes on geopolitics, first in terms of the projection of sovereign power, and second in terms of articulations between PEPFAR and geopolitical economies of global health. The article suggests, first, that the geopolitics of sovereign power shaped the timing, scale and form of PEPFAR, and second, that PEPFAR articulated with geopolitical economies of global health through its mobilization of US-based corporations, non-governmental and faith-based organizations. The article extends existing work by examining the role of critical mobilizations in shaping PEPFAR, both in relation to questions of political economy and the contentious politics of life. Reflecting on the politics of global health, it considers the prospects for using ideas of security and the international response to HIV/AIDS as stepping stones towards the development of broad-based health systems.     

Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world.     

“You kill the dam,you are killing a part of me”: Dam removal and the environmental politics of river restoration

River restoration through dam removal provides an opportunity to investigate the changing nature of environmental conflicts and politics in long-humanized landscapes. In New England, where over 14,000 dams fragment the region’s rivers, dam removals are often highly contested. This is due, in part, to how the intertwined roles of history, identity, and aesthetics coalesce to create attachment to place and inspire the defense of dammed landscapes. Dam removal provides a useful lens to consider the following: How do the historical and geographical contingencies of this region shape and alter conflicts over dam removal in specific ways? In instances where conflicts emerge, what do the conflicts reveal about the politics of ecological restoration in highly altered landscapes? We use a political ecology approach to reveal how complex cultural dynamics, competing interpretations of science and the environment, micropolitics, and the role of multiple actors generate and shape conflicts over dam removal. We show that the historical geography of New England influence conflicts over removal in important ways, particularly with regard to the roles of aesthetics and identity in landscapes that are characterized largely by consumptive as opposed to productive uses. Our findings also suggest that restoration in long-humanized landscapes will embroil new constellations of human and nonhuman actors, requiring attention to the political and cultural, as well as the ecological, dimensions of restoration. This paper contributes to research on the political and social dimensions of dam removal, as well as to research at the nexus of ecological restoration and environmental politics.     

Defence and the environment: An economic approach

Abtract The environmental impacts of defence is a neglected and under-researched area for economists. This article presents a conceptual approach outlining some of the economic issues involved in the environmental impacts of defence spending and the activities of the armed forces. It reviews the economics and politics of externalities and then considers beneficial and harmful externalities and concludes by identifying some of the environmental costs of disarmanent.     

Questioning the virtues of pro-environmental behaviour research: Towards a phronetic approach

Drawing on Flyvbjerg’s (2001) call for the development of phronetic social science, this paper argues that much current research into pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) is misguided, and even potentially dangerous. After outlining Flyvbjerg’s argument, it reviews existing work on PEB and argues that, to date, it has predominantly sought after the Aristotelian intellectual virtues of either episteme or techne, and has neglected phronesis which Aristotle himself saw as most important. It then explores the ways in which aspects of a phronetic approach are being developed in cultural geography and environmental sociology, before offering a brief empirical case study of a PEB-change initiative to illustrate what a phronetic approach to research might look like. It concludes by calling for an improved and more reflexive dialogue between PEB researchers regarding the purpose and approach of their work, both in order to improve the relevance and impact of their research, and in order to help individuals and communities understand and confront the significant environmental challenges they currently face.     

Water reform governmentality in Ecuador: Neoliberalism,centralization, and the restraining of polycentric authority and community rule-making

In most Latin American countries, issues concerning water governance and control also reflect broader conflicts over authority and legitimacy between the state and civil society. What lies behind the diverse water policy reforms is not simply a question of governing water affairs but also a drive to control or co-opt water user groups. This paper examines the efforts by the present Ecuadorian government to ‘control water users’ through new forms of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991). We use the ‘cathedral and bazaar’ metaphor (Lankford and Hepworth, 2010) to illustrate government rationale and practices in water governance shifts in the last decades. We analyze how Rafael Correa’s government sets out to reshape the relations between state, market and society. In its ‘Twenty-first Century Socialism’ project, based on a proclaimed ‘Citizen Revolution’, actual policy reform does not reverse but rather transforms the process of neoliberalizing water governance – creating a hybrid bazaar-cathedral model. We argue that the current water govermentality project implements reforms that do not challenge established market-based water governance foundations. Rather it aims to contain and undermine communities’ autonomy and ‘unruly’ polycentric rule-making, which are the result of both historical and present-day processes of change. Interestingly, water user federations that emerged during the neoliberal wave of the last two decades now claim water control space and search for new forms of democratizing water governance. They act as agents who fiercely – yet selectively and strategically – oppose both elements of the State-centered (cathedral) and market-based (bazaar) water governance models.     

Enacting environmental justice in Singapore: Performative justice and the Green Volunteer Network

Environmental justice research has of late expanded beyond its’ original focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads’ to debate injustices at a wide array of sites and scales. Despite this expansion, the applicability of an environmental justice framework to seemingly apolitical and banal expressions of environmental concerns remains open to question. This paper argues that environmental justice struggles can be located in the mundane environmental politics of Singapore, by employing a performative rather than rights-based approach to both justice and politics. It draws on qualitative research into volunteers’ practices in one Singaporean environmental organisation, and asserts that through their focus on experiential learning and re-inscribing ‘developmental’ spaces as spaces of care and justice, volunteers seek to redress the social, political and environmental injustices replete within the spatial politics of Singapore.     

Contested claims over space and identity between fishers and the oil industry in Mexico

This essay examines neoliberal forms of resource governance and emerging struggles over control of sea space between coastal fishers, the para-statal oil industry and government authorities in the State of Tabasco, Mexico. The analysis focuses on the changing mechanisms of resource governance and networking related to contested claims over rights to offshore space. The study is based on material collected during ethnographic field research in Tabasco in 2011–2014. By linking a post-Foucauldian approach to governmentality with a Deleuzian perspective on networks, our research examines resource governance as a socio-political arena, constructed in negotiation between multiple governmental, private and civil society actors, including heterogeneous groups from local populations. The study demonstrates how hybrid techniques of resource governance lead to fishers’ socio-spatial displacement, marginalization in the fields of political representation and subjection to ideas of aquaculture entrepreneurship. The ensemble of private regulation and governmental control provides a venue for drawing fishers into clientelist practices of governing while it diffuses questions of responsibility. These modes of governance fragment the fishers’ efforts to mobilize politically, making them rely on less visible networks of contestation shaped by heterogeneous fishing groups, with varying access to resources and political representation. Recent transformations in environmental legislation and the fishers’ mobile tactics of networking may offer opportunities for them to reclaim their resource rights.     

Enacting things through numbers: Taking nature into account/ing

In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the ‘critical limits’ of nature under the impact of acidification was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not ‘Nature’ as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the effect of this process was to produce ‘a nature as a whole’, in a process of unification. This I argue can only be understood relationally: ‘Nature’ is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour’s work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look first at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.     

Investing in the field: Positionalities in money and gift exchange in Vietnam

This paper contributes to the existing literature on positionality, ethics, research design, and the politics of the field by sketching power relations between an American researcher and Vietnamese respondents in Vietnam. I illustrate how two types of investments, financial compensation and gift exchange, “live” in the field as arbitrators of power relations between researcher and respondent. Specifically, I argue that financial and symbolic investments are important yet neglected aspects of the fieldwork experience for both investigators and research subjects because they allow both parties to deploy and negotiate multiple positionalities in the field. In sum, the paper makes three points: it outlines the multiple positionalities at play as scholars plan and execute their research; it introduces the concept of investment to field methods, with a focus on financial compensation and gift giving; and it demonstrates investment’s role in the negotiation of power between researcher and respondent.