Putting discourse in its place: planning, sustainability and the urban capacity study

This article argues that policy discourses need to be set within the heterogeneous resources that governments routinely use to govern across the state/non-state divide. It employs the governmentality perspective to show how a discursive coalition in the planning for housing sector uses such resources to embed a new rationality of 'planning for sustainability' in a host of differing local arenas. The article extends the governmentality approach by proposing that this 'embedding' process is geographically uneven as the discourse becomes enmeshed in differing economic and environmental circumstances. The analysis thus reveals a geography of governmentality by showing how local actions intrude upon the functioning of governmental networks.     

Neoliberalism and the making of food politics in California

This paper examines a philanthropy-led initiative which has as its objective to jump start the transition to a more sustainable and just food system in California. The first major project funded was a “vivid picture” of California’s food system twenty-five years in the future. The outcome of the project is a report that is glossed with the tropes of neoliberalism in all of its key organizing frameworks, analytics, cognitive maps, and idioms and argues for “opportunities-based approaches” as the engine of change. Yet, as described in the paper, this outcome was initially under-determined, and, in fact, the funders had originally intended to leverage their resources for large scale transformation. By examining four moments in the development of the Vivid Picture project, the grantee selection, the modeling exercise, the stakeholder meetings, and the qualitative interviews, this paper will show how existing techniques of neoliberal governance such as modeling, audit, best-practices, and stakeholder participation, as well as current norms of philanthropy, shaped what is thinkable and hence actable. It will also show how “stakeholders” played a constitutive role in producing the outcomes of the project, in part because their input reflected already-developed notions of the possible within the current climate of neoliberalism. In the end it will argue that the failure of the Vivid Picture to look beyond the neoliberal present is itself evidence of the proliferation of neoliberal governmentalities. Still, the entire process galvanized many of the movement actors who were left out of the funding process and, in that way, produced political openings.     

Towards a heterogeneous environmental responsibility: sustainability and cycling fundamentalism

This article explores the urban governmentalities that are emerging through the discursive constitution of cycling as a form of sustainable transport. It has two main aims. The first is to explore and critique the strategies and discourses used to promote cycling as a sustainable form of transport. We argue that cycling advocacy displays totalising tendencies which obscure social and cultural difference, ignore the embodied and affective dimensions of transport practices and fail in part to apprehend the heterogeneity of environmental responsibility. Our second aim is to tentatively suggest a more productive way of knowing and talking about cycling that might be constitutive of a less exclusionary affective ethical sensibility.     

Neoliberal subjectivities or a politics of the possible? Reading for difference in alternative food networks

Recent research on alternative food networks has highlighted the centrality of place-embeddedness as a strategy in constructing alternatives to conventional agri-industrial food systems, and has illustrated the political nature of these strategic localisms. Recently, critical human geographers and sociologists have drawn on relational theory to criticise the localism of alternative food networks as representing a politics of place which is unreflexive or defensive. Furthermore, some readings of alternative food networks argue that they reproduce the very neoliberal subjectivities that they seek to oppose. This article argues that agri-food scholars should be aware of the ways in which their readings of alternative food networks can guide and reproduce alternative food network practice. Drawing on Gibson-Graham's technique of 'reading for difference', I argue for a reading of alternative food networks that sees difference beyond the discursive field of neoliberalism. The article explores recent debates around governmentality as the mechanism through which neoliberal subjectivities are reproduced, and draws on a preliminary discussion of the alternative food network practice of the 100 Mile Diet in order to illustrate the arguments made .     

Regional governmentality: Neoliberalization and the Caribbean Community Single Market and Economy

Formally launched on 30 January 2006, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Single Market and Economy (CSME) is, like many other regional economic initiatives, designed to create an economic space in which the uninhibited flow of goods, capital and skills across the borders of member states is anticipated to generate competitive business opportunities and external investment. Despite the intensification of such regional programmes, promoters and critics alike continue to consider CARICOM to be an intergovernmental organization dependent on the political will of member states as they negotiate the pressures of neoliberal globalization. In this paper, I argue that such a framing of regional integration in the Caribbean misses some of the tangible ways that CARICOM works beyond the sovereign intent of member states to enable the encroachment of neoliberal-style economic orders across the space of the region. I adopt a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to unhinge CARICOM from the governments of its member states. Once freed from a persistent statism it becomes possible to consider the technical competencies through which CARICOM initiatives increasingly connect and cohere with neoliberal rationalities. My goal in developing such an analytics is not to suggest CARICOM operates as a superstate but rather to broaden the sites considered relevant to understanding the encroachment of neoliberalism in the Caribbean.     

'Science', representation and resistance: the Bt cotton debate in Andhra Pradesh, India

Transgenic cotton is promoted in India on the basis that it will improve rural livelihoods, but such claims are contested on the basis that they are 'unscientific'. In this study, discourse analysis is utilized to deconstruct the environmental and scientific narratives employed by two key actors (Monsanto-Mahyco and the Deccan Development Society) in the debate in India. Whilst strong differences in the ideology of the two actors are found to account for their approaches to managing the environment, significant similarities in their approach to science and their recourse to Foucauldian governmentality are also evident. The conclusion considers how the use of discourse analysis could empower the rural poor to take part in the debate in India.     

The green economy in Tanzania: From global discourses to institutionalization

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transfer of the green economy from a global discursive level to institutionalization at the national level in Tanzania. While there is a growing amount of research discussing technological aspects of the green economy, less attention has been paid to policy implications and governance aspects, especially in developing countries. There is an increasing emphasis on technological and market-based solutions to environmental challenges globally and in the developed part of the world. However, in developing countries, ‘green growth’ often implies transformed control over natural resources – under schemes that are often driven from abroad. Over the last five to ten years, investments aimed at increasing productivity in the rural agricultural sector in developing countries have become a focus area of the green economy, but various concepts of green have become confused. Such (mis-) interpretation of the green economy has consequences for implementation and outcomes of various ‘green’ projects. Drawing on governmentality as well as the concept of institutional bricolage, I examine how the green economy discourse and policy at the global level have been re-shaped and re-interpreted to fit the existing agri-business initiative of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), which has been championed as a model for green economy implementation in Africa. I discuss how the green discourse has been ‘grabbed’ as an opportunity to ‘greenwash’ SAGCOT in its establishment and institutionalization.