Ecomanagerialism Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Coined by Virginia Tech political science professor Timothy Luke, eco-managerialism refers to a particular type of environmental management carried out by “professional-technical workers” who are trained in environmental science and policy schools at Western universities, which emphasize “sound scientific and technical” solutions to environmental crises. Specifically, Luke argues that specially trained environmental experts define their managerialgoals in relation ecosystem “goods” and “services,” which necessitatea treatment of the physical environment primarily in terms of natural resources. This means that environmental managers, though charged with theprotectionand conservation of the physical environment, also protect the dominant economicand political interests that surround those resources.

This notion of ecomanagerialism favors a capitalistic and technocratic approach to environmental management, where efficiency and economic development are the primary motivations for environmental policy and management, rather thanother potential solutions to environmental concerns, such asbehavioral changes, economic restrictions, or alternative technologies. In essence, Luke’s idea of ecomanagerialism attempts to acknowledge and understand how modern resource management has cast nature primarily as an economic and political “asset” that can only properly be managed by technical environmental experts. The physical environment, under a regime of ecomanagerialism, is valued far less for its preexisting ecological processes, than its function in the modern capitalist economy. Furthermore, the material and discursive practices of ecomanagerialism constitute a form of power that Luke refers to as “geopower,” where only ecomanagers are employed for resource management and to solve impending ecological crises. This requires that the goals of environmental management employed by eco-managers are defined in terms of modernization, where the average citizen is made to think that he or she cannot fully understand the complexities of the natural environment.

The basis of ecomanagerialism lies in the discursive transformation of ecological processes and systems into economic commodities or natural resources. Luke claims that this occurs in the modern research university. Here, students learn to manage, manipulate,and control nature as “a sanding reserve, a resource supply center, a waste reception site.” This is essential for making nature and the physical environmental legible and comprehendible to various policy-makers and engineers, but also makes the physical world politically relevant (in so far as it has economic and social services). Drawing on Foucault’s notions of discourse, power, and knowledge, Luke claims that these eco-managers, produced by schools such as Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, use nature to “legitimize many political projects” aimed at facilitating or sustaining capital accumulation. This is done through the exercise of disciplinary forms of geo-power in the modern capitalist economy held by a new class of experts, specialist, engineers, and planners. Similarly, this practice often disguises the role of the capitalist economyin creating the very environmental problems ecomangers are required to solve.

Luke identifies three primary forms of eco-managerialism, including resource managerialism (where ecosystem services are protected and supplied for economic production), risk managerialism (which calculates and oversees the amount of destruction on natural systems to sustain a minimum level of economic and social health), and recreationist managerialism (which manages the natural environment for recreational consumption as a resource,suchas public parks). Luke’s critique of ecomanagerialism lies in its assertion that only “positivistic technical knowledges” can be used as a means to address environmental concerns. This often excludes socially and politically based solutions to environmental concerns, which might not necessarily accelerate and facilitate capitalist accumulation. These practices not only obscure the complex and uneven power relations inherent in environmental management, but also the way in which eco-mangers inevitably reproduce themselves by reproducing the environmental crisis they are expected to solve. Ecomanagerialism is a self reproducing and expanding form of modern environmental management.

Bibliography:

Timothy W. Luke. Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx. (University ofIllinois, 1999);
Timothy W. Luke. “Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation” in Living with Nature: Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse, eds. Frank Fischer and Maarten A. Hajer (Oxford University Press, 1999).