Environmentality Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Environmentality is a neologism (or newly invented word) devised to describe a novel set of political processes in and through which the environment is being governed and controlled. The types of political practice discerned within work on environmentality were first described in the pioneering work of Michel Foucault. In a series of lectures, partly given at the College de France between 1978-79 and later in the United States, Foucault outlined a history of the changing objectives and technologies associated with state power (or to use Foucault’s term, governmentality).

Governance of Each and of All

Within these lectures, Foucault revealed that the practices of governments were not universal or unchanging, but were marked by a shifting set of rationalities concerning what the purpose of states actually was. According to James Faubion, Foucault’s account of governmentality was an attempt to explore the links between the government of the self and the government of a national population, or to put it another way, the governance of each and of all. At the heart of Foucault’s history of state power was a desire to show how the reason, rationality, or mentality of government had shifted in the modern era from being one devoted to securing the sovereign power of a government over its territory, to one committed to establishing the right disposition of things in order to assure continued wealth, power, and prosperity. According to Foucault, securing the right disposition of things is most effectively achieved by governing the conduct of the individual while anticipating the needs and likely productivity of the whole of society. The key to both of these goals was an effective knowledge of the society to be governed and the deployment of disciplinary tactics to guide the activities of the population at an individual level. It was in this context that Foucault equated the practices of the modern state with “the head of a family over his household and his goods.” Consequently, just as the head of a household knows and controls her/his family, the state knows and controls its population through the complex webs of surveillance and disciplinary tactics it deploys.

The notion of environmentality embodies an attempt to understand how this new mode of modern government applies to the political control and management of the environment. The word environmentality was first used by Timothy Luke and reflects a hybridized summation of Eric Darier’s notion of environmental governmentality. While a concern with the governmentalization of the environment is implicit within Foucault’s own account of governmentality (particularly in his discussion of the ensemble of objects that make up a territory), he does not outline the significance of his theory for studies of the environment directly. It is in this context that writers such as Luke, Darier, Michael Goldman, Paul Rutherford, James Scott, and Arun Agrawal have worked assiduously to reveal the different ways in which the environment has been governmentalized. According to Darier, studies of environmentality should focus primarily on political interventions within the environmental field, which have occurred since the early 1970s. Darier chooses to focus on this historical period because it is only at this point that we see-through the establishment of environmental ministries, policies, and acts of legislation-the emergence of the environment as a distinct arena for government intervention. Darier asserts that the object of environmentality is not to develop a history of how the environment has been governmentalized, but rather to study how the notion of the environment inserts itself into the longer history of the practices associated with governmentality.

Through a detailed study of Canada’s 1990 Green Plan, Darier argues that the governmentalization of the environment is achieved through the collation of knowledge about the national environment and the establishment of new systems of environmental citizenship and education, which govern the conduct of individuals’ environmental conduct.

The work of Michael Goldman and Timothy Luke has extended the application of environmentality from a study of national environmental governance to consider the government of the environment at a global level. Through studies of the transnational activities of the World Bank and the government of the United States, respectively, Goldman and Luke show how a sensitivity toward the practices of environmentality reveals the increasing up-scaling of environmental power from a national to a global level. According to Luke, the global and interconnected nature of contemporary environmental threats means that in order to secure the right disposition of things within a given territory, a state must also work to protect the functioning of transnational ecological systems. It is in this context that Luke interprets the policies of sustainable development currently being pursued by the United Nations and the environmental policies of Clinton-Gore administration in the United States as attempts to secure national forms of socioeconomic productivity through the governmentalization of the total setting of the global environment.

Most prominently, Arun Agrawal’s research has revealed the way decentralized institutions of forest governance, specifically in India, have led to a system of management that transforms local people, as subjects, to become concerned about forest protection. This work has most clearly and empirically demonstrated that changes in governance can lead to a actual changes in the identities of people, as political subjects, as they encounter and relate to state institutions. Whether it is used to analyze the ways in which social conduct toward the environment is being changed or how the global environment is being governed, it is clear that theories of environmentality are having a profound affect on contemporary understandings of the links between state power and the environment.

Bibliography:

Arun Agrawal, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Duke University Press, 2005);
Eric Darier, “Environmental Governmentality: The Case of Canada’s Green Plan,” Environmental Politics (v.5, 1996);
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” (lecture given to the College de France), reproduced in Michel Foucault, Power-Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-84, V 3, James D. Faubion, ed. (Penguin, 2002);
James Faubion, “Introduction,” in Michel Foucault, Power-Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-84, Vol. 3, James D. Faubion, ed. (Penguin, 2002);
Michael Goldman, “Eco-Governmentality and Other Transnational Practices of the ‘Green’ World Bank,” in Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (Routledge, 2004);
Timothy W. Luke, “Environmentality as Green Governmentality,” in Eric Darier, , Discourses of the Environment (Blackwell, 1999);
Timothy W. Luke, “On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism,” Cultural Critique (Fall 1995);
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998).