Beyond the green panopticon: New directions in research exploring environmental governmentality

Abstract

This introduction to the special collection explores how a revised or expanded understanding of ‘environmentality’ can further our analysis of the evermore complex terrain of environmental politics today. We offer an outline of the literature from which the discussion emerges and how the subsequent articles both engage with and depart from it. We describe the origin of the ‘green governmentality’ discussion following the rise of global sustainable development discourse. We then explain how this initial exploration was subsequently complicated by introduction of two further lines of investigation: (1) attention to the micropolitics of community-based natural resource management; and (2) extrapolation from this to describe the different forms of green governmentality within which such local practices are situated as well as the multiple scales at which environmental governance is exercised. Following this, we outline a range of critiques to which this burgeoning research has also been subject and the fruitful lines of future research to which they point. We finish by describing how the various contributions to this collection engage with different aspects of this multifaceted discussion as the basis for further engagement by other researchers in the years ahead.

Cosmological Subjectivities: Exploring 'Truth' Environmentalities in the Haa Highlands of Bhutan

“…This multiple environmentality perspective has been productively employed by a growing body of researchers to explore intricacies of environmental policies and behaviours in a variety of contexts (see e.g. Youdelis 2013;Fletcher 2017;Montes 2020;Fletcher and Cortes-Vazquez 2020).…”

What is the Blue Economy? A spatialised governmentality perspective

“…Studies of modern government through the lens of governmentality have revealed that governance as a manifestation of power takes place in multiple sites, through different discourses, and often outside the traditional boundaries of the state (Dean 2009, Allen 2004Murdoch 2006;Rutherford 2007;Ettlinger 2011). A growing body of literature attends to the concept of "green governmentality" and multiple governmentalities in environmental governance (see Fletcher and Cortes-Vazquez 2020) but the Blue Economy is yet to feature. There have, however, been a few studies of the BE as discourse (as noted earlier), discourse being an important element of the operationalisation of governmentalities.…”

Morals and climate decision-making: insights from social and behavioural sciences

“…Much critical discussion in environmental governance currently falls under the rubric of 'environmentality'-building on Foucault's original concept of 'governmentality'-referring to the subtle ways that environmental behaviour is regulated through the development of new subjectivities, or new environmental values and moralities (Agrawal, 2005). There are a variety of environmentalities (Fletcher, 2017;Asiyanbi, Ogar and Akintoye, 2019;Fletcher and Cortes-Vazquez, 2020), including the ways that local communities resist or adapt to new forms of environmental governance (Morrison et al, 2019). For instance, empirical work has critiqued the market-based focus of many climate tools and conceptual frameworks, such as REDD+, ecological modernization and carbon trading and offsetting (Knox-Hayes, 2015;Watt, 2018;Song et al, 2021), resonating with literature that explicitly critiques their morality (Caney, 2010).…”

“…This emphasis on multiple rationalities has highlighted the interactions between environmental and climate governance strategies and the subjects of those strategies (e.g. McGregor et al, 2015;Malier, 2019), and has helped to investigate and interpret the gaps between the visions of climate decision-makers and the implementation of decisions on the ground (Collins, 2020;Fletcher and Cortes-Vazquez, 2020). In their discussion of REDD+ in Nigeria, for example, Asiyanbi et al, (2019) describe how it aimed to normalise particular moral values about forest protection but were countered by local discourses of morality centred around entitlements to forests.…”