Environmentality and Green Governmentality

Abstract

Environmentality, or green governmentality, offers a way of thinking about how power works through the construction of the environment, its problems, and the solution to those problems. The concept emerged in the 1990s and has been applied to a wide array of environmental questions. Environmentality is most keenly focused on how regimes of truth are made, how strategies of regulation are formed, and how human subjectivities are enacted with reference to the environment.

Shaping the Noosphere: Geoethical values and spiritual resistance in Terres de l’Ebre, Catalonia, Spain

“…Perceiving, sensing, feeling geological landscapes as the result of the constant dialogue between human beings and the Geosphere reinforces the idea that there are no wild places, only places of encounter and mutual transformation, where geospheric places are not only political arenas and spaces of power or environmentalities (Rutherford, 2017), but also grant meaning values that highlight the geological and spiritual power of the space reframing ecological justices as spatial justice (Soja, 2010). This underlying thinking moves the human agent-centered vision of geoethics towards a more decentered humanism.…”

Beyond subject-making: Conflicting humanisms, class analysis, and the “dark side” of Gramscian political ecology

“…More detailed, Hart writes: “The concept of governmentality calls for precise diagnoses of the rationalities of rule; the forms of knowledge and expertise they construct; and the specific and contingent assemblages of practices, materials, agents and techniques through which these rationalities operate to produce governable subjects” (Hart, 2004: 12). Political ecologists have, over the last couple of decades, translated this interest into new terms such as “environmentality” in the work of Agrawal (2005), and also partially overlapping terms such as “green governmentality” (Dressler, 2014; Rutherford, 2017), “eco-governmentality” (Valdeiva, 2015), and, recently, “green panopticon” and “environmental governmentality” (Fletcher and Cortes-Vazquez, 2020).…”

Untitled

“…It thus lightens users' perceptions of the catastrophic impact of climate change, which in turn shields the government from its political responsibility for it. As the literature on environmentality suggests (Luke 1995;Fletcher 2017;Rutherford 2017), Ant Forest adopts a governmental model that seeks to address environmental management and climate change by modifying individual behaviours, thus rendering the environment a site of biopolitical calculation.…”