Governing Capital, Labor, and Nature in a Changing World*

Abstract

This chapter attempts a broad analytical compass for surveying the main actors, institutions and instruments governing our world. Despite its seeming ubiquity, governance is a relatively new expression in this context suggestive both of new modes of exercising power, and an enhanced focus on ordering a world undergoing rapid change. Speaking generally governance may be understood as the exercise of power organized around multiple dispersed sites operating through transnational networks of actors, public as well as private, and national, regional as well as local. The turn to governance is often held to be coeval if not conjoined to profound changes in the meaning and nature of government associated with the ascendancy of 'neo-liberal' ideas and precepts. This has had significant implications for how governance tends to be understood. Critics associate it directly with the changing role of states in the economic and social sphere.

Biomass logistics: Mythistory and sociotechnical imaginary in trans-Atlantic wood pellet assemblage

“…The global politics of energy transition generates complex, hybrid governance forms of state and non-state actors that continually re-border and shift "modes of environmental authority" at supra-, national, and sub-national nestled hierarchies (Balachandran et al, 2018;Brenner, 2004;Haughton and Almendinger, 2015;Jessop et al, 2008;Nightingale, 2018;Swyngedouw, 2010). Within this multi-scalar state environmental regulatory field, non-state actors are granted the opportunity and the burden of technological innovation, investment, market pressures, and politically complex multijurisdictional regulation and stimulus to operationalize and achieve climate goals set by public bodies.…”

Strategic ignorance and global governance: an ecumenical approach to epistemologies of global power

“…When it comes to environmental science and governance, for instance, researchers have spent over three decades developing General Circulation Models (GCMs) which aim to predict interactions between different polities and geographical regions at the global scale (Dahan Dalmedico and Guillemot ; Eriksen, Nightingale and Eakin ). Here, scholars have regretted that the well‐intentioned goal of charting globally interconnected climate dynamics led to an unintended effect, ‘which is the fact that contemporary GCM models are not capable of fully capturing the pace and scale of change in small or regional areas’ (Balachandran et al : 507) – a case of what Robert Proctor (: 5) calls ‘selective ignorance’, as the transformation of climate change into a ‘global problem’ is associated with the exclusion of other paradigms which might have used a more varied approach to combating ecological damages at the local or regional levels (Pestre ; see also Gross ).…”

The socioenvironmental state: Political authority, subjects, and transformative socionatural change in an uncertain world

“…At national and sub-national levels, public authority is increasingly hybrid and invested in a wide range of multi-scalar actors that are both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the state (Swyngedouw, 2010). In this milieu, the state nonetheless continues to be a major player in environmental politics, and new forms of rule and environmental governance processes are emerging that appear to revitalise the state as public authority 2 (Balachandran et al., 2018).…”