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of who - or, indeed, what - can be recognised as having political agency: indeed,
as Bulkeley (2001, p. 442) observes, 'the scale, scope and nature of contemporary
environmental risks poses novel challenges for “relations of defi nition” '. From this
perspective a key part of governance, then, is the recasting of relationships via the
language and models of partnership, participatory development, and stakeholder
participation. These discursive tropes subvert old administrative, governmental
hierarchies of ruler and ruled, state and citizen with their explicit indications of
power and suggest an equality of agency among political actors. This occurs both
in formal planning processes (e.g., via processes of consultation) and in the corpo-
rate social responsibility literature. Concern over the negative developmental effects
of extractive industries, for example, has spurred a raft of initiatives to construct
'good governance' regimes around oil, minerals and forestry projects (primarily in
the developing world). Institutionalised as new partnerships for development, these
resource and environmental governance initiatives frame the politics of extraction
as questions of inclusion and participation, rather than justice, rights and distribu-
tion. While these initiatives create new political spaces and facilitate the emergence
of new actors, they can also serve to stabilise extractive regimes (Zalik, 2004).
The construction of consent has been the subject of several normative critiques
of participatory forms of governance. Palmer (2006), for example, critiques the
'assimilative environmental governance arrangements' around national parks in
Australia. Claiming that 'democratic projects that seek to create spaces of inclusion
for indigenous peoples within existing environmental governance arrangements' are
politically inadequate, she turns to alternative traditions of governance and sover-
eignty outside or preceding the nation state. The value of this critical perspective
on governance as a process of negotiating the boundaries of the political is high-
lighted in Keil and Desfor's (2003, p. 28) assessment of environmental policy in
Toronto and Los Angeles. They strive to recover local policymaking as a contested,
political process 'about how we live our lives in cities for the generations to
come . . . about sustainability, justice and redistribution' rather than 'a merely tech-
nical exercise, restricted to the arcane world of experts in the policy community.'
As they point out, 'where policy making appears as a solely technical exercise, there
are suspicions about what took the contentiousness out of the process'.
Governance as a problematic of state (re-)regulation
For researchers working from a neo-Marxian tradition, environmental governance
is understood primarily as a matter of the social regulation of capitalist accumula-
tion. Largely inspired by regulation theory and its focus on the institutional arrange-
ments of state, market and civil society in relation to capitalism, this work focuses
on the roles played by these 'extra-economic' institutions in stabilizing - politically
and socially - particular regimes of accumulation. From this perspective, the rise of
an administrative state apparatus for managing the environmental state appears
analogous to the welfare state regimes put in place in industrial economies in the
post-war period: both serve to mitigate some of the contradictory social/socio-
ecological relations arising from the commodifi cation of labour and nature (Hudson,
2001; Gandy, 2002). The 'environmentalisation' of the state, then, is an historical
process that can be observed to have taken different trajectories around the world:
from colonial administrative concerns over forestry and soil conservation to the
introduction of regulations governing microtoxins, state-centric forms of environ-
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