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mental governance can be understood as efforts to offset various crises of under-
production (of nature, including the underproduction of human health) by shoring
up the ecological conditions on which accumulation depends.
A range of critiques from the left, however, have challenged not only the effi cacy
of state-based environmental regulation, but also the assumptions of the relatively
autonomous state that can be associated with accounts of the 'environmental Levia-
than' (Paehlke and Torgerson, 1990). Accordingly, research on governance derived
from regulation theory develops more socially embedded accounts of the state. In
the Gramscian-inspired work of Jessop, in particular, the state becomes a social
relation and a site of strategic action by different parts of civil society. This opens
up a space for considering the way in which the 'regulation' of environment takes
place not via the administrative and legal structures of government, but via the
interactions and negotiated consent of many different actors. MacLeod and Goodwin
(1999), for instance, highlight the institutional reconfi guration from state-centric
govern
ment
to the multi-scalar ensemble of state and non-state actors involved in
govern
ance
, which they discuss as a hallmark of urban administrative practice under
neoliberalism (see also Painter, 2000; Wood and Valler, 2001). Central to this
interpretation, then, is a focus on the 'hollowing out' of the state, and the role of
non-state or quasi-state actors in carrying out functions that were previously the
sole responsibility of the central state. This view has helped shape geographic analy-
sis of urban and regional environmental governance and urban sustainability (Jonas
and Gibbs, 2002). Gibbs and Jonas (2000; 2001), for instance, focus on the role of
cities and localities in formulating environmental policy and enacting sustainable
development plans, and highlight the rescaling and reinstitutionalisation of environ-
mental policy at the urban scale. Rooted in regulation theory, this approach exam-
ines environmental decisions within the context of capitalist regimes of accumulation,
arguing that urban environmental governance is a crucial spatial and scalar 'fi x' to
the after-Fordist crisis (Tickell and Peck, 1995). In much of this literature, then,
'environmental governance' captures the way actually-existing forms of neoliberal
governance are multi-sited and multi-scaled, are products of social and political
mobilisation, and can just as readily produce differentiation as convergence
in norms relating to resource use and environmental quality (Prudham, 2004;
Perreault, 2005).
A related approach is found in work on critical resource geography, sometimes
referred to as 'First World political ecology' (Bakker, 2003a; Castree, 2006). Geog-
raphers working in this fi eld seek to illuminate the ways that particular institutional
confi gurations - for example resource rights, policies regarding resource extraction
and conservation, or codifi ed social norms and management practices - mediate the
metabolic relationship between nature and society, and in so doing serve to stabilise
environmental and social regulation within a given regime of accumulation. Such
institutional arrangements are seen as responses to, and codifi cations of, the social
and ecological contradictions of capitalism (e.g., Bridge, 2000; Bridge and Jonas,
2002; Bakker 2003b).
Governance as rule and the production of (socio-natural) order
A sixth problematic at the heart of some mobilisations of 'governance' concerns
relations of power in the absence of a single, dominant authority. For researchers
working in international relations, for example, the language of 'governance' is
