Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
increasingly works through environmental rationalities. Geographers have made
signifi cant contributions to this perspective on governance-as-rule, as discussed in
more detail below.
Assessing environmental governance
While we critique the widespread, uncritical use of 'environmental governance', our
intention is not to discard the concept wholesale but to refi ne its application. Our
view is that environmental governance retains some positive value for geographical
analyses of nature-society relations for three broad reasons. First, insofar as envi-
ronmental governance is centrally concerned with questions of spatial, ecological
and administrative scale, it opens up a space for critical analyses of scale's produc-
tion and contestation. A focus on the geographical scales of governance provides a
way to think about scale as an inherently political and unstable spatial manifestation
of socio-environmental relations. We have in mind here not only the way in which
ecological processes and socio-political capacities can reside at different spatial
scales, but also how particular scales become privileged as
the
appropriate sites for
participation and decision making (Adger, 2001; Brannstrom et al., 2004). Geog-
raphers have readily accepted environmental governance's implicit invitation to
think critically about scale, examining the scalar politics of environmental gover-
nance in the context of community forestry (McCarthy, 2006), fi sheries (Mansfi eld,
2004b) and urban water systems (Swyngedouw, 2005).
Second, environmental governance focuses attention on the problem of
coherence
and the ways in which different peoples - and radically differentiated parts of the
non-human world (such as atmospheric gases, tropical forests and fossil fuels) - may
be brought into durable forms of alignment, despite problems of incommensurabil-
ity and the many political, economic and social tensions that can exist around issues
of the environment and resources. In contrast to the alternative concept of environ-
mental management - which can imply a unitary 'manager' - environmental gover-
nance highlights the articulation of a range of actors. This perspective can enable
relatively nuanced analyses of how power is produced and exercised over and
through the non-human world, and the ends to which power is directed. Bakker
(2002, 2007), for instance, has demonstrated how the commodifi cation of water
services requires the reconfi guration of not only market institutions but also those
of the state and civil society, and how the whole process may be understood as an
effort to stabilise a 'market environmental' or 'green neoliberal' regime of capital
accumulation.
Third, by foregrounding decision making and the political process more gener-
ally, environmental governance helps us to think creatively about politics as the
process of imagining, challenging and producing collective environmental futures.
Environmental governance extends a broad embrace, encompassing relatively
mundane issues like urban land use zoning or neighborhood recycling policy, as well
as higher-profi le concerns such as the patenting of life-forms or the regulation of
access to the resources of Antarctica or the deep oceans. In each instance, however,
an environmental governance perspective can focus attention on who participates in
decisions large and small, and a sensitivity to the extent to which policies and pro-
posals - i.e., the mechanisms through which environmental futures are enacted -
express an elite vision or have 'social depth'. At its best, then, environmental
governance can help to revitalise politics as a social practice - a struggle to defi ne the
