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also central concerns of international trade agreements such as the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which carry profound implications for environ-
ments and natural resources insofar as such agreements subsume environmental
governance under the rubric of 'free market' capitalism. These processes have been
investigated by McCarthy (2004; 2005), who has demonstrated the ways in which
NAFTA has re-scaled and reinstitutionalised environmental governance. McCar-
thy's work also sheds light on new possibilities for agency opened up by neoliberal
trade agreements. Indeed, resource-user organisations, environmental NGOs and
other interest groups are important (at times the
most
important) implementers of
resource governance decisions. McCarthy (2005) demonstrates that civil society
actors such as environmental NGOs may have greater capacity to infl uence policy
agendas under neoliberalism than under more centralised, Keynesian models of
governance. Similar processes are at work in Bolivia, where indigenous and peasant
social movements have played a major role in shaping water governance (Perreault,
2005).
From an administrative point of view, it is apparent that efforts to neoliberalise
environmental governance are not far removed from the neoliberalisation of other
economic sectors, such as the privatisation of pension funds or the opening of state-
controlled telecommunications industries to market forces. As McCarthy (2006)
notes, however, nature's irreducible materiality asserts itself in ways that set envi-
ronmental governance apart from other regulatory domains. The careful attention
paid by critical resource geographers and political ecologists to the biophysical
qualities of natural resources - and therefore as factors of production distinct from
one another and from human-made commodities - illuminates the particular prob-
lems each resource poses for its metabolism into capitalist relations of production
(Bakker and Bridge, 2006). Drawing on Polanyi's (1944) discussion of nature as a
'fi ctitious commodity,' Bakker (2003b) exposes the 'uncooperative' nature of water
as a commodity: although frequently subject to market-based modes of allocation,
water's biophysicality - a product of climate, geology and ecology, an essential
component of life - resists full commodifi cation. Similarly, the biology and geogra-
phy of the Douglas Fir - the preferred tree of timber fi rms in the North American
northwest - militates against many practices that would optimise and rationalise
the harvesting, processing and replanting of trees (Prudham, 2005). In this way
nature presents barriers to, and opportunities for, accumulation that can necessitate
a reconfi guration of the institutional form of capitalist processes. The fact that
natural resources such as water, copper and wood are essential to the primary circuit
of capital but are not themselves produced by capitalism sets them apart from other,
human-produced commodities. The fact that the materiality of nature - the bio-
physical characteristics of particular natural resources - makes a difference to the
way processes of accumulation 'work' in some sectors means that the governance
of resource access, use and environmental impact in these sectors has become a vital
area of research for environmental geographers.
Eco-governmentality
Governmentality is a concept allied with governance, yet also distinct from it. It
shares with governance an interest in the process by which people, organisations
and things come into alignment with political objectives. It focuses more explicitly,
however, on the mechanisms of power and the specifi c question of how people and
