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things come to be aligned in ways that enable their administration and rule. In short
- and as the term itself indicates - governmentality is centrally concerned with the
rationality of government. Where the starting point for work on governance is a
putative shift in the actors and spaces of decision making (away from government
to governance), governmentality explicitly returns to government as an analytical
and historical problem: that is, to understand how ' “the possible fi eld of action of
others” is structured' and the mechanisms through which governable subjects and
governable objects are produced (Foucault, 1982, p. 221; Watts, 2003, p. 12). The
origins of work on governmentality lie in Foucault's consideration of the character
of modern power, an historically specifi c form of power emerging from the 17th
century onwards marked by a shift in its 'point of application' away from territorial
control to the governance and administration of 'things' (Scott 1995). Geographers
(among others) have found this conception of power appealing as a way of thinking
about the mechanisms and 'technologies of rule' through which states and other
actors are able to secure certain forms of 'action at a distance' (Hannah, 2000;
Mitchell, 2002). Governmentality highlights not an historical expansion in the
capacity of the state (important as this may be in some contexts), but 'the emergence
of a new fi eld for producing the effects of power - the new, self-regulating fi eld of
the social' (Scott, 1995, pp. 202-3). Foucault's pithy defi nition of governmentality
as 'the conduct of conduct' captures this attention to how people and things come
to be brought together in such a way - neatly referred to by Scott (1995) as the
'right disposition' - that they are amenable to administration.
Eco-
governmentality - or environmental governmentality (see Rutherford, 1994;
Darier, 1996) - can be described as a concern with the way in which discourse and
the apparatus of government (i.e., rule, more broadly) have come increasingly to
centre on environmental phenomena. Accounts of eco-governmentality show how
resources, ecosystems and bodies (both human and non-human) are subject to cal-
culative procedures and practices of codifi cation such that the administration of
ecology and nature 'emerges as one more productive power formation' within
modern society (Luke, 1999, p. 146). Eco-governmentality, then, is not so much an
expanding application of governmentality
onto
environmental issues, as an exhuma-
tion and extrapolation of one of Foucault's initial observations about the centrality
within modern government of calculative practices that pertain to
life
and, more
explicitly, to the administration, optimisation and regulation of population. Fou-
cault signaled this historical shift by labeling it 'biopower:' largely an anthropocen-
tric concept to Foucault (Darier, 1999), it has subsequently been re-tooled by
geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists to express the ways in which dis-
courses about - and strategies towards - the management of biological, ecological,
and biogeochemical processes are a key part of how social order is produced and
maintained.
A substantial body of research on governmentality, environment and resources
has developed since the mid-1990s. Broadly there are three different emphases
within this work. The fi rst relates to the generative
political
effects of 'environmen-
tal' knowledge associated with, for example, biodiversity conservation, sustainabil-
ity, or climate change. Environmental science and the 'greening' of social science
introduce calculative practices and administrative rationalities that create both new
objects of rule - various novel 'spaces of nature' such as biodiversity hot spots,
carbon sinks, or the 'interior geographies' of plants and animals - and new subject
positions. Luke (1999), for example, describes the emergence of a new environmen-
