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tal power-knowledge nexus since the 1970s, a 'new environmental episteme' char-
acterised, he argues, by the way power is exercised 'over, within and through Nature
in the managerial structures of modern societies and economies'. This new, envi-
ronmental modality of power fi nds its embodiment in the cadre of environmental
managers, impact assessors, and environmental auditors graduating from higher-
education institutions in Europe and North America. Goldman (2005) makes a
more specifi c argument about the political effects of applied environmental science
in his analysis of the 'greening' of the World Bank, a process centred on the epis-
temic transformation of a major hydro-electricity scheme in Laos into a showcase
of sustainable development. The discourse of sustainability not only created new
geographies of environmental degradation and resource commodifi cation within
Laos by introducing cultural and scientifi c logics that made the landscape legible in
non-traditional ways: it also consolidated the position of the Bank as a global
knowledge producer in the areas of environment and development.
A second emphasis is on the way individuals and communities internalise envi-
ronmental objectives and rationalities, producing what can be called 'environmental
subjects'. Among the most thorough working out of these ideas is the work of
Agrawal (2005, p. 2) on forest conservation in northern India which examines the
relationship between changes in the technologies of governing the environment and
the emergence of an 'environmentally-oriented subject position'. At the core of
Agrawal's analysis is an interest in the evolution of new 'technologies of govern-
ment' to manage forests, such as the use of numbers, statistics, lists and rules, and
the devolution of decision making to progressively smaller geographical scales.
These technologies, he argues, not only materially changed the kinds of forests
produced, but also the ways in which forest users in northern India came to under-
stand their relationship with trees: technologies of government, in other words, not
only produced the governable space of the 'forest reserve' but also the identity of
individuals as 'environmental subjects'. A similar interest in the intersection of
expert knowledge, identity, and the regulation of social practice can be seen in
Robbins' (2007) work on the American lawn. Although his analysis largely eschews
the language of governmentality, it exemplifi es the shift within political ecology over
the last decade towards a fuller engagement with environmental knowledge and the
practices and techniques through which 'new natures' and social identities are
co-produced.
A third emphasis addresses the modern techniques of power through which space
and nature become incorporated into national projects (Peluso and Vandergeest,
2001; Mitchell, 2002). Research with this emphasis has been primarily historical,
and hones in on the link between the production of specifi c forms of knowledge
about the
qualities
of space and nature - via techniques of surveillance, calculation
and abstraction that introduce new kinds of visibility and legibility - and the exten-
sion of political and economic control over spatially-extensive socio-ecological
systems. Key questions here centre on the techniques for establishing 'comprehensive
epistemological access' to territory, enumerating the content and qualities of terri-
tory, and the spatial organisation (i.e., centralisation/decentralisation) of knowledge
management (Hannah 2002). Authors draw inspiration from Foucault's reference
to governmentality as the governance of 'men and things' (Watts 2004). This explic-
itly relational approach to the problem of modern government - to see 'men in their
relations, their links, their imbrication with those things that are wealth, resources,
means of subsistence . . .' - is also an invitation to examine the knowledge-power
