Geoscience Reference
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tionalism focused on describing changing organisational forms, or an environmental
managerialism that is unrefl exive about the relations of power enabled by talk of
'environmental crisis'. In short, environmental governance is often deployed in ways
that fl atten uneven relations of power, and which mask competing claims to, and
about, the non-human world. Thus, we argue that a careful examination of differing
epistemological, normative and rights claims to and about nature should be central
to any treatment of environmental governance.
We identifi ed six distinctive 'problematics' of environmental governance as a way
to differentiate a large and expanding literature: spatial scale and its administrative
reconfi guration; commodity chain coordination; management of common pool
resources; popular participation and democratic action; institutional re-regulation
under capitalism; and the production of social order. Although each of these themes
appears in work by geographers on environmental governance, we identifi ed two
analytical areas in which geographers have mobilised concepts of governance criti-
cally to make signifi cant contributions to a broader social science literature: neolib-
eral environmental governance, and eco-governmentality. Neoliberal environmental
governance approaches are rooted in neo-Marxian theories of political-economic
change, and attempt to understand and critique the relative coherence of meso- and
macro-level political economic processes in the face of inherent contradictions
arising from the socio-ecological organisation of production-consumption. By con-
trast, eco-governmentality draws explicitly on Foucauldian understandings of gov-
ernment to analyse the micropolitics of power, discipline and subject formation in
relation to the administration of resources and environments. It is in these two areas,
we suggest, that geography has made distinctive contributions to the literature on
environmental governance.
Moreover, to the extent that geographers teach, research and write about envi-
ronmental governance, we contribute to the ways these processes are understood
and critiqued. It is essential, therefore, that we refl ect upon the stakes for geography
of adopting different perspectives towards environmental governance. In our view
environmental governance describes an institutional arrangement that is not only a
socio-spatial confi guration: it is also, and fundamentally, an instantiation of - and
resource for - political and economic power operating on and through the control
of the non-human world. Because the institutions, organisations and relations of
environmental governance are inherently power-laden, analyses of environmental
governance should aim to lay bare these power geometries, and interrogate their
origins and implications. It is our contention that managerial approaches to envi-
ronmental governance can serve to mask the necessarily political-economic charac-
ter of the 'environmental' objective on which management's sights are trained (such
as improving air quality, stabilising carbon emissions or preserving biodiversity).
Such pitfalls may be avoided, we suggest, by interpreting environmental governance
not as the 'governance
of
nature' but as 'governance
through
nature' - that is, as
the refl ection and projection of economic and political power via decisions about
the design, manipulation and control of socio-natural processes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, W. M. (2007)
Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third
World
, 3rd edn. London: Routledge.
