Environmental Governance in Motion: Practices of Assemblage and the Political Performativity of Economistic Conservation
Date
2019
Authors
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Publisher
World Development
Abstract
This article critically explores the dynamic, constitutive processes that animate economistic conservation
and sustainable development as an expression of governance-beyond-the-state. I focus attention on governance
in motion—expanding logics, hybrid practices, diffuse networks, and shifting social technologies
that incrementally reshape power dynamics and the institutional domains that enable and constrain
them. While the majority of institutional approaches to environmental governance emphasize intentional
designs rooted in collective choices, less attention has been focused on dynamic processes of
assemblage resulting from differentially coordinated actions across interrelated networks. Building from
Foucauldian perspectives on governmentality and biopower, I argue that processes of assemblage help to
constitute new techniques of governance aligned with the language and practices of economics. I examine
two business and biodiversity initiatives—the Natural Capital Finance Alliance and the Business and
Biodiversity Offsets Programme—in terms of five practices of assemblage: authorizing knowledge, forging
alignments, rendering technical, reassembling, and anti-politics. I highlight four dimensions of political
performativity associated with business and biodiversity initiatives that exemplify environmental governance
in motion: discursive amplification, organizational articulation, institutional re-shaping, and technical
instrumentation. Governance in motion reflects the distributed power dynamics of diverse
individuals and collectives in generating economistic techniques of governance.
Description
Keywords
natural capital, market-based conservation, business, governance