Governmentality and Conservation

Governmentality and conservation is a developing area of scholarship that addresses the alignment of nature conservation initiatives with political, economic, and social change. It draws heavily on the French philosopher Michel Foucault's analytics of government to describe and critique some of the shifts occurring in the relationships between government, corporate, and community actors concerning nature conservation, emphasizing the roles played by both individual and collective subjects within broader networks of power relations that operate on multiple geographical scales.

From his studies of government transformations in Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries, Foucault observed that new political rationalizations emerged in particular sites at particular historical moments, underpinned by coherent systems of thought. While beginning as new sets of ideas and systems of thought, these practices eventually became linked to a range of new regulatory practices. Although Foucault himself never applied these ideas to environmental governance or nature conservation, there has been particular interest among geographers, political ecologists, and others in the social sciences in drawing on ideas of “governmentality” for understanding new approaches to environmental management, the management of natural resources, and human-environment relations more generally. These approaches are linked to shifts in the role of the state, but they also operate at a more epistemological level.

While the literature on governmentality and conservation has largely developed since the 1990s, it has strong connections with the more established literature about the role of the commons versus individual property rights in the management of natural resources. While, on the one hand, contemporary environmental governance initiatives seek to create new forms of individual property rights in nature, on the other hand, many environmental programs emphasize collective responsibilities for good environmental conduct in the common interest.