Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism (original) (raw)

Bodies Do Matter: The Peculiar Persistence of Neoliberalism in Environmental Governance (2013)

Human Geography, 2013

Substantial academic attention has recently highlighted the increasing and contradictory tendency to promote neoliberal market-based mechanisms such as "ethical" consumption as the solution to environmental problems exacerbated by processes of capitalist accumulation themselves. To date, the majority of this research has drawn on Marxist or Foucaultian frames, and thus has paid little attention to the embodied psychodynamic processes supporting this paradoxical dynamic. This article thus draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, primarily through the work of Slavoj Žižek, to analyze the role of fantasy and desire in sustaining faith in the potential of market-based environmentalism. In the process, it seeks to synthesize Marxian, Foucaultian, and Lacanian perspectives in pursuit of a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary environmental governance functions. It does so by treating the body as a crucial nexus of convergence among these different perspectives. The analysis is illustrated through discussion of how the practice of ecotourism, a quintessential market-based conservation strategy, is sustained through its promise to provide a transcendent experience of nature-culture unity yet instead offers, for the most part, a mere "pseudocatharsis" that paradoxically intensifies the very desire that it promises to satisfy and thereby supports the twin neoliberal fantasies of consumption without consequence and accumulation without end, in terms of which the body itself becomes a prime site of capitalization.

Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology

2012

This chapter aims at exploring how the neoliberal project reproduces itself theoretically and practically in the context of the government of the ecology. It first proposes, following Foucault, a definition of neoliberalism as not only a drive towards privatization and marketization, but rather more broadly as a drive towards the economization of the ensemble of social relations (viz., the economic, the cultural, the political, and the ecological) through governmental dispositifs based on the understanding that individuals are calculative and calculable. It then traces the historical genealogy of neoliberal reason back to the establishment of the Mont Pèlerin Society in the immediate aftermath of WWII, as an alliance venue for the Austrian, the Chicago and the Virginia schools of thought. The chapter then claims that if neoliberal project is to be understood as an economization of the entire realm, then the Post-Walrasian approach, whose main aim is to provide "incentive-compatible" mechanisms to situations pertaining imperfect and costly information, should equally be included within the neoliberal project despite its egalitarian concerns. On this backdrop, the chapter finally unpacks how different varieties of neoliberalism reproduce themselves in the context of the ecology. It concludes by making two claims: first, the reduction of ecological valuation to a mere aggregation of individual subjective valuations may be inappropriate for complex and uncertain ecological services; and second, environmental policies that are based only on economic incentives are likely to subject the entire ecology into the economic logic of markets and "performatively" turn it into an object of strategic-calculative logic, as they solicit manipulative, predatory, and rent-seeking behavior.

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE ‘AFTER’ NEOLIBERALISMtesg_

The relationships between neoliberalism and environmental governance have been the topic of much scholarly and policy debate. The recent, and ongoing, economic crisis brings new questions and urgency to these debates. This paper examines whether and how the economic crisis might be understood as a crisis of neoliberalism and what the implications might be for environmental quality and the dominance of ‘neoliberal’ approaches to environmental governance. The paper attempts to delineate some of the major potential relationships between neoliberalism and environmental governance through this crisis. It argues that although such relationships are contingent and subject to political action, in the US context at least the ongoing economic crisis has resulted in a weakening of support for environmental protections, in a manner that does not fit with current claims of the ‘post-political’ condition. The paper concludes by outlining several positive contributions critical geographers and other analysts of nature-society relations could make to challenging the current dominance of neoliberal policies in environmental management.

The limits of 'neoliberal natures': Debating green neoliberalism

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent critiques of geographical scholarship on 'neoliberal natures'. The analysis juxtaposes distinct (and at times divergent) conceptualizations of neoliberalism – as political doctrine , as economic project, as regulatory practice, or as process of governmentalization – and also of nature – as primary commodity, as resource, as ecosystem service, or as socio-natural assemblage. Strategies for developing a more systematic account of the variegation of neoliberal natures are discussed, with the goal of provoking scholars of neoliberal natures to reflect upon their core conceptual and methodological commitments , while contributing to broader debates over neoliberalism and the 'nature of nature'.