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The Governmentalisation of the Environment

Jo Goodie, PhD (Murdoch) B.A. LLB (Melb)

School of Law
Murdoch University
J.Goodie@murdoch.edu.au

The Governmentalisation of the Environment

Environmental governance
Contemporary environmental governance and its interface with other aspects of the
modern social condition emerged through a process of rethinking Nature. The creation of
a new social entity called environment marked a fundamental shift in our interaction
with nature and our social perception of the significance of the natural world. Scientific
capacity; agricultural practices; resource management; emergent environmental
sensibility; increasingly sophisticated techniques and processes of ecological science;
shifting political will and policy implementation; as well as various legal devices and
regimes through which environmental responsibility, rights and ambitions have been
framed, regulated and prescribed, have all shaped and given substance to the concept of
environment and determined how it is governed. Taking up governmentality theory, this
paper analyses how certain forms of specifically environmental thinking and governance
emerged. It is an approach which has also informed the work of Darier (1999); Higgins
and Lawrence (2005); Higgins and Natalier (2004); Lockie (2004); Rutherford (1999a,
1999b). OMalley characterises governmentality theory as deploying an:
analytic stance that favours how questions over why questions. In other
words it favours accounts in terms of how government of a certain kind
becomes possible: in what manner is it to be translated into practice, using
what combination of means. Only secondarily is it concerned with

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accounts that seek to explain government in the sense of understanding
the nature of government as the effect of other events (1999: 679 n.7).
Higgins and Lawrence argue that the governmentality approach looks beyond the state
based government to consider the diversity of actors involved in governing processes.
It also recognises the important role played by seemingly non-political agents who
employ an array of new practices in an attempt to govern (2005: 1).
Governance of the environment, as it is now conceived, barely existed before the mid
nineteenth century (Sutton 2004: 19). The conceptualisation and application of eighteenth
century scientific modes of thinking, in conjunction with economic development and
increased productivity, led to the emergence of previously unconsidered connections and
new problems regarding the management of what we now call the environment
(Rutherford 1999a: 42). In the early nineteenth century, the environment became
physically more conspicuous both as a thing of beauty and as a site of degradation. This
led to the problematisation of the environment through the governmental discourse and
practice that focused upon publicly harmful or dangerous aspects of nature.
Environmental governance was not assimilated into modern politics and government until
the mid twentieth century (Sutton 2004: 19). Ecological thinking, in combination with
post war security, prosperity and political stability identified the environment as a special
focus of government. Systems ecology and other forms of scientific modeling, such as
those employed by climatologists and geographers, meant it became technically possible
to efficiently conduct macro-calculations of environmental conditions, the impact of
resource exploitation or levels of degradation caused by industrial development.

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In surveying the features and course of environmental governance my discussion briefly
considers an example of environmental governance from either end of that trajectory: the
governmental response to the urban degradation of industrial cities dates from the midnineteenth century and the environmental challenge posed by climate change provides a
contemporary example. Climate change, its dimensions, its consequences, how it might
be controlled or remedied, is one of the preeminent concerns of western, contemporary
environmental governance. It is the subject of scepticism, public anxiety and media
debate, expert scientific and economic analysis and report, political grandstanding, policy
initiatives to change patterns of consumption, and regulation and incentives to limit the
production of carbon emissions. It appears to have very little in common with my other
example of environmental governance, but in the early to mid nineteenth century urban
degradation and disease inspired similarly far reaching government action to reshape the
urban environment (Flinn 1965; McMichael 2001; Reynolds 1995). Both examples have
a specifically bio-political focus; wherein expert knowledges are brought to bear on the
governance of particular environment to secure the well being of specific populations.
Climate change is typical of the objects of twentieth/twenty-first century environmental
governance; it embodies the threat to human societies which stem from their relationship
with the natural world (Sutton 2004: 15, emphasis added). Unlike climate change, the
public health crisis of the industrial nineteenth century might not at first appear to be an
example of environmental governance at all. Chadwicks public sanitation reforms seem
to have little to do with the governance of the relationship between human society and the
Natural world. Indeed, the industrialisation and urbanisation of the nineteenth century not
only seriously transformed the living environment of working people, it also meant that

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Nature become quite distant and did not figure hugely in the lives of people living in the
industrial cities (Coyle and Morrow 2001: 151-2; Bonyhady 2000). However, this
physical and spiritual alienation from nature was a source of serious moral concern
among the governing classes in both England and Australia and became part of an
emerging environmental discourse of (Coyle and Morrow 2001: 151-2; Bonyhady 2000:
222-27). Taylor observes that:
The belief that ones surroundings could aggravate an inherited capacity
for disease coincided with mounting evidence that the transformation of
nature by human kind was occurring with such magnitude as to threaten
the basis of natures laws and economies that ultimately was the basis of
the well-being of all species (2004: 202).
Governmentality theorised
Before considering the character of environmental governance or these examples further,
it would be useful to layout the predominant features of governmentality theory which
inform my analysis. In his lecture Governmentality (1991) Foucault analysed the
dominant characteristics of a society of government, which he claimed emerged through
an amalgam of knowledge and techniques by which the economy and its constituent
population was understood, made calculable and subject to intervention. The
development of a society of government was partly dependent, he said, upon two
simultaneous events, the emergence of the problem of population and the isolation of
economy as a specific sector of reality (1991: 102). Foucault argued that: The
perspective of population, the reality accorded to specific phenomena of population,

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render possible the final elimination of the model of family and the recentring of the
notion of economy (1991: 99).
The parameters of populations were largely revealed by statistics or the set of analyses
and forms of knowledge utilised by the territorial monarchical administration during the
sixteenth century and increasingly during the late seventeenth century (1991: 96).
Statistics became a technical force in a society of government, they revealed:
That population has its own regularities, its own rate of deaths and disease,
its cycles of scarcity, etc.; statistics shows also that the domain of
population involves a range of intrinsic, aggregate effects, phenomena that
are irreducible to those of the family such as epidemics, endemic levels of
mortality, ascending spirals of labour and wealth; lastly it shows that,
through its shifts, customs, activities, etc., population has specific
economic effects (Foucault 1991: 99).
By the eighteenth century, population became, the ultimate end of government
(Foucault 1991: 100). Thus, government began focusing upon improving the conditions
and interests of the population, in terms of its welfare, health and aspirations. The
population was not only the focus of understanding and amenable to calculation, but also
a site of governmental intervention as new knowledge and techniques aiding governance
developed. It became in Foucaults words: an object in the hands of government (1991:
100).
There was a significant nexus, Foucault contends, between governance of the population
and the development of political economy. This was because, political economy arises

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out of the perception of new networks of continuous and multiple relations between
population, territory and wealth (1991: 101). Tadros describes Foucaults understanding
of the interrelation between the three tiers of government:
The economy both provided a description of population and a place where
governmental decisions could be organized. Government could intervene
tactically into the economy by utilizing laws but it could also do so by
adjusting taxation, prescribing standards for education, by building an
infrastructure as well as directing moral and religious education (Tadros
1998: 92).
From bio-politics to environmental governance
Foucault argued that the emergence of a society of government allowed a bio-political
focus and form of governance to develop. Bio-power is multifaceted it operates through
the normalising process of disciplinary networks, which shape the conduct of individuals
in particular institutional contexts. It is immanent in self-governance and formation, but it
also operates at a distance upon populations, through the development, dissemination and
application of expert knowledges such as statistical analysis, risk assessment, economic
forecasting, public health initiatives, and regulation of the market. Rutherford observes
that:
It was the conjunction of the modern biological understanding of life and
the proliferation of medical and social scientific knowledge as normalizing
disciplines that brought forth a qualitatively different, distinctively modern
biopolitics. For Foucault, the rise of biopower, from the eighteenth century

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onwards, represented quite literally the entry of life into history (2000:
116).
Bio-politics particularly emphasises population governance, in terms of health,
prosperity, security and welfare. Rutherford argues that implicit in Foucaults theorisation
of the biopolitical regulation of populations, is the governance of the environment of
which those populations are an integral part (2000: 120). Indeed, in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Rutherford argues, a new discourse that had as its object what
today we call the environment developed along side other population related discourses
concerned with health, criminality, education, sexuality etc (2000: 128).
While Foucault identified the conditions through which modern forms of governance
occurred, he insisted that governance is produced not prescribed, it does not take some
universal or essential form. Governmentality theorists, such as Hunt and Wickham (1994)
and OMalley (2001), observe that programmes of governance are typically produced
through the challenge and resistance of differing forms of calculation and knowledge.
OMalley argues that:
Locating such sources of difference in governance: counters the tendency
to subsume government under one ascendant rationality; creates spaces in
which alternative governmental forms may be identified and contests
facilitated; opens up the possibilities for recognising hybridisation,
adaptation and change (2001: 25).
It is at this point I will return to consider the shape and characteristics of the two
examples of environmental governance introduced above.

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Early environmental governance
In the early nineteenth century, the environment became physically more conspicuous
and increasingly fouled. Due to the largely unregulated industry and lack of town
planning the rapidly expanding industrial cities were susceptible to overcrowding and
pollution. These factors, combined with the lack of coordinated sanitation, led to the
onset and rapid spread of infectious diseases, such as cholera and typhoid (McMichael
2001: 254-255). Edwin Chadwicks sanitary reforms of the 1840s led to refashioning of
the urban environment and an alleviation of the public health crisis. Perhaps because
Chadwicks reforms are famous for the numerous reports and statistical analysis which
informed and preceded them, it is easy to assume that the reforms followed an orderly,
far sighted approach to the governance of the urban environment. In particular, a clear
recognition that action need to be taken to address an evident and pressing problem.
However, the process of governance was not so straight forward. The impetus to take
action was inspired by factors beyond the large number of untimely deaths among the
working people which the statistics revealed. In the early-nineteenth century the general
death rate exceeded the birth rate, the infant mortality rate was high, the population of
urban Britain was singularly sustained by the steady immigration of dispossessed rural
poor (McMichael 2001: 254). Tuberculosis was the major cause of death, but it was not
the trigger for public health intervention. Like typhoid and cholera, it was disease which
thrived in squalid living conditions and the depleted, malnourished bodies of its victims.
But despite these factors the impact of tuberculosis on public health was not appreciated.
It was so much a part of life, so inevitable, so little understood, that it was accepted
mutely (Flinn 1965: 11). It was the epidemic effects of diseases such as typhoid and

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cholera, which were dramatic, highly lethal and extremely contagious (Flinn 1965:
10), that ultimately broke through the mindset of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
middle and upper classes who had become so inured to death among the urban poor
(Flinn 1965: 17).
The typhoid epidemics also stimulated action on public health among doctors practicing
in the working class districts. They supported their argument for action to relieve the
problem of urban public health with an inexhaustible supply of persuasive statistical and
descriptive material (Flinn 1965: 21-2). Some were persuaded, the Registrar-General
William Farr in his 1947 Report envisioned the possibility of legislating to eradicate the
miasmic poisonous vapour produced by the overcrowded and polluted cities, and
blamed for the epidemics (Flinn 1965: 29). Despite Farrs obvious political influence
state intervention to ensure public health was not an obvious solution, even in the very
narrow social sector represented by governments, Parliament, and the press (Flinn 1965:
40). But the development and increasing influence of intellectual trends, especially the
capacity of the new sanitary science to control and manage at least some aspects of urban
environment in Britain, persuaded government to commission its now famous reports and
inquiries (Coyle and Morrow 2004: 133).1 Edwin Chadwick, who coordinated and
steered the sanitary reforms, commissioned medical experts to survey and detail the
nuisances which afflicted the industrial cities, those surveys were published as
supplements to the final Report. This type of information had already been collated by
the medical profession and others in a number of detailed but local surveys. Some of
those surveys even anticipated the Chadwicks findings (Flinn 1965: 24-5). Significantly,

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however, before Chadwick, such reporting had not been sought and relied upon by
government as a prelude to possible parliamentary action (Flinn 1965: 44).
Within a couple of decades public health had become a social priority of late Victorian
government (Coyle and Morrow 2004: 133-4). In England and Australia early public
health legislation adopted the language and practice of sanitation reflecting
governments confidence in the capacity of sanitary science to maintain public health
through the effective management of physical urban space (Reynolds 1995: 96). The
shape of public health initiatives was to shift again when the miasmic theory that had
supported Chadwicks interventions was trumped by the authority of bacteriology. It was
a differently oriented technology that linked the onset of various diseases to
microbiological agents, rather than the vaguer pathogenic environment which required
general cleansing (McMichael 2001: 163; Curson and Clark 2004: 239).
Contemporary environmental governance
Public health regulation and policy continued to impact on the shape of the physical
environment and individual perception of risk and unhealthy environments. However, the
trajectory of environmental governance in the twentieth century was conditioned and
shaped more immediately by the knowledge and associated technologies of ecological
science. Ecological thinking in the twentieth century identified the environment, in a
governmental sense, as something more than a physical space that is simply the site of
public health interventions or population resource dilemmas. Modern ecology and
associated technologies have facilitated the detailed mapping and auditing of physical
environments, and have profoundly effected our modern appreciation of the environment

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as an interdependent, dynamic and potentially fragile web of interdependent physical
zones, spaces and activities. Significantly, it has undermined the dualism of the social and
the natural (Lockie 2004; Sutton 2004). Modern environmentalism has emerged through
the application of this type of technical scientific knowledge, in combination with certain
forms of environmental sensibility which treat the environment, not as a thing, or
somehow out there, but as a dynamic process of which humans are a part, which has a
history, an economy, and a power to transform and be transformed (Bramwell 1989;
McMichael 2001). The shape of modern environmental governance has been especially
influenced by the scientific and ethical critique of environmentalism that connects the
origin of ecological risks to technological application and commodity production
(Rutherford 1999b, Sutton 2004).
Despite the fact that the predominate characteristics of this environmental discourse are
readily identifiable, and the technologies that are employed to identify and intervene to
cure environmental problems are sophisticated, consensus on the nature of contemporary
environmental dilemmas is no more readily achieved in the twenty first century than it
was in the nineteenth. There has been evidence available for some decades of the impact
of human activities on global environmental systems and the phenomenon of global
warming. The first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established
by the United Nations in 1988, however the governance of climate change is still in its
nascence (Smith and Shearman 2006: 1-5). While there is perhaps consensus that because
climate change threatens our fundamental environmental security it poses an acute
political and social problem (McMichael 2004: xviii), the problems of governance
presented by climate change are still in the process of being articulated and priotised

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(Smith and Shearman 2006; Curson and Clark 2004: 239-43). Unlike my first example of
nineteenth century sanitation reform it is not possible to analyse the governance of
climate change with the benefit of hindsight. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the
unfolding response to climate change bears many of the hall-marks of modern ecological
thinking and practice environmental governance.
Rose and Miller observe that governmental or political rationalities are characteristically
moral, epistemological and idiomatic (1992: 178-179). It is an observation which assists
in delineating the shape of climate change governance. The authority of climate change
governance relies upon the epistemological constructions of climatology to demonstrate
how the enhanced greenhouse effect causes climate change and the probable effects of
climate change. This knowledge when combined with economic modeling to determine
how the effects of climate change might be abated, has provided both a guiding political
rationality and technical apparatus for the calculation and assessment of climate
change (Rutherford 1999b: 113). The governance of climate change is also informed by
the moral agendas and discourse of ecological ethics which take up the language of risk,
hazard, responsibility, justice and equity (Mc Michael 2004: xix). Risk particularly is the
idiom through which the impact of climate change on our daily lives is made thinkable.
Whether one agrees that there actually is a risk, or with calculations of the magnitude of
the risk of Gore, Garnaut (2008), Stern (2006) and others, the public discourse and
anxiety about the risks of climate change have a special significance in the governance of
climate change. They have made the statistical calculations of climatologists, economists
and geographers amenable to political deliberations, and sustained the moral, highly

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rationalised and technical aspects of contemporary understandings of climate change
(Rutherford 1999b: 116).
Concluding remarks
The two examples considered here demonstrate how environmental governance shifted
from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in terms of its idiom and the techniques it
employs. The great differences between the two examples also show how the focus of
environmental governance shifts not only with changes in circumstance, but also with the
technical capacity to identify and articulate environmental problems. But by their very
differences, the examples, also evidence the fact that there remains a significant similarity
in the process of environmental government. It is neither neat nor readily delineated; it is
motivated, limited and determined by the operation of various congruent and
contradictory rationalities and disciplines. The emergence of any particular
environmental problem and the will to govern that problem is contingent upon certain
forms of scientific investigation, but it is also determined in the midst of moral and
political claims about the impact of environmental factors on social well being.

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End notes
1. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (the Chadwick Report of
1842); the Reports of the Commissioners on the State of Large Towns (1844-45); Report
of the Royal Commission of Noxious Vapours (1878).