Biopolitics, Environmental Change, and Development Studies

Abstract

This article proposes a Foucaultian, yet more-than-human, conceptual framework for scholars of both international development and biopolitics in our current historical–geographical conjuncture: the ostensibly nascent Anthropocene. Under these conditions, it is argued that biopower operates across three primary axes: first, between differently ‘racialized’ populations of humans; second, between asymmetrically valued populations of humans and nonhumans; and, third, between humans, our vital support systems, and various types of emergent biosecurity threats. Indeed, one can observe biopower at work in governmental programmes to encourage specific forms of environmental citizenship, or, alternatively, to ensure the conservation of certain ‘charismatic megafauna’ at the expense of marginal human communities. In addition, emerging campaigns to identify and contain both harmful pathogens and their vector species constitute a third axis of human–nonhuman–nonhuman biopolitics, wherein the international community increasingly seeks to eliminate or contain life-forms that threaten both human communities and the ecological systems from which we derive our prosperity. In short, each of these sets of interventions proposes a governmental vision for the forms of life that states and development institutions can and should support, while implicitly approving that others may be ‘let die’. Suggesting that these are the parameters of the empirical problematic with which a properly (bio)political approach to development studies must engage, the article concludes with a further elucidation of these arguments in relation to four ‘sectoral impacts’ of environmental change that the World Bank has recently identified: (i) agriculture, (ii) water resources, (iii) ecosystem services, and (iv) emerging infectious diseases.

Keywords:

• biopolitics
• development studies
• Foucault
• environmental change
• Anthropocene

Notes on contributor

Connor J. Cavanagh is a PhD Research Fellow in the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric) at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

Notes

¹As an initial definition, the concept of biopolitics refers to the emergence of living populations – rather than simply geographical territory – as the object of both government and political strategy from the eighteenth century onward. For Foucault (1978, 2003, 2007), in particular, biopolitics first arose when the classical sovereign power to ‘take life or let live’ became complimented by mechanisms for ‘making live or letting die’ at the level of the population. Such mechanisms include, for instance, the disciplines of demography, medicine, and public health, which wield power through the identification of programmes and strategies for the ‘improvement’ or betterment of entire populations, rather than through the mere deployment of coercive force.

²Fassin (2011, p. 226) distinguishes Foucault's biopolitics from what he calls a ‘politics of life’, which focuses on life as such rather than merely on the population as an object of study. Regardless of whether one ultimately accepts this distinction, his work provides an invaluable overview of the relationship between humanitarianism and biopolitical thought.

³Exceptions include Grove (2010), Baldwin (2013), and Dalby (2013), although these authors focus on the topic of environmental security more so than on environmental change as such.

⁴Although Latour (2004, 2005) expresses his intervention in a radically different theoretical idiom, I extract its biopolitical implications in Section 3 of this essay.

⁵On this point, see also Dempsey (2013) on the redefinition of biodiversity loss as both financial and material risks at the World Economic Forum.

⁶Here, I cite the text of this lecture that appears in Burchell et al.'s The Foucault Effect (Foucault, 1991).

⁷Of course, this is clearly not to say that both refugee camps and national parks are produced via an identical causal process. Surely, the emergence of each is ‘overdetermined’ in the sense that multiple political and economic factors converge to produce them. My point is that, despite the empirical differences between these phenomena, we can identify a similar biopolitical logic as one of the contributing variables to their overdetermination. For readers interested in a more detailed discussion of the biopolitics of biodiversity conservation, please see Smith (2011) and Biermann and Mansfield (2014).