Climate change as governmentality: technologies of government for adaptation in three European countries

Abstract

Using the Foucauldian theoretical framework of governmentality, this paper examines the role of regulative ‘technologies of government’ in climate change adaptation. The paper examines such technologies and underlying rationalities in a multi-level context, in three European countries that represent different stages of adaptation policy development: the UK, Finland and Sweden. Drawing upon policy documents and interviews at different levels, the paper illustrates differences in technologies of government for adaptation between the relatively ‘regulative’ UK state system and Finland and Sweden's traditional legalistic and welfarist systems. The study illustrates that, while the treatment of adaptation as an issue on a national level coheres with national rationalities, local and regional levels show a diversity in the development of bottom-up adaptation technologies.

Keywords:

• adaptation
• climate change
• governmentality
• technologies of government

Notes

1. However, recent economic crises have influenced the inclusion of certain market-based technologies within such bureaucracies, providing instruments for “regenerating the public sector, without changing the ideological or structural fundaments of the Nordic model” (Sjöblom and Godenhjelm 2009, p. 171).

2. This system has been changed (in December 2010) since the new government came into power, with assessment functions under the new system yet to be clarified.

3. The Regional Environmental Centres were abolished after the fieldwork took place. Their tasks have been allocated to Regional Centres for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment, which now have a slightly different mandate than the RECs.