Rendering climate change governable: From biopower to advanced liberal government?

Abstract

This article generates a theoretical framework for analysing the politics of climate change on the basis of Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. Foucault does not limit the exercise of power to sovereignty, but introduces discipline, biopower, liberal and advanced liberal government as alternative configurations of state and power. The article argues that the ways in which climate change is rendered a governable entity are best understood before the background of a shift from biopower to advanced liberal government. It will be argued that climate change was first rendered governable by biopower, which justified global management of spaceship Earth in the name of the survival of life on Earth. Since the mid-1990s, climate change has been captured by advanced liberal government, which articulates climate change as an economic issue that requires market-based solutions to facilitate cost-effective technological solutions. A governmentality analysis asks which visibilities, fields of knowledge, practices and identities this ‘global climate regime’ is actually producing, rather than assuming that what it does or is supposed to do is known. In that way, the ways in which programme failure has already been built into the very formation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol can be identified.

Keywords:

• Governmentality
• neoliberalism
• climate change
• constructivism
• power

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 46th annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, 3 March 2005. The author would like to thank Jason Adams, Tim Bending, Peter Feindt, Michael Shapiro and the anonymous peer reviewer for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The author would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for her stay as visiting scholar at the Political Science Department of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa from January to March 2005, which enabled the research for this paper to be conducted.

Notes

1. Over the course of his writing, Foucault has used different strategies to capture power relations and there have been significant shifts of emphasis in his work. It is not before Foucault's third phase (the ‘middle’ Foucault), that he turns towards a productive concept of power and challenges the conventional concept of power as repressive. Some have argued that Foucault's theorizing of power failed (Fink-Eitel, 2002, p. 94; Taylor, 1985, p. 167) because of unresolved conceptual problems within certain works and inconsistencies between the various phases of Foucault's work. In opposition to that, it is argued that while there are shifts of emphasis, all the different strands of Foucault's investigations come together to form a more or less coherent whole (for a similar view: Deacon, 2002, p. 90; Smart, 1983, p. 63).

2. A more extended comparison of Foucault's concept of power and traditional approaches to power in political theory can be found in Digeser (1992). The implications of a Foucaultian approach for the practice of policy analysis have been spelled out most systematically by Gottweis (2003).

3. This is based on the assumption that it is impossible to gain knowledge of ‘society’ that would allow the effective deployment of public policy (Dean, 2003, p. 163).

4. Edited volumes with governmentality studies include Barry et al. (1996), Bröckling et al. (2000), Burchell et al. (1991), Darier (1999), Dean & Hindess (1998); for a good overview of the literature see Lemke (2002).

5. While the use of the term biopower in the following quote is different from the usage employed by Foucault, Luke's concept of eco-governmentality exhibits all characteristics of Foucault's notion of biopower as extended to the planet.

6. To sign up for the CCP campaign, a local government has to ratify a commitment to reduce its 1990 levels of carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by the year 2010. The commitment is monitored on the basis of an obligatory emissions inventory and grounded in a local action plan.