Flexible Nature: Governing with the Environment in the Development of U.S. Neoliberalism

Abstract

The environment is organic to the neoliberal turn, not just as more or less cooperative material inputs or as a surface on which the changes to production and labor relations play out. The frequent finding that nature is being privatized and commodified in new ways is often described as nature's neoliberalization, but these trends do not exhaust the ways in which nature is integral to recent economic transformations. This article is structured around two claims. First, the ways of representing the environment economically that the neoliberal natures literature tends to represent as quite new are actually present and important at the origins of neoliberal policy. A brief genealogy of neoliberalism and nature in U.S. economic policy of the 1970s is surveyed in support of this. Second, work on neoliberal natures has emphasized the commodification and privatization of nature under neoliberalism at the expense of analyzing the environment's role in other important features of neoliberalism. Using qualitative policy analysis and an examination of three modern cases of environmental policy, this article traces the connections between the governance of nature and the governance of other parts of the economy with reference to the more specific economic transformations identified as “post-Fordist.” These similarities are not due to the new application of an established set of techniques of economic governance but because nature was internal to neoliberalism from the beginning not just as resources but as a set of relationships useful for stabilizing capital accumulation.

环境是构成新自由主义转向的基本元素, 而非协作物质或多或少之投入, 抑或是生产与劳动关系变迁所上演之表面。自然正以崭新的形式私有化与商品化此般频繁的研究发现, 经常被描绘为自然的新自由主义化, 但这些趋势并未穷尽自然内含于晚近经济变迁的方式。本文的构成围绕着两大主张。首先, 新自由主义自然之文献, 倾向将环境再现为经济之方式呈现作为相当新颖之事, 实则是当前的, 且对新自由主义政策的缘起至关重要。本研究检视美国 1970 年代经济政策中, 新自由主义与自然的简要系谱学, 以支持上述主张。再者, 新自由主义自然之研究, 强调新自由主义下自然的商品化与私有化, 并以牺牲分析环境在新自由主义其他重要特徵中的角色为代价。本文运用质性政策分析, 检视三大当代环境政策之案例, 追溯自然治理与其他经济面向的治理之间的连结, 并指涉被指认为 “后福特主义” 的更为特定的经济变迁。这些相似性并非源自于已建立的经济治理技术的崭新应用, 而是因为自然从一开始便是新自由主义的一部分, 自然并非仅只是资源, 而是有助于稳定资本积累的一组关系。

El medio ambiente es orgánico al giro neoliberal, no solamente representado en insumos materiales más o menos cooperativos o como superficie sobre la cual juegan los cambios en las relaciones de producción y trabajo. El hallazgo frecuente de que la naturaleza está siendo privatizada y comodificada de nuevas maneras se describe a menudo como la neoliberalización de la naturaleza, aunque estas tendencias no agotan los modos como ésta se integra en las transformaciones económicas recientes. Este artículo se ha estructurado alrededor de dos declaraciones. Primero, los modos de representar el medio ambiente económicamente, algo que la literatura neoliberal relacionada con estas cuestiones tiende a mostrar como muy novedosos, se detectan realmente presentes e importantes en los propios orígenes de la política neoliberal. Para respaldar esta afirmación, se revisa una breve genealogía de neoliberalismo y naturaleza en la política económica americana de los años 1970. Segundo, el trabajo sobre las naturalezas neoliberales ha enfatizado la comodificación y privatización de la naturaleza bajo el neoliberalismo a expensas del análisis del papel del medio ambiente en otros rasgos importantes del neoliberalismo. Usando el análisis cualitativo de la política y un examen de tres casos modernos de política ambiental, este artículo traza las conexiones entre la gobernanza de la naturaleza y la gobernanza de otras partes de la economía con referencia a las transformaciones económicas más específicas, identificadas como “posfordistas”. Estas similitudes no se deben a la nueva aplicación de un conjunto establecido de técnicas de gobernanza económica, sino porque la naturaleza era interna al neoliberalismo desde el principio, no meramente en forma de recursos sino como un conjunto de relaciones útiles para estabilizar la acumulación del capital.

Key Words:

• ecosystem services
• neoliberal nature
• post-Fordism
• regulation approach
• regulatory reform

关键词:

• 生态系统服务, 新自由主义自然, 后福特主义, 调节学派方法, 调节式改革。

Palabras clave:

• enfoque de regularización, naturaleza neoliberal, posfordismo, reforma reguladora, servicios ecosistémicos

Notes

1. “There is no logic of capital but a series of logics with a family resemblance, corresponding to different modes of regulation and accumulation strategies” (Jessop 1990, 189).

2. Search of “regulatory reform” on the Google Ngram viewer at https://books.google.com/ngrams.

3. The USRC can be thought of as a precursor to Reagan's Council on Regulatory Relief and George H. W. Bush's Domestic Policy Council. It is significant for our purposes that President Carter turned to his Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Douglas Costle, to lead the effort.

4. Although they were commissioned by the government, because they were published by a private firm they were not kept in government depository libraries. Their formal citation post-Reagan appears to have been limited to a few nods in the documents articulating Vice President Gore's “Reinventing Government” initiatives of 1994 and 1995, which had many of the same goals. I eventually located them as part of the holdings of a government information agency that had been defunded and shuttered between 1994 and 2009.

5. The Steiner quotation is shown on screen at http://www.naturalcapitaldeclaration.org/category/signatories/.

6. See http://willamettepartnership.org/ecosystem-credit-accounting/pilot-project-descriptions/. See also Nost (2015).

7. See http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detailfull/national/programs/financial/cig/?cid=nrcs143_008205.

8. This is in no way meant to sanction the resort to neologisms such as “nulture” or “natureople” (K. D. Smith 2002), which displace onto philology, rather than destabilizing, the establishment of nature and culture as opposed realms: “… the taking sides, relationality, and ‘splace’ will not do” (Wainwright and Barnes 2009, 984).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Morgan Robertson

MORGAN ROBERTSON is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include market-based environmental policy and the science–policy interface pertaining to issues of environmental assessment, ecosystem services, and wetlands.