Neoliberalism, sustainability and governance

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Neo-liberalism, sustainability and governance

• Richard Le Heron
• School of Geography and Environmental Science
• The University of Auckland

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Interpretation

• Know little about past governing arrangements in
  New Zealand
• Range of literatures available much greater now
• Cross-boundary work happening
• Post-structural political economy

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What we have heard so far

• Governing to facilitate economic and social
  development in a context where market-driven
  neoliberalism has proven ineffective,
  unpredicatible, risky, politically unpalatable
  and socially costly

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What I am going to explore

• Broad approaches of society to economic and
  ecological outcomes in production and
  consumption terms
• Embedding/disembedding of investment processes in
  market arrangements

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Definitional work

• Economic and ecological processes in their
  institutional settings
• Investmentlabour processes
• Political projects and concrete political
  programmes
• Sustainability as a political project and as a
  programme

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General comments

• Range of research projects and roles
  agriculture, fisheries and environment/amenity
• Genealogy of sustainability in New Zealand
• Sense of directionality relating to
  sustainability

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Mappings

• Lines of engagement, contingency of connection
  and points of contact
• Framings, guiding terms/triggers, and
  systems/sequences
• Accessibilities, availabilities, associations,
  alignments, accommodations assemblages and
  autonomies

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Projects
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Genealogy of Sustainability

• From Rio to Johannesburg
• Science
• Sustainable Action Plan
• Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment

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(No Transcript)
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A governmentality-informed perspective

• Seeking to establish the singularity of
  particular strategies within a field of relations
  of truth, power and subjectivity (Rose, 1999,57)

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A governmentality-informed perspective

• Governing strategies
• Framing
• Rules
• Techniques
• Constructing subject positions/practices/spaces
  of action
• assemblying expertise
• technologies of performance and agency
• actor relations
• internal process relations

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Reflections

• Moments of possible change directed towards
  Sustainable Development
• Unusual in being a researcher-expert at a
  particular juncture in each formative process
• Tried to combine regulationist sensitivity to
  construction of context and governmentality
  interest in the constitutive dimensions of
  micro-politics in order to reflexively inhabit
  the policy space between theory and practice
• Urge not to be too cynical in the contexts some
  movement from problems and solutions to
  problematics and processes

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Basic questions

• Key actors approaching questions in particular
  ways
• Change management - What is good governance? Is
  behaviour changing through interventions?
• Process-centred - Can activities such as science,
  planning, economic development be conceived and
  practiced differently?

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Some conclusions

• About changing changing investment processes
• SD projects as transition processes?
• Expose what values we might circulate status quo
  or transformative?
• In and out of new subject positions, spaces,
  subjectivities and identities
• Potentially new spaces of production and
  consumption

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Made visible

• Theoretical and empirical
• Mappings
• Co-constituted
• Emergent and multiple
• Links-coherence and coherence-links
• New spaces for/of political engagement
• In-the-making

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Basic questions still relevant

• What is happening to investment processes?
• What is happening to institutional arrangements
  in relation to investment processes?
• Are outcomes altering?