2008 - Himley

Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.
Geographies of Environmental Governance:

The Nexus of Nature and Neoliberalism
Matthew Himley*
Department of Geography, Syracuse University
Abstract
Environmental governance has emerged as both a key organizing concept and
priority arena of research for nature–society geographers. This article offers a
critical review of the burgeoning geographical literature on environmental
governance, emphasizing how geographers have employed the concept to analyze
how neoliberal globalization has entailed a fundamental reconfiguration of the
organizational and institutional arrangements through which society–environment
relations are governed. I begin by tracing the diverse bodies of scholarship and
theoretical perspectives – including political ecology and institutional theories of
political economy – that have shaped how geographers have approached environ-
mental governance. I then examine three themes central to work on the ‘neolib-
eralization’ of environmental governance: privatization and enclosure, the rescaling
of governance, and the role of oppositional social movements. Finally, I propose
that future research place more emphasis on documenting and analyzing the
practices of neoliberal environmental governance through ethnographic methods.
The institutional landscapes of capitalism are being redrawn. (Martin 2003, 78)
Neo-liberalism is now, and ever was, the politics of the crisis. (Tickell and Peck
1995, 370)
Introduction: The Rise of Environmental Governance

With the world in the throes of neoliberal globalization and with pro-
clamations of capital-induced ecological crisis proliferating, environmental
governance has emerged in recent years as both a key organizing concept
and priority arena of research for geographers working in the nature–society
tradition. Given that the most recent edition of The Dictionary of Human
Geography (Johnston et al. 2000) did not contain an entry for the term,
the ascendancy of environmental governance has indeed been swift. In the
last 6 years, for instance, at least two special issues of geographical journals
have been dedicated to the theme (see Bridge and Jonas 2002; McCarthy
and Prudham 2004). Geographical research on environmental governance
has a provenance that can in part be traced to the traditional concerns of
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
434 Geographies of environmental governance
political ecology, in particular this subdiscipline’s abiding interest in the

institutions that structure access to and control over resources; it has also
drawn heavily on institutional theories of political economy familiar to
economic geography. In addition, ecological modernization theory and
environmental justice scholarship have shaped how geographers have
employed the concept. Drawing on these diverse traditions, geographers,
as I explore in this article, are in the middle of producing a distinctive, and
decidedly critical, body of work on environmental governance. Importantly,
much of this work has used the concept to analyze how processes of
neoliberal globalization have entailed – indeed, have been predicated on
– a radical reconfiguration of the organizational and institutional arrange-
ments through which society–environment relations are governed. In the
process, geographers have stressed the interests served by these reconfigu-
rations as well as how governance arrangements are contested and struggled
over by differentially empowered social and political actors.
In the next section of this article, I define environmental governance
and expand on the claim that recent geographical research on the topic
builds on subject matter central to political ecology. In addition, I detail
the influence of the ‘institutional turn’ in economic geography on
geographical scholarship on environmental governance, and I compare
this work to ecological modernization theory. In the third section, I turn
directly to the burgeoning literature on neoliberal environmental governance
and examine three main themes within this research: privatization and
enclosure, the rescaling of environmental governance functions, and the
role of social movements in contesting the neoliberalization of envi-
ronmental governance. In the conclusion, I propose that geographers
direct more attention to the practices of neoliberal environmental governance.
This would entail more detailed ethnographic accounts of the complex
and place-based sets of practices through which particular actors work to
produce (or oppose the production of ) governance regimes.
The Roots of Environmental Governance Scholarship

While the term governance may commonly be employed to invoke the
more general process, or ‘art’, of governing organizations or societies
(see Pierre 2000), in geography and the social sciences more broadly the
concept has developed a more specific usage: as a means to refer to the
trend away from state-centric forms of social and economic regulation
associated with post-Fordist state restructuring. Jessop (2002) argues that
this restructuring has entailed the transference of regulatory and administrative
functions from the national state to variously scaled nonstate actors [such
as parastatal organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and
private firms], which has effectively resulted in a redrawing of the public–
private divide. Within this new context, the affairs of economy and society,
it is thought, are increasingly governed not merely by government, but
© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.x
Geographies of environmental governance 435
rather through the networked interaction of various state and nonstate

organizations and institutions operating at multiple sites and scales (Painter
2000). It is precisely this ‘destatization of the political system’ (Jessop
2002, 199) that the concept of governance seeks to capture.
Animated by this work on the shift from government to governance,
nature–society geographers have adopted the term environmental governance
– or resource governance when referring to the production and consumption
of particular resources – to problematize the traditional equation of
resource regulation/environmental management with the actions and
institutions of the administrative state (Bakker and Bridge 2007) – a reas-
sessment prompted by the growing role of nonstate actors (consumers,
NGOs, corporations, and social movements, for example) and institutions
(such as global environmental accords, corporate codes of conduct, and
investment treaties) in the governance of society–environment relations
(Liverman 2004). As Bakker and Bridge (2007) note, a complex interplay
of forces has led to this decentering of power regarding resource/environ-
mental decision-making. Authority, on the one hand, has been wrested
from the state. This has occurred, for instance, through the challenges
posed by historically marginalized indigenous and tribal groups – in places
like the Ecuadorian Amazon (Sawyer 2004), northern Wisconsin in the
United States (Silvern 1999), and Australia (Howitt 2006; Langton 2001)
– as they have struggled to control decisions regarding resource development
within their territories. In their efforts to assert resource rights, such
groups and their academic and civil society allies often contest state dom-
inance in resource questions on epistemological grounds, namely by
critiquing state-led, Western science-based resource management as
instrumentalist and economistic and by calling for the integration of
‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ ecological knowledges into resource management
systems (Davis 2005; Howitt 2001; Johnson et al. 2007; for further analysis
of the promotion of indigenous knowledges in the development process,
see Briggs 2005; Briggs and Sharp 2004). On the other hand, the state
has ceded authority over resource questions, as witnessed in the reduction
of formal state regulatory and administrative capabilities associated with
the implementation of neoliberal policies, which, as I explore in more
detail below, have emphasized public–private ‘partnerships’ and market-based
mechanisms as means to achieve ‘efficient’ resource use and allocation
(Liverman 2004; Mansfield 2007a; McCarthy and Prudham 2004;
Robertson 2004, 2007). In summary, the concept of environmental
governance has supplied geographers with an analytical category with
which to examine the multiple and overlapping organizational, institutional,
and epistemological systems through which access to natural resources is
now structured/negotiated and decisions regarding resource use and envi-
ronment management are now taken.
As a field of study that ‘seeks to understand the complex relations
between Nature and Society through careful analysis of social forms of
access and control over resources’ (Watts and Peet 2004, 4), political
ecology has long grappled with a number of core concerns that have
reappeared as central to environmental governance scholarship. Of particular
note is the enduring focus within political ecology on the institutions – what
Watts (2000, 40) refers to as the ‘rules-in-use’ – that structure resource
access, use, and conservation. State development and natural resource
policies, for example, have figured prominently in political–ecological
analysis (Hecht and Cockburn 1989; Peluso 1992, 1994), as have property
rights regimes. Regarding the latter, political ecologists have underscored
the complexity of property rights over resources and ecological systems
characteristic of more traditional societies (Robbins 2004) and have
detailed how these multifaceted arrangements, generally entailing a
mixture of individual and shared rights, have been transformed through
processes of imperialism, internal colonialism, state formation, and
capitalist development ( Jacoby 2001; Neumann 1998, 2004). This work
highlights how the imposition of statist/capitalist property rights regimes
and systems of resource governance has historically operated to both
dispossess traditional resource users and erase their customary resource
management institutions. In their analyses of these dynamics, political
ecologists have drawn inspiration from classical accounts of capitalist
development occurring across centuries in rural England, which entailed
a shift from various forms of property rights (including common, collective,
state) to exclusive private property rights, namely through acts of enclosure,
and thereby restricted peasants’ access to land and resources (Marx 1967;
Thompson 1975; see also Harvey 2003). As I discuss below, the concept
of enclosure has gained renewed purchase for researchers examining the
radical reconfiguration of property institutions fundamental to neoliberal
reforms, particularly the recent and extensive round of privatization of
commons resources (Heynen and Robbins 2005; Mansfield 2004, 2007a;
McCarthy 2005a).
While environmental governance research in geography has built on
issues central to political ecology, the ‘institutional turn’ in economic
geography has offered a more developed set of theoretical tools with
which to undertake these analyses (Bridge and Jonas 2002; Martin 2003;
McCarthy and Prudham 2004). Scholars have, in particular, drawn on
urban regime theory and regulation theory, both of which represent insti-
tutional approaches to political economy undergirded by the notion ‘that
the form and evolution of the economic landscape cannot be fully understood
without giving due attention to the various social institutions on which
economic activity depends and through which it is shaped’ (Martin 2003,
77). Urban regime theory, for its part, seeks to provide an understanding
of both the ways in which spatiotemporally contingent institutional
arrangements structure local economic processes as well as how particular
actors wield power, both economic and extraeconomic, through these
institutions in order to shape land use and development policies (Bridge
and Jonas 2002; Feldman and Jonas 2000; Gibbs and Jonas 2000). This
task is frequently undertaken by examining the role of growth coalitions
– usually partnerships between state and market actors – in governing the
trajectories and geographies of urban expansion. Geographers applying
urban regime theory to questions of environmental governance have mainly
focused on environmental policymaking at the urban and subregional
scales. Feldman and Jonas (2000), for instance, utilize urban regime theory
in their analysis of conservation planning in Southern California under the
Endangered Species Act. Exploring the implementation of conservation
measures designed to preserve habitat for the endangered Stephens’
kangaroo rat, these authors suggest that these measures were largely
at odds with Southern California’s expansion-oriented suburban ‘mode
of social regulation’ – a key concept within regulation theory (see next
paragraph) that Martin (2003, 77) defines as ‘the ensemble of rules, customs,
norms, conventions, and interventions which mediate and support
economic production, accumulation, and consumption.’ Feldman and
Jonas detail how local landowners and progrowth groups mobilized in order
to shape the conservation planning process so as to preserve their economic
interests and sustain the prevailing mode of social regulation. Unfortu-
nately for the Stephens’ kangaroo rat, the result of this political struggle
was a series of conservation reserves that was ‘piecemeal and fragmented,
often matching existing geographies of property rights, fiscal interests,
and political boundaries, but, in many places, mismatching the habitat
distribution of the [Stephens’ kangaroo rat]’ (Feldman and Jonas 2000, 277).
Rather than examining questions of urban environmental policy and
regional conservation, studies utilizing regulation theory have, for the
most part, focused on governance issues revolving around the production
and consumption of particular resources. Since its inception in France in
the 1970s, regulation theory has gained currency in a variety of social
science disciplines as a tool for understanding the relations between, on
the one hand, inherently contradictory and crisis-prone processes of
capitalist accumulation and, on the other hand, the constellation of
institutional forms and social practices – that is, the mode of social regulation
– that guides, regularizes, and stabilizes accumulation for more or less
extended periods (Dunford 1990; Jessop 1995, 1997; Peck and Miyamachi
1994). While regulation theorists have traditionally prioritized the nation-state
as the pivotal scale of governance, geographers adopting the regulation
approach have emphasized the ways in which broader-scale modes of
social regulation may be mediated at the subnational scale, thus creating
local and regional modes of social regulation grounded in the histories
and sociopolitical dynamics of particular places (Gertler 2000; Peck and
Tickell 1992; Tickell and Peck 1992). Although resource questions were
largely absent from early regulationist work in geography, since the mid-1990s
geographers have increasingly mobilized regulation theory in their analyses
of economy–environment interactions. Initial forays down this path
involved efforts to use regulation theory as a framework for better

conceptualizing and operationalizing sustainable development (Drummond
and Marsden 1995; Gibbs 1996). Yet, these abstract endeavors soon gave
way to more empirically grounded studies of the historically and geo-
graphically specific institutional forms that mediate the relations between
dynamic resource landscapes (see Roberts and Emel 1992) and processes
of capital accumulation. In applying the regulation approach to concrete
instances of resource regulation, geographers have explored the socioeco-
nomic restructuring of urban water systems (Bakker 2000, 2002; Gandy
1997); they have also examined the dynamics of nature-based capitalist
production in the context of a variety of primary commodity sectors,
including agriculture (Drummond 1996), mining (Bridge 2000; Bridge
and McManus 2000; Krueger 2002), and forestry (Bridge and McManus
2000; Prudham 2005).
Regulationist accounts of resource governance highlight the deeply
contested and conflict-ridden nature of resource development activities.
As Bridge and Jonas (2002) suggest, these struggles may be expressed in
a variety of forms, including conflicts over access to resources, the sociospa-
tial distribution of the benefits and burdens of resource extraction, and
cultural values assigned to nature. Despite underlying tendencies toward
conflict, however,
[T]he most striking thing about resource production and consumption is

that . . . resource extraction activities are rendered reasonably coherent for
significant periods of time . . . This is because potential conflicts are often nego-
tiated through historically and geographically specific sociopolitical struggles
that become codified as the institutions and social practices within which
resource extraction activities are embedded. By defining what is economically,
technologically, and politically possible at particular moments, such institutions
can lend coherence and stability to efforts to extract, process, market, and
consume natural resources. (Bridge and Jonas 2002, 759 –760)
Central to regulationist accounts of the socioinstitutional arrangements

that serve to (temporarily) contain the crisis tendencies of resource devel-
opment under capitalism have been attempts to identify the specifically
ecological contradictions inherent in such activities. In order to do so,
geographers have turned to ecological Marxism and, in particular, to the
work of O’Connor (1998) and Altvater (1993). Altvater draws on the laws
of thermodynamics to locate an ecological contradiction of capitalism in
the ‘dual character’ of the capitalist labor process – that is, that commodity
production is simultaneously the quantitative transformation of value and
also the qualitative transformation of materials and energy. As Bridge
(2000, 240) states, ‘as a result of this dual character, there is an inherent
tension between the expansionary requirements of capitalist growth and
the necessary increase in entropy (decline in free energy) that expansion
involves, given the “celestial constraints” of a closed system.’ O’Connor,
in contrast, locates his ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ in the antago-

nistic relationship between, on the one hand, the forces and relations of
production and, on the other hand, the conditions of production, particularly
external nature. The contradiction for O’Connor lies in capital’s tendency
to destroy – rather than reproduce – its own conditions of production,
thus leading to a crisis of underproduction, which threatens profits and the
reproduction of capital.
The notion of an ecological contradiction is central to Bridge’s (2000)
analysis of the copper mining and processing industry in the Southwestern
United States in the 1980s. Bridge locates the contradiction within the
production process of copper itself, namely in the industry’s tendency to
deplete its resource base, use up its available waste disposal options, and,
in the process of searching for new mineral deposits and waste sinks,
create opposition from nonmining interests. Drawing on regulation theory
and referring to the Phelps Dodge copper smelter in Douglas, Arizona,
Bridge demonstrates that these crisis tendencies had been effectively managed
for a considerable amount of time by formal and informal institutional
arrangements between corporations, the state, and activist groups that
regulated land use, raw material supply, and environmental impacts. However,
increased social opposition to mining and its impacts eventually led to
‘institutional exhaustion’ and the closure of the smelter. As Bridge (2000,
238) states, the ‘closure of Douglas demonstrated that the institutions
which had developed during the post-war years to facilitate profitable
production of copper from the natural environment of the desert
Southwest were no longer viable’. Thus, this study illustrates that being
attentive to the forms and dynamics of resource governance is crucial for
understanding the historical trajectory of mineral production in the
Southwestern United States.
Although not examining the primary commodity industry, Robertson
(2004) also draws on regulation theory and the notion of an ecological
contradiction in his analysis of wetland banking in the northern Illinois.
Robertson argues that the contradiction inherent in attempts to create a
market for wetland services – itself a project of environmental governance
designed to stabilize social and ecological relations under capitalism – is
one of commensurability. In short, while the market system is predicated
on the ability to abstract and generalize a measurable value of a commodity
(its exchange value), which can then be translated across space, attempts
to do so with wetlands have proven to be exceptionally challenging. The
reason is that science recognizes wetlands as diverse and heterogeneous;
the exact ‘services’ different wetlands provide are in fact complex, varied,
and hard to generalize. The difficulty in articulating the logic of science
with the logic of the market thus threatens the future of wetland banking
and, more generally, calls into question the viability of a process fundamental
to neoliberal environmental governance: the ongoing drive to commodify
nature and fold ecosystem processes into the market.
As these cases suggest, a theme that runs through geographical analysis

of environmental governance, including studies not explicitly adopting
institutional political economy approaches, is how the biophysical properties
of natural resources and ecological systems impinge on and shape the
organizational and institutional systems though which they are governed.
Thus, Bakker (2003), in her analysis of water privatization, refers to water’s
‘uncooperativeness’ as a commodity. Because water is a flow resource and
necessary to life, property rights are more difficult to establish for water
than for most other resources, thereby inhibiting privatization. In addition,
because water is heavy and relatively difficult to transport, it requires
large-scale capital investments and is therefore susceptible to monopoly
control. In another example, Perreault (2006) explains the distinct dynamics
of the water and gas wars in Bolivia as in part due to the material
characteristics of the resources themselves. Water, a locally produced and
consumed resource that is a daily necessity and appropriated by relatively
simple means, was implicated in a primarily regional-scale struggle.
Natural gas, meanwhile, which enters into social relations through
more technologically advanced means and was destined for export, led to
a national-scale struggle that came to symbolize ‘the kind of exploitative
practices that Bolivians know so well – the theft of national wealth – that
enriches a few foreign and national elites while further impoverishing
those who labor for them’ (Perreault 2006, 166). Here, we see how the
biophysical properties of natural gas helped to determine the means by
which it could be extracted and then abstracted as an exchange value.
This, in turn, shaped the form and symbolism of popular mobilization,
which ultimately impacted the institutional and organizational arrange-
ments although which natural gas would be governed.
It is instructive to note the overlaps and divergences between geographical
scholarship on environmental governance, particularly work that draws on
institutional theories of political economy, and the ecological modernization
literature. Developed and cultivated primarily by environmental sociologists,
ecological modernization theory is similar to regulation theory in that it
views economic processes as embedded within and shaped by a complex
set of social institutions (Mol 2000; Murphy 2000). In addition, as with
ecological Marxists, ecological modernization theorists concern themselves
with industrial capitalism’s overall propensity to produce negative environ-
mental effects, even ecological crises. Yet, ecological modernization
research, often drawing on Beck’s (1992) notion of ‘reflexive modernity’,
offers a rather more optimistic depiction of modern society’s ability to
transform itself in response to these tendencies. This is thought to occur
through institutional reform and/or techno-scientific advances, the end
result being a form of green hypermodernity. Ecological modernization
theory places particular emphasis on the role of nonstate actors, such as
NGOs, in affecting these institutional and technological shifts (Mol 2000;
Sonnenfeld and Mol 2002). Furthermore, while ecological Marxists such
as O’Connor (1998) may view negative externalities, such as pollution or

industrial hazards, as drains on the economy and sources of potential crises
for capital, Beck (1992) considers the risks entailed by modern production
processes to be an economic opportunity, a new sphere of accumulation.
As Beck (1992, 23) states, ‘modernization risks from the winners’ point
of view are big business. They are insatiable demands long sought by
economists’ [emphasis in original].
While acknowledging certain intersections between ecological
modernization theory and geographical scholarship on environmental
governance, geographers have largely adopted a less sanguine position
regarding the ability of modern industrial society to deal with environ-
mental crises. Emel (2002), for instance, analyzes the role of NGO activism
in the ‘disciplining’ of the global mining industry. In particular, she examines
tactics that NGOs employ to pressure shareholders to divest from firms
with questionable environmental and human rights records, to invest
responsibly, and to encourage mining executives to alter undesirable practices.
While these strategies may be successful in reforming the worst corporate
social and environmental behavior, Emel finds little evidence to suggest
they influence more fundamental decisions concerning the use of tech-
nology or spatiotemporal patterns of investment. Furthermore, corporations
are unlikely to respond to these tactics in ways that might seriously diminish
profits or reduce the throughput of materials and energy through the
global economy (Emel 2002). In addition to interrogating the empirical
foundations of ecological modernization theory, geographers have suggested
that the faith that ecological modernization theorists place in the self-
reflexive capacity of industry looks suspiciously like the voluntarist forms
of ‘self-regulation’ championed by proponents of neoliberalism (McCarthy
and Prudham 2004). The risk, then, is that ecological modernization
theory may provide rationale for the neoliberal project, which, as I will
now explore, has entailed the ‘roll back’ of formal social and environmental
regulations associated with the post-war Keynesian state – regulations that
many consider to have had the teeth to engage in a more significant
disciplining of capital.
Neoliberal Environmental Governance and Its Critics

As I have indicated, environmental governance as a field of inquiry within
geography has emerged during a period in which the institutional land-
scapes of capitalism have been – and will likely continue to be – radically
reconfigured in the context of neoliberal globalization. Indeed, that
nature–society geographers have been so acutely concerned with docu-
menting and analyzing the neoliberalization of environmental governance
(Bakker 2007; Bridge 2004; Guthman 2007; Heynen and Robbins 2005;
Liverman 2004; Mansfield 2004, 2007a,b; McCarthy 2005a,b, 2006;
McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Perreault 2005, 2006; Prudham 2004;
Robertson 2004, 2007; St Martin 2007) strongly suggests that the recent
upwelling of environmental governance scholarship has occurred precisely
due to the scope and consequence of the transformations brought about
by neoliberal reforms. Regarding neoliberal governance more generally,
McCarthy and Prudham (2004, 276) identify four central processes by
which state functions aimed at regulating the social and environmental
excesses of capitalist development have been transformed under neoliber-
alism. These are: (i) privatization; (ii) the incapacitation of the state to
regulate through fiscal and administrative cuts; (iii) the ‘hollowing out’ of
the state through the rescaling of governance functions, a process Swyn-
gedouw (1997) refers to as ‘glocalization’; and (iv) shifts toward supposedly
more flexible ‘second-generation’ regulatory frameworks, namely market-
based, nonbinding, voluntarist regimes that stress public–private cooperation,
self-regulation, and the increased participation of civil society. Within
geography, analyses of neoliberal environmental governance have been
organized around three key themes: privatization and enclosure, the rescaling
of environmental governance functions, and the role of social movements
in contesting the neoliberalization of environmental governance.
The enclosure of commons resources and the concomitant shift from
traditional property institutions to capitalist private property, as noted
above, have long been central concerns of political ecology. With the
neoliberal consensus arguing that ‘efficient resource management and
allocation requires the allocation of individual titles in land, water, forests,
biodiversity, and fisheries, and the trading of these resources and rights
within a free market that will assign high prices to scarce resources and
encourage sustainable management of renewable resources’ (Liverman 2004,
734), nature–society geographers have revived the language of enclosure
in reference to the recent wave of attempts to privatize and commodify
land, natural resources, and environmental services. Of particular note
have been analyses of (often highly contested) schemes to commercialize
and/or privatize water systems (Bakker 2002, 2003; Budds 2004; Perreault
2005, 2006); to patent and market genetic resources or even whole
organisms (McAfee 2003; Prudham 2007); and to assign private property
rights to ocean fisheries, which had long been treated as global commons
(Mansfield 2004, 2007b; St Martin 2007). Bridge (2004), in another
example, details how free-market fiscal and administrative reforms
throughout much of the developing world have opened up significant
tracts of land for private mineral investment, namely through the
establishment of legally defined and exclusive private property rights.
These trends, as Otto (1998, 79) states, have offered transnational mining
firms ‘unprecedented access to a larger portion of the earth’s surface then
ever before.’
Now prevalent within geography is an interpretation of these modern-
day and ongoing acts of enclosure as ‘accumulation by dispossession’,
a concept Harvey (2003) deploys to analytically link these processes to
Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’ or the ‘original sin of capitalism’

(see also Glassman 2006). Drawing on Luxemburg’s (2003) idea of an
‘inside–outside’ dialectic within capital accumulation, Harvey argues that
following the global economic slowdown after 1973, accumulation by
dispossession – which has been prompted by the need for capital to look
‘outside itself ’ as a means to guarantee continued accumulation – took
precedence over expanded reproduction, which refers to a more purely
‘internal’ economic expansion, or the expansion of surplus value
through labor. What is enticing about Harvey’s analysis is that it provides
for an understanding of the forces underlying the worldwide reregulation
of resource access, production, and consumption fundamental to neoliberal
globalization. A major aspect of this reregulation has been the privatization
of commons resources as a means of opening up new arenas for investment
and accumulation. Geographers have further drawn attention to the ways
in which the creation of private property relations under neoliberalism
generates new subjectivities, both for traditional users divested of their
customary rights to resources as well as for private property owners now
disciplined to be ‘efficient, profit-seeking, “rational” individuals’ (Mansfield
2007a, 396; see also Wolford 2007). This focus on subject formation within
processes of neoliberal privatization offers nature–society geographers one
fruitful analytical bridge to the broader literature on neoliberalism as
a form of political rationality, or, to use Foucault’s terminology, ‘govern-
mentality’ (Burchell et al. 1991).
Another predominant theme within geographical research on environ-
mental governance under neoliberalism has been the rescaling of governance
functions both ‘downward’ toward the local and subregional scales and
‘upwards’ toward the supranational scale (Bridge and Jonas 2002; Bulkeley
2005; Gibbs and Jonas 2000; Liverman 2004; McCarthy 2005b; Perreault
2005, 2006). Environmental policy in the UK, for example, is shown by
Gibbs and Jonas (2000) to have undergone a process of localization in the
context of after-Fordism. Furthermore, the ascension of neoliberal
doctrine within international development has encouraged efforts through-
out the Global South to decentralize political and environmental governance
so as to achieve ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability’, and research by geographers
and other development scholars has interrogated the complex socioeco-
logical outcomes of these reforms (Batterbury and Fernando 2006).
Perreault (2005), for example, examines the scalar politics of water
governance in rural Bolivia in the context of both economic liberalization
and administrative decentralization. He finds that while smallholder
irrigators have viewed the neoliberal drive to privatize water and other
resources as a clear threat to their livelihoods, state decentralization has,
perhaps unexpectedly, helped to open up new spaces for political mobi-
lization on the part of these irrigators to oppose privatization and defend
both their water rights and customary water use practices. Geographers
have also been attentive to the emergence of supranational institutions of
environmental and resource governance. Duffy (2006), for instance, examines

the creation of transboundary environmental management programs,
which have become common in the context of both economic globalization
and the increasing recognition of the global and transboundary nature of
environmental problems. Not only do these various studies point to ‘how
the new economy might be rescaling existing spaces of governance’
(Bridge and Jonas 2002); they also confirm, as underscored within the
broader literature on the politics of scale (see, inter alia, Sadler and Fagan
2004), that the scalar reconfiguration of governance is an intensely political
and contested process. The interests and demands of particular class factions
frequently drive the rescaling of modes of environmental governance; this
rescaling, in turn, serves to structure and delimit what social groups in what
geographical regions are able to participate in decision-making regarding
resource use and environmental management.
Finally, as the above Bolivian example suggests, geographic analyses of
environmental governance are increasingly taking into account the role of
social movements and other nonstate actors (Bakker 2007; McCarthy
2005a,b; Perreault 2005, 2006). Rather than suggesting, however, that
these movements will assist us toward a form of hypermodern green
capitalism, geographers have drawn attention to the ways in which these
groups contest and rework neoliberal forms of governance. Thus, McCarthy
(2005b) examines how environmental organizations engage in a complex
politics of scale in their attempts to counteract some of the key provisions
of the North American Free Trade Agreement, particularly those dealing
with ‘indirect expropriation’, which these groups expect will lead to
disastrous socioecological consequences. Central to these analyses of social
movements and environmental governance is how the highly unjust
nature of neoliberal reforms may also be contested through mechanisms of
environmental governance, whether that be through the construction of
alternative decision-making bodies or popular pressure to reform existing
public policy. This focus on social movements draws on longstanding
interests in political ecology in popular mobilization and subaltern resist-
ance (Moore 1998; Watts and Peet 2004) and intersects with geographical
research on the struggles of indigenous peoples to oppose their historical
exclusion from resource decision-making and to assert their customary
land and resource rights (Howitt 2001, 2006; Langton 2001; Silvern 1999).
It also speaks to the normative and analytical concerns of the environmental
justice literature, particularly this work’s focus on the uneven sociospatial
distribution of environmental costs and benefits (Bullard 1990; Pulido
2000). In summary, these studies underscore the necessity of analyzing not
only how social movements contest, shape, and participate in resource
governance, but also how governance arrangements may codify inequality
(e.g. in regards to access to and control over resources or vulnerability
to environmental hazards) and in the process reproduce unjust social
relations.
Conclusion: A Way Forward
Although this article could not hope to review, let alone do justice to, the
entirety of recent geographical research on environmental governance, it
should be clear that geographers are in the process of building a rich and
compelling body of work on the topic. As I have attempted to show, this
research expands on core concerns of political ecology; meanwhile, insti-
tutional theories of political economy have offered geographers new and
productive conceptual tools with which to undertake their studies.
Importantly, geographical analyses have provided an understanding of
how neoliberalism has been rooted in quite radical reconfigurations of the
organizational and institutional arrangements that mediate our relations with
the natural world. By maintaining a focus on both the interests advanced by
these reconfigurations as well as their complex and uneven socioecological
consequences, geographers have provided an important counterbalance to
more laudatory depictions of neoliberal governance mechanisms and the (at
times overly) optimistic proclamations of ecological modernization theorists.
In considering how this literature might move forward, my chief
proposal would be a stronger emphasis on the practices of environmental
governance – or, as Bakker (2007, 434) states, ‘the practices by which we
construct and administer the exploitation of resources’ – under neoliberalism.
With much of the geographical literature on neoliberalism and environ-
mental governance foregrounding the organizational and institutional
changes wrought by neoliberal reforms, this work would profit from more
robust ethnographic accounts of the complex and place-based sets of
practices through which particular actors have produced, reproduced, and
challenged these novel modes of governance – or, alternatively, have failed
to do so. A number of existing studies, indeed, adopt such an approach.
Robertson (2007), for instance, documents the practices of bureaucrats,
economists, and market participants as they work – often at odds with
one another – to create markets and set prices for ecosystem services. In
doing so, Robertson (2007) reveals the neoliberal marketization of ecosystem
services to be ‘a contingent and sometimes rudderless task’ (p. 501); by
emphasizing that neoliberal forms of environmental governance must be
enacted on the ground by particular agents in specific locales, he also
directly confronts neoliberal economic theory, which ‘declines to theorize
either agency or location’ (p. 520) [emphasis in original]. In another example,
sociologist Goldman (2005, 5) has undertaken an institutional ethnography
of the World Bank as a means to understand how the World Bank, in
response to its increasingly vociferous critics, ‘successfully worked to reinvent
itself, tame its critics, and intervene in an ever-growing number of
institutions, terrains, and social bodies located across the postcolonial
map.’ Goldman focuses specifically on the in situ practices of ‘green’
knowledge production at the World Bank and offers an analysis of the
mechanisms through which this knowledge – codified into rules, norms,
regulations, and policies – is made to ‘travel’ to countries of the Global

South, thereby contributing to new forms of ‘ecogovernmentality’. By
explicitly examining how particular actors in specific locations work to
produce (or resist the production of ) environmental governance regimes,
these sorts of ethnographic approaches to neoliberal environmental gov-
ernance significantly enhance our understanding of not only the practices
of neoliberalism but also the power-laden and fundamentally geographical
nature of environmental governance itself.
To support this assertion, I offer one further example, from my own
research, regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the global
mining industry. Self-regulatory mechanisms such as CSR are a hallmark
of neoliberal environmental governance, celebrated by proponents for
both their flexibility and, ostensibly, their ability to induce corporations
to ‘go beyond’ legal requirements. The global mining industry – in the
face of widespread opposition to its, at times, disastrous socioecological
impacts – has been at the forefront of efforts to institutionalize CSR into
corporate operations (Kapelus 2002). With the development of these
novel governance mechanisms, however, decision-making powers regarding
the social and environmental consequences of mining are, to a significant
extent, ceded from the state to the corporation (Reed 2002). In the case
of the Pierina Project, a large-scale open-pit gold mine in the Peruvian
Andes owned by Barrick Gold Corporation of Canada, this decentering (or
privatization) of governance is enacted and reproduced on a daily basis by
the mine’s community relations office and its staff. These individuals manage
Barrick’s CSR programs at Pierina, which include health, education,
housing, and local development projects with rural communities adjacent
to the mine. In this case, the neoliberalization of resource governance has
not only transformed social relations of governance by granting authority to
corporate officials, it has also produced new spatial relations of governance
at the point of extraction: the community relations office, now a critical
node of decision-making regarding the livelihood impacts of mining in
adjacent communities, is located on mine property, behind a closely
guarded gate. Community residents must pass through this gate, past
armed security officers, in order to access the office. In short, within the
geography of governance at the mine, the firm itself administers access to
a crucial site of decision-making; its capacity to do so is, of course,
enabled by private property rights.
Dynamics such as these, I propose, are best grasped through not only
an examination of the multiscalar institutional and organizational arrange-
ments through which environments and resources are governed, but also
through detailed accounts of the practices of environmental governance,
practices enacted by particular sociopolitical actors in specific historical–
geographical situations. In further pursuing analyses of the practices of
neoliberal environmental governance through critical ethnographic methods,
geographers will gain a fuller and more nuanced understanding of how
actual resource/environment decisions are being made, by whom, for

whose benefits, and within the contexts of what power asymmetries.
Importantly, as the Pierina example suggests, this approach will also
underscore why the geography of environmental governance – that is, where
these decisions are being made – really matters, and matters in ways that
‘local’ and ‘global’ do not fully capture.
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge Don Mitchell, Reecia Orzeck, and Tom Perreault
for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. I would
also like to thank Gary Brierley and two anonymous reviewers for their
valuable comments.
Short Biography
Matt Himley holds a BA in English and International Studies from
Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, USA, and an MA in Geogra-
phy from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA. Currently a doctoral
candidate in Geography at Syracuse, Matt’s interests lie primarily in
resource politics and rural livelihoods in the Andes. For his MA thesis,
Matt explored the contested history of conservation initiatives in an indig-
enous campesino cooperative in highland Ecuador. His doctoral dissertation,
for which he is undertaking primary fieldwork during the 2007–2008
academic year, examines the relations between large-scale mining operations
and rural communities in the Peruvian Andes, focusing on the ways
in which local communities have sought to exercise control over mineral
development and its complex socioecological impacts.
Note
* Correspondence address: Matthew Himley, Department of Geography, Syracuse University,
144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-1020, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
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Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.

Geographies of Environmental Governance:

Introduction: The Rise of Environmental Governance

political ecology, in particular this subdiscipline’s abiding interest in the

The Roots of Environmental Governance Scholarship

rather through the networked interaction of various state and nonstate

involved efforts to use regulation theory as a framework for better

[T]he most striking thing about resource production and consumption is

Central to regulationist accounts of the socioinstitutional arrangements

in contrast, locates his ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ in the antago-

As these cases suggest, a theme that runs through geographical analysis

as O’Connor (1998) may view negative externalities, such as pollution or

Neoliberal Environmental Governance and Its Critics

Marx’s notion of ‘primitive accumulation’ or the ‘original sin of capitalism’

environmental and resource governance. Duffy (2006), for instance, examines

Conclusion: A Way Forward

regulations, and policies – is made to ‘travel’ to countries of the Global

actual resource/environment decisions are being made, by whom, for

© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.x

© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.x

© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.x

——. (2004). Nature–state–territory: toward a critical theorization of conservation enclosures.

© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.x

© 2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/2 (2008): 433–451, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00094.x

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