Capitalism & Climate Change

There is today growing consensus that the climate crisis is also a crisis of capitalism. Regardless of one’s political persuasion, it is incontrovertible that capitalism’s MO (of converting “natural resources into fungible commodities and monetary wealth”[1]) has been a primary driver of ecological change over the last 200 years. Jason Moore, an environmental historian at Binghampton University, has gone as far as to call our current epoch the Capitalocene, preferring this to the more common Anthropocene, which fails to capture how the costs and benefits of “the Age of Man” have been distributed unequally.[2] It is not humans, in general, who are to blame for this crisis, but rather, and more specifically, capitalist systems. (Indeed, as the 2017 Carbon Majors Report revealed, just 100 companies were responsible for 71 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.[3])

“Capitalism has produced a plethora of socioeconomic benefits”, writes Jonathan Park, of the University of Utah, “[but] it has generated a correspondingly monstrous amount of waste…, atmospheric pollution and other forms of environmental degradation”, of which global climate change has been the most severe consequence.[4]

All this begs the question: can capitalism and climate consciousness co-exist? Or does ending the climate crisis necessarily entail ending capitalism?

Position 1: Capitalism must fix this (aka “Capitalism got us into this mess…”)

If capitalism has caused climate change, could it also solve it? Humans, it is reasoned, are endlessly creative, and capitalism is a seedbed for innovation. Eventually, then, we will “crack” climate change, just as we’ve cracked other environmental challenges. This view is exemplified by the MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, who predicts that “the two forces of capitalism and technological progress will continue their [extraordinary] track record of providing for our wants and needs”. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, McAfee frames this as “the fuel of interest” meeting “the fire of genius”,[5] echoing what the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to as “the gale of creative destruction”. As Jonathan Park notes, this is inherent to the logic of capitalism: “when a commercially viable resource is exhausted, the market will produce an alternative. Thus, capitalism is a supposedly indefatigable method for perpetually generating more wealth and greater social prosperity.”[6]

Position 2: Capitalism must die (aka “System change not climate change”)

But here’s the catch. Capitalism may promote innovation, yet it does so in the name of growth, not of sustainability. Thus, “while capitalist economies are able to spin off improved renewable-energy systems or energy-efficient technologies,” as the author Stan Cox writes, “they’re even better at producing new energy-consuming technologies and products”.[7] Again, this is central to the logic of capitalism: extraction, production, consumption, repeat. And since this process is driven by (short-term) economic goals rather than (long-term) ecological ones, it cannot be part of the solution.

Capitalism, it has been argued, has a parasitoid relationship to the Earth:[8] it will feed off its host until the latter ultimately expires. For this reason, the fight against climate change is seen by many as a fight against capitalism itself – “the capitalist system as it currently stands is neither designed for nor capable of consciously inhibiting its own propensity for unsustainable growth”.[9] Instead, as the Guardian journalist Phil McDuff puts it, “[w]e need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital”.[10]

Position 3: Capitalism must change (aka “The baby, not the bathwater”)

Clearly, unfettered capitalism has been bad news for the environment. But what if we could harness capitalism, tame it, and put it to work for the climate, rather than against it? This is not simply a matter of investing in green technology; instead, it’s about restructuring the economy, and redefining growth. There are growing calls for “a greening of capitalism through large scale [sic] environmental and socialist reforms”.[11] This so-called Green New Deal allies efforts to address climate change with other social aims, such as job creation and reducing economic inequality.[12] Such structural change, critics argue, must go hand-and-hand with a wholesale recalibration of economic performance measures. Many businesses are already incorporating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors in their annual reports. However, this shift must be mirrored by governments, for whom GDP remains the predominant indicator of economic performance. And since GDP is a purely monetary measure, not a social or ecological one, it fails to capture the costs of development – to people and the planet.[13] 

What are the alternatives? One option is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a means of measuring economic growth that takes into account both social and environmental factors.[14] Actions that boost GPI include generating more power from renewables, preserving natural habitats and increasing energy efficiency. By pursuing such aims, governments can harness capitalism for holistic ends, rather than solely economic ones.

So, is capitalism, in one shape or another, the solution to the climate crisis? Or does its underlying logic of exploitation, consumption and growth render it fundamentally incompatible with environmental goals?

There is no one answer here; no single truth. “Capitalism”, said Marx, “is the religion of everyday life”.[15] And this is a matter of faith. Readers must decide for themselves where salvation lies.

What cannot be denied, however, is that capitalism has long been complicit in the destruction of the natural world. It is incumbent on capitalism to rectify this, or face extinction of its own.

[1] Park, J. T. 2015. Climate change and capitalism. Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development 14(2): 189-206.

[2] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jcde-2020-0003/html

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

[4] Park, J. T. 2015. Climate change and capitalism. Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development 14(2): 189-206.

[5] https://www.wired.com/story/technology-will-keep-us-from-running-out-of-stuff/

[6] Park, J. T. 2015. Climate change and capitalism. Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development 14(2): 189-206.

[7] https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2018/09/01/heres-why-capitalism-cant-fix-climate-change

[8] See e.g. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/fight-against-climate-change-fight-against-capitalism/

[9] Park, J. T. 2015. Climate change and capitalism. Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development 14(2): 189-206.

[10] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change-end-capitalism

[11] https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/capitalism-and-the-green-agenda-a-green-new-deal-or-green-neo-colonialism

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal

[13] https://earth.org/change-capitalism-for-climate-action/

[14] The system is already in use in 20 US states, with more set to follow.

[15] Marx, Karl. 1894 [1998]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 37. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Can Tech Save Us?

For businesses, investors and entrepreneurs, the climate crisis is frequently framed as an opportunity as well as a threat. According to the World Bank, climate-related sectors are “primed for growth”, with “the potential to unlock billions of dollars’ worth of investment opportunities”.[1] Central to this thesis is the role of radical “green” technologies in combatting global warming, whether it’s sucking carbon from the atmosphere, injecting aerosols into the stratosphere[2] or refreezing the Arctic with wind-powered pumps.[3] Should any of these prove viable, the gains would be astronomical – not only for investors, but for the entire human race. Tech could quite literally save us.

It’s a tantalising prospect: a technocratic-messianic prophesy. But is it realistic?

The first consideration is time. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Alex Rao and colleagues point to a “disturbing reality”: regardless of their potential, new energy innovations “might not be deployable until it’s too late”.[4] Most technologies, they note, take decades to come to the market. In the past, clean technologies have taken between 19 and 30 years to achieve widespread use, according to the UK thinktank Chatham House and the patent-search firm CambridgeIP. And though “powerful new market forces are at work”, including government limits on emissions and green finance schemes, “technology deployment always takes time”.

A second consideration concerns the technologies themselves. Duncan McLaren and Nils Markusson, from Lancaster Environment Centre, have charted the “co-evolution” of technological promises and changing climate-change targets, showing how this process ultimately undermines environmental goals. Each new technology, they argue, “not only competes with existing ideas (in research funding and in markets as much as in cost-optimizing models), but also downplays any sense of urgency”.[5] In other words, we are seduced by the promise of a “quick fix” just around the corner, which serves only to delay meaningful action. This points to a larger, more systemic problem with technocratic approaches (to climate change as well as other issues, such as international development[6]) – that of depoliticisation.

Depoliticisation is a process through which political issues are translated into mere technical or environmental ones. Famine, for example, is not simply a matter of too many people and too little food, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen famously showed; rather, it is about the politics of food distribution. Presenting famine as an environmental problem with technical solutions thus depoliticises it. The same is true for climate change, which is to say that a focus on technological solutions obscures the role of governments (and other political actors) in coordinating (or failing to coordinate) adequate responses. More worryingly, depoliticisation can be used as a “smokescreen” for corruption and other self-serving behaviour by political elites, at the expense of those most vulnerable.

If tech isn’t the answer, what is?* The key is social innovation. “Cutting carbon use depends on changing social norms and behaviour as much as technology”, notes Geoff Mulgan, former head of the UK government’s strategy unit. What’s needed, he continues, is “a different approach to innovation, in which investment in new technology is matched by investment in new ways of organising society”.[7] The logic is simple: “the scale of change needed…[cannot be achieved]…by top-down government policy or grassroots action” alone; rather, society must be a partner in this process. Social innovation is about mobilising “mass creativity”, whether it’s energy co-ops in South Korea,[8] “freecycling” websites in Britain[9] or citizen action in Ethiopia.[10] As Mulgan concludes, “[c]hange must be accelerated, not just in the organisation of our physical systems, but also in the way in which we live and relate to each other.”

For businesses, investors and entrepreneurs, this is the opportunity.

*We can put this another way: technology is not the problem. A case in point: we grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and still can’t end world hunger.[11] Without cultural, social and political transformation, our efforts to “end” the climate crisis face a similar fate.

[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/opinion/2016/01/13/climate-change-is-a-threat---and-an-opportunity---for-the-private-sector

[2] https://www.srmgi.org/what-is-srm/

[3] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000410

[4] https://hbr.org/2010/01/can-technology-really-save-us-from-climate-change

[5] McClaren, D. & Markusson, N. 2020. The co-evolution of technological promises, modelling, policies and climate change targets. Nature Climate Change 10: 392-397.

[6] https://anthropology.stanford.edu/publications/book/anti-politics-machine-development-depoliticization-and-bureaucratic-power-lesotho

[7] https://theconversation.com/technology-will-not-save-us-from-climate-change-but-imagining-new-forms-of-society-will-124364

[8] http://english.seoul.go.kr/creating-sharing-energy-energy-welfare-communities/

https://energytransition.org/2018/09/south-koreas-grassroots-energy-transition/

[9] https://www.freecycle.org/

https://www.ilovefreegle.org/

[10] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ethiopia-plants-over-350-million-trees-day-setting-new-world-record

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/29/ethiopia-plants-250m-trees-in-a-day-to-help-tackle-climate-crisis

[11] Seufert, V., Ramankutty, N. and Foley, J. A. 2012. Comparing the yields of organic and conventional Agriculture. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature11069

Climate Equality

Climate change, it is often said, is a global problem – a crisis for the whole of humanity. Earth is the proverbial Titanic, and it’s hit the climate iceberg.

“We may all be on the Titanic”, says the justice campaigner Asad Rehman, “but it’s the rich, white industrialised countries who are on the top deck, sipping their cocktails, listening to the orchestra and waiting for some technological fix to save them, whilst in the hold of the Titanic are black, brown, indigenous people, poor brown and black people from the Global South, who are already drowning, and when they try and flee, they find that the escape hatch is bolted.”[1]

Rehman is not alone in this assessment. “Climate change is a civil rights issue”, writes the Reverend Gerald Durley,[2] who once marched with Martin Luther King. Others are more blunt: Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert of Black Lives Matter calls climate change “a racist crisis”.[3] It is, moreover, “sexist”,[4] affecting women and girls disproportionately in all regions of the world, as the UN explicitly acknowledges.[5]

The fight against climate change is therefore a fight against inequality, wherever and whenever it occurs. Organisations are a key battlefront.

The business case for equality is well-established.[6] Substantial research has demonstrated how Equality, Diversity and Inclusion[7] (EDI) initiatives enhance organisational performance in myriad ways. Equality, for instance, ensures a positive working environment, which in turn increases employees’ motivation, engagement and productivity. Diversity, meanwhile, invites a broad spectrum of thought styles, attitudes and approaches, which bolsters creativity, adaptability and effectiveness. Furthermore, diverse organisations are more reflective of society at large, which makes them more responsive to the needs of their patrons.

Just as there is a business case for EDI, there is also an environmental one. As noted by Professor Katherine Hayhoe, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, “the greater the diversity of voices that you have at the table – in terms of life experience, culture, knowledge, expertise, gender, race and other things – the bigger the range of possible solutions you’re able to come up with”.[8] And since climate change is the defining issue of our times, the more solutions we come up with, the better.

There is ample empirical evidence for this claim. Oil companies with higher female representation at board level are more likely to have set decarbonisation strategies.[9] Companies that employ more women show a higher concern for climate change.[10] Hispanic/Latino (37%) and Black Americans (36%) are more likely to campaign against global warming than White Americans (22%).[11] People with disabilities are adept at “anticipating, assessing and improvising in the face of risk”,[12] which should be “central to climate change adaptation planning”.[13] The list goes on.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion are important not only because they yield better solutions to environmental problems. As mentioned previously, marginalised groups are disproportionately affected by climate change.[14] The statistics are sobering:

• Developing countries suffer 99 per cent of the casualties attributable to climate change; the 50 least developed countries contribute just 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.[15] [16]

• People in low-and lower-middle-income countries are around five times more likely than people in high-income countries to be displaced by sudden extreme weather disasters.[17]

• Almost 80 per cent of people displaced by climate change are women.[18]

• Hispanic and Black Americans are exposed to around 60 per cent more air pollution than they make; White Americans are exposed to 17 per cent less.[19]

• Only 21 per cent of people with disabilities believe they could evacuate without difficulty following a climate emergency.[20]

• Between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause an estimated 250,000 additional deaths per year, primarily in developing countries.[21]

• Nearly three quarters of the world’s poor depend directly on natural resources for their livelihoods. Seventy per cent are women.[22] [23] [24]

What is worse, climate change has been shown to heighten economic inequality[25] and increase vulnerability – it is, as the UN puts it, “a vicious cycle”.[26] It stands to reason, then, that marginalised groups should be front and centre in the fight against climate change. In the words of Dr Robert Bullard, the “father of environmental justice”, “those most impacted by climate change must be in the room and at the table when plans, decisions and solutions are being developed”.[27] 

There is an obvious rejoinder here. If those most impacted by climate change are poor, marginalised groups in the Global South, how can EDI efforts in the industrialised world hope to make a difference? In other words, how does increasing diversity in, say, large European corporations impact vulnerable communities in sub-Saharan Africa, or South Asia?

The answer is deceptively simple: we are dealing here with systemic issues, and all systems of oppression are interlinked. Murray Bookchin, the founder of social ecology, famously argued that the destruction of the natural world is rooted in the domination of humans by humans. Thus, so long as inequality exists, there will be environmental crises; how could it be otherwise, when environmental risks and rewards are not shared equally? (It is no coincidence that “human equality” is a fundamental principle of most environmental movements.[28])

In this light, every effort to reduce inequality can be seen as a step to protecting the planet. Climate change, we are slowly realising, is not about “weather”. Instead, “[i]t is a civilisational wake-up call”, writes the author and activist Naomi Klein, “[a] powerful message – spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions – telling us that we need a new way of sharing this planet”.[29]

We must share the planet equally.

[1] https://worldat1c.org/negotiating-who-lives-and-dies-5d400021b860

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-civil-rights_b_3844986

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/06/climate-change-racist-crisis-london-city-airport-black-lives-matter

[4] https://gca.org/climate-change-is-sexist-but-climate-adaptation-doesnt-have-to-be/

[5] https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change

[6] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-business-case-for-equality-and-diversity-a-survey-of-the-academic-literature

[7] The terms “equality”, “diversity” and “inclusion” are often used interchangeably, yet their meanings are in fact subtly different. Equality is about granting people equal opportunities, regardless of their race, age, gender or other characteristics.[7] Diversity is about being aware of these differences and celebrating them. And inclusion is about making sure that everyone feels welcome and accepted.

[8] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/women-climate-crisis-talks-un-b1813132.html

[9] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/international-womens-day-climate-change-gender-diversity-b1813574.html

[10] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/csr.279

[11] https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/race-and-climate-change/

[12] Abbott, D., & Porter, S. 2013. Environmental hazard and disabled people: From vulnerable expert to interconnected. Disability & Society 28(6): 839–852.

[13] Görgens, T. & Ziervogel, G. 2019. From “No One Left behind” to Putting the Last First: Centring the voices of disabled people in resilience work. In Watermeyer, B. (Ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Citizenship in the Global South. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

[14] https://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2017/wp152_2017.pdf

[15] Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009, 'Human Impact Report: Climate Change - The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis', Global Humanitarian Forum, Geneva. Available at https://gsdrc.org/document-library/human-impact-report-climate-change-the-anatomy-of-a-silent-crisis/

[16] http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/268/hdr_20072008_en_complete.pdf

[17] https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/physical-risks-from-climate-change.pdf

[18] Aguilar, L. 2004. Climate change and disaster mitigation. Gender makes the difference. Gland: IUCN; https://www1.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/Climate%20and%20Disaster%20Resilience/Climate%20Change-final-for%20WEB.pdf

[19] https://apnews.com/article/f6bf2f47c81c4958811dc4e99d526197

[20] https://www.unisdr.org/2014/iddr/documents/2013DisabilitySurveryReport_030714.pdf

[21] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/wpro---documents/hae---regional-forum-(2016)/climatechange-factsheet-rfhe.pdf?sfvrsn=75d570fd_2

[22] https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change

[23] https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/no-70-world-s-poor-aren-t-women-doesn-t-mean-poverty-isn-t-sexist

[24] https://www.wavespartnership.org/sites/waves/files/kc/WAVES-nca-poverty-5.pdf

[25] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/20/9808

[26] https://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2017/wp152_2017.pdf

[27] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/22/black-climate-change-leaders-we-have-to-be-active.html

[28] See e.g. https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/about-us/ (Point 6); https://wwf.panda.org/discover/people_and_conservation/our_principles/ (Point 5); https://www.edf.org/diversity

[29] Klein, N. 2015. This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Business, Ethics and Climate Change

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business – ”, wrote the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits”.

For Friedman, writing in 1970, corporations had responsibility towards no-one and nothing beyond their shareholders. Fast-forward fifty years, however, and the issue of corporate responsibility seems less clear-cut. A recent analysis of anthropogenic climate change traced 63 per cent of global CO2 and methane emissions between 1751 and 2010 to just 90 entities, with Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, BP and Gazprom top of the list.[1] Clearly, these corporations are in some sense “responsible” for climate change. But can it therefore be said that they have a moral responsibility towards mitigating it? “Business ethics”, it has often been joked, is an oxymoron. But in light of the climate crisis, should we take business ethics more seriously?

Conventional wisdom dictates that businesses have no ethical obligations beyond those stipulated by law. In his classic essay “Money, Morality and Motor Cars”, Norman Bowie challenges environmentalists over their insistence that business do more to combat the climate crisis. While agreeing that “no one has a right to render harm on another unless there is a compelling, overriding moral reason to do so”[2], he argues that this applies only to fellow persons, not ecosystems, species or individual animals. To put this another way, businesses can harm the environment (within legal limits), but they can’t get away with the murder. But what about those whose products are inherently harmful or dangerous, such as tobacco companies and car manufacturers? In such cases, Bowie reasons, it’s a matter of consumer preference: some people prefer cigarettes with a higher tar content, or cars with fewer safety features (which are therefore cheaper). Therefore, there is no moral obligation for businesses to make such products less harmful. By the same token, consumers often rebuff products that are more environmentally friendly, on account of their cost, convenience or other qualities. (How many of us, for example, use refillable soaps and detergents?) For Bowie, this shows that “legal harm to the environment caused by businesses is regarded as morally permissible by society”.[3] And where this is not the case – that is, where such harm is not socially permissible – citizens in democracies can impose regulations to rectify this, as for any market failure. Thus, businesses have no obligations to the environment beyond those expressed through legislation and consumer demand.

This broad thesis, which is often referred to as the “market solution” to environmental issues, has proved widely influential in recent years. Yet there are several serious problems with this approach as applied to anthropogenic climate change. First, and most obvious, is that climate change affects every person on Earth, not just the consumers of specific products or services, in specific countries or territories. Furthermore, it will continue to impact future generations. Thus, it is not only present-day consumers who will be “harmed” by climate change, but also non-consumers, both present and future.

The second problem concerns the role of consumers. The market solution assumes that consumers have perfect information when making decisions. When someone buys tobacco products, for example, they do so in the knowledge that they are harmful to one’s health. Thus, they make an informed decision. However, when it comes to complex environmental problems, such as climate change, it is likely that most consumers have limited awareness of the full causes and consequences.[4] Thus, their preferences are poorly informed. In contrast, large corporations (particularly those in the transport and power sectors) are likely to have sophisticated understandings of climate change, and their role in it. This allows them to make changes to their processes, products and services in line with climate goals, which consumer preference alone could never achieve.[5]

And there are other issues with using consumer behaviour to guide business ethics. For one thing, consumer preferences are not always satisfied by businesses. For another, consumers often have little or no influence over companies’ environmental practices. The energy industry is a case in point. Consumers may prefer to purchase electricity from renewable sources, but energy companies often have a monopoly over consumers, so they cannot take their business elsewhere. Again, the capacity of consumers to steer corporate behaviour is questionable.

The third problem is the absence of democracies. The market solution contends that citizens in democracies can curb corporate excess through regulation. In other words, people will make their feelings known through the political process, just as they do in the market. There are two issues here. First, over half (55.1%) of the world’s sovereign states have non-democratic forms of government[6], which means that citizen-voters cannot regulate companies’ environmental practices. And second, even if voters accept a particular level of harm for themselves, this fails to account for the harm done to people in other nations, or to future generations. Again, this speaks to the heart of the crisis: climate change is a global issue, not a local one, future as well as present.

So, do businesses have a moral obligation to mitigate climate change? In the UK, only a handful of companies are required by law to limit their greenhouse-gas emissions – the government’s Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) cover the power-generation sector, aviation and other energy-intensive industries. For the rest, we might conclude, it’s business as usual.

However, the climate has changed since Friedman’s time, in more ways than one. The growth of concepts like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria suggests a “voluntary” recalibration of obligations, from shareholders to stakeholders. The latter includes not only investors but also employees, suppliers, customers, communities and the environment as a whole. ESG criteria, which grew out of the earlier CSR movement, allow companies to measure their environmental and social impact (and to advertise this to investors). Moreover, these measures can be used to demonstrate the wider business case for “doing good”; a major 2019 study found that higher ESG performance was correlated with higher profitability and lower volatility.[7]

In light of these findings, there may be no need to appeal to moral obligations to mitigate climate change. For businesses, as for the rest of us, this is not simply an ethical or economic imperative, but an existential one.

[1] Heede, R. 2014. Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854–2010. Climatic Change 122: 229–241.

[2] Bowie, N. E. 1990. Money, morality and motor cars. In Hoffman, W. M., Frederic, R. & Petry, E. (Eds.) Business, Ethics, and the Global Environment. New York: Quorum Books.

[3] Arnold, D. G. & Bustos, K. 2005. Business, Ethics, and Global Climate Change. Business & Professional Ethics Journal 24: 103-130.

[4] Arnold, D. G. & Bustos, K. 2005. Business, Ethics, and Global Climate Change. Business & Professional Ethics Journal 24: 103-130.

[5] Arnold, D. G. & Bustos, K. 2005. Business, Ethics, and Global Climate Change. Business & Professional Ethics Journal 24: 103-130.

[6] https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2020/

[7] https://www.issgovernance.com/file/publications/ISS_EVA_ESG_Matters.pdf

Sacred Ecology

Anthropologists from both sides of the social-biological interface have long been interested in natural resource use, its myriad methods and meanings. One particularly fruitful branch of study has been that concerned with common property resources, which can loosely be defined as a class of resource for which (a) exclusion is difficult and (b) joint use involves subtractability (Feeney et al. 1990). In his 1968 article The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin, articulating conventional wisdom, prophesised a bleak fate for such resources. He invites us, famously, to ‘picture a pasture, open to all’:

It will be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal war, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally however comes the day of reckoning, that is the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy (Hardin 1968:1244).

Beyond the crude Malthusian logic – Hardin was interested primarily in population growth – The Tragedy of the Commons presents a coherent and persuasive argument. Re-cast in economic terms, the tragedy is the inevitable result of rational calculus by self-interested actors, for whom the individually accrued benefits of ‘free-riding’ always outweigh the shared costs of such behaviour. Modelled using game theory, this tragedy plays out repeatedly.

But over the last four decades, scores of researchers, including anthropologists of diverse persuasions, have compiled empirical evidence that challenges Hardin’s model. Studies have emerged from throughout the world of cases where common property is collectively managed by communities, shifting theoretical attention to questions of how, why and under what conditions the tragedy is averted. In this paper, I will explore some of ways in which anthropologists – both social and biological – think about these questions, making reference to my own research on commons management in Rajasthan, India.

Diverse Perspectives on Collective Action

Common property resource dilemmas are examples of the broader problem of cooperation. For evolutionary biologists, human ecologists and institutional economists, collective action in resource management is best understood through the application of rational choice theory and game theoretic models. Adapting Hardin’s analysis, these researchers note how tragedy ‘game players’ can watch outcomes unfold and change their decisions in later ‘rounds of play’ (Robbins 2012:53), thereby demonstrating the underlying logic of collective action. Much of the focus has been on institutions – the ‘rules of the game in society’ (North 1990:3) – which provide constraints on action. Theorists such as Ostrom (1990) emphasise the way in which institutions or rules can be purposely crafted to produce collective action; through detailed case studies they aim to discern the conditions under which communal resource management ‘evolves’, such as clearly defined resource boundaries and graduated sanctions.

A second school of thought on collective resource governance – what I shall call ‘the social approach’ for the purposes of this paper – emphasises the force of tradition, value systems, social rights and moral codes in promoting and preserving communal management, what Scott (1976) termed ‘the moral economy’: the group conscience derived from a community’s mutual dependence on resources and its need to deal with shared risks.

These two perspectives – the biological and the social – involve opposing conceptions of the individual: the self interested actor of Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes (Homo economicus) and the primarily social being (Homo sociologicus) of Durkheim. But as David Mosse (1997:469) has observed, despite their differences, ‘within the discourse on common property resource development, both “rational choice” and “moral economy” schools construct rather similar images of community and indigenous collective action’. Likely biased by development policy, both schools examine resource management schemes through a lens that is apolitical, ahistorical, synchronic and unchanging (Meinzen-Dick & Zwarteveen 1998). Exhibiting oversimplified concepts of social relations and traditions, they are often ‘narrowly utilitarian and economistic’ (Mosse 1997:470), divorcing resource management from the rest of social life. It is my contention also that the distinction between these schools’ apparently antithetical conceptions of human motivation – self-interest vs. social interest – is itself illusory. Upon close examination, it can be seen that Scott’s explanation of the ‘moral economy’ of peasant culture is also based on the theory of individual rational calculation. Values and ‘the subsistence ethic’ develop, he argues, because poor peasants are aware that their situation is so precarious that it is essential that they cooperate, thus the norm of reciprocity. Adherence to shared norms is therefore the ‘rational’ strategy.

An Embedded Approach

It is clear that many attempts at understanding collective action are undone by a failure to furnish individuals with credible social identities, to contextualise everyday practices. This has led many scholars to employ an ‘embedded’ approach to common property management, and particularly to institutions (see e.g. Cleaver 2000, 2002; Lund 2001; McCay 2002). In examining – and in economic analysis, operationalising – the role of history, politics and ‘social capital’ in collective resource management ventures, this body of research invokes questions on the much-contested relationship between structure and agency. At its most simple, one may ask: Does social structure determine individuals’ actions, or does human agency rule supreme? The methodological individualism of most institutional economic and evolutionary approaches to collective action grants primacy to agency, while the early functionalism of Durkheim exemplifies the belief in the ultimately constraining effects of structure. Since the 1970s, much scholarship – notably the work of Giddens and Bourdieu – has emphasised the complementary and recursive relationship between agency and structure, individuals and institutions, with behaviour both enabled and constrained by social structures. Viewed in this way, it can be argued that individuals have freedom, but that this is circumscribed by institutional structures that are historically and spatially specific, that may be partial or invisible, and that may serve to reproduce relations of power and dominance. This potential subliminality of constraint is apparent in Foucault’s concept of discourse, the systems of thoughts, beliefs and practices that systematically construct subjects. According to Foucault, people’s apparent agency – and even their belief in it – is ultimately a product of power/knowledge relations, of discursive constraint. I will now consider some of these positions with reference to my own research in India.

Sacred Ecology in Rajasthan

In Alwar district of Rajasthan, village commons are characterised by distinct environmental outcomes. More often than not, the landscapes surrounding settlements feature patches of dense, multi-tiered forest lying side-by-side with heavily denuded tracts of pasture and woodland. The former, it emerges, are sacred forests, or orans, conserved by the community in the name of a local god, goddess or saint. Exploitative use of such forests will not go unnoticed by the residing deity, who furnishes transgressors with maladies, accidents and other supernatural chastisements. Outside the orans, meanwhile, common forest lands are visibly degraded. What explains this environmental disparity?

Given the need for concision, I will focus here on the orans alone, considering various explanations for the survival of these common property resources. Let us begin with an institutional-economic perspective. According to theorists such as Ostrom, ‘robust’ institutions are necessary to mediate against the profit-maximising strategies of rational actors. This equates to transparent systems with graduated sanctions, strict rules, clear incentives, and so on. Yet few of these ‘facilitating conditions’ are apparent in the institution of the sacred forest. It can be argued, moreover, that the apparent primacy of ethical and spiritual considerations mediating use of orans renders rational choice models of decision making quite empty. Rather than allowing for the fact that people make decisions based not solely on narrow, productive considerations but also on history, political concerns, religious beliefs, and so on, institutional theory presents us with an individual who blindly conforms to the logic of economic calculus. Get the sums right, it promises us, and people will never stray far from the flock.

In this example, social order is viewed as the unintended consequence of self-interested action being mediated by a compulsion to conform in relation to dominant groups and authorities. A methodological holist perspective, to the contrary, would reject self-interested action as a route to order. Indeed, applying Durkheim’s functionalism, which held that religion maintained the social order, might lead one to conclude that it is the sacred character of orans (and associated religious beliefs) that explains their persistence. Such a thesis echoes early work in ecological anthropology by researchers such as Harris (1966), Harner (1972) and Rappaport (1984), who viewed religion as a medium through which groups interact with their environment and examined how religious practices helped to maintain ecological stability.

Neither of the approaches detailed above, which crudely represent the opposing poles of a structure-agency spectrum, appears to adequately explain the persistence of orans. In my research, I look instead to Bourdieu’s practice theory, Giddens’ concept of structuration and Foucault’s work on discourse to understand commons use in Alwar. A comprehensive discussion of these various studies is beyond the scope of the present paper, but I offer the following précis in order to advertise the need for a more politicised, historicised model of collective action.

The principal castes in Alwar district are Meo, Gujar and Mina. A review of the historical literature pertaining to the region of Mewat, of which present-day Alwar district was a part, indicates that political confrontation has been something of a defining theme over the last few centuries. Gujars and other peasant-pastoral castes mounted widespread and long-lasting resistance against Mughal invaders, and participated in the major agrarian revolts of the 17th and 18th centuries, during which time they refused to pay land revenue, plundered highways and looted from traders (Lal 1995). Many groups in the region also took place in the 1857 mutiny against the British, after which the Gujars and others were labelled as ‘Criminal Tribes’. Indeed, descriptions of Gujars by authors of the British colonial period typically draw attention to this criminal character, emphasising their habit of lifting cattle, their ‘turbulent and quarrelsome nature’ (Imperial Gazetteer of India 1908:114) and their ‘readiness to take advantage of disorder in Mewat’ (Bingley 1978 [1899]:44).

This reported volatility of Gujars and Meos must of course be taken with a pinch of salt. What these writings make apparent, though, is that the history of the peasant castes that today are predominant in eastern Rajasthan is one characterised by displacement, dispossession and marginalisation. The region’s curious caste composition – nomadic Gujars, tribal Mina and Muslim Meos – was not typical of the princely states of Rajputana. Elsewhere in north India Hindu mythology had been writ large on the landscape or weaved into royal lineages; in Mewat, for so long a rugged no-man’s-land between the Rajput kingdoms and Mughal Delhi, rural communities enjoyed little in the way of cohesive cultural continuity. Certainly the notion of ‘sacred’ would have had very different connotations here among disparate creeds compared to in other, more ‘orthodox’ regions. Bhasin (1999:330) suggests that ‘[w]hat is sacred can only be expressed according to the collective forces and relations in both historical and mythological time’. In Mewat, solidarity was drawn from the ‘collective forces’ of subjugation and marginalisation. Myth, too, seems to have been born of a common heritage of oppression. Consider the case of Bherunathji, whose oran serves the people of Bakhatpura village in Alwar district:

Legend has it that during his lifetime this devtar was a much-respected saddhu [holy man] who frequented the forest around Bakhatpura. He was held in such high esteem that even the erstwhile Maharaja expressed reverence by donating a fine white horse. Bherunathji proceeded to tour the region on his new steed, but soon realised from the local people that he had been wrong to accept the gift. The Maharaja refused to take back the horse so, consumed by ignominy, the elderly saddhu rode to the hillock that is now Bherunath ki Bani and, along with his mount, buried himself alive.[1]

This tale’s allegorical motifs of honour and autonomy are widely understood and transcend gender, caste and creed. The sanctification of the ‘martyr’s’ resting place, occurring as it did at a time of popular protest over increasing state claims to land, is evidence perhaps of Sivaramakhrishnan’s (1995:33) assertion that by implementing a policy that denied property rights to tribals and other rural poor, the state effectively ‘divested the affected populace of material claims to the forest, leaving them no recourse other than to assent a religious affinity to the forest’.

Conclusion

The example presented above highlights the need for a fine-grained analysis of human-environment interactions, one that takes into account not only productive concerns but also the dynamic influence of historical discourses, political representation, social meaning and power relations. For those seeking to understand – and indeed shape – resource-use behaviour, including policy makers and practitioners in the fields of development and conservation, attending to such factors is crucial. It is only by viewing human action as socially embedded that one can hope to account for the diversity of environmental practices witnessed across time and space, let alone to replicate those considered more desirable.

References

Bhasin, V. 1999. Religious and cultural perspectives of a sacred site – Sitabari in Rajasthan. Journal of Human Ecology 10(5-6):329-340.

Bingley, A. H. 1978 [1899]. History, Caste & Culture of Jats & Gujars. New Delhi: Ess Ess Publications.

Cleaver, F. 2000. Moral ecological rationality, institutions and the management of common property resources. Development and Change 31(2):361-383. 

Cleaver, F. 2002. Reinventing institutions: Bricolage and the social embeddedness of natural resource management. The European Journal of Natural Resource Management 14(2):11-30.

Feeney, D., Berkes, F., McCay, B. J. & Acheson, J. M. 1990. The tragedy of the commons: Twenty-two years later. Human Ecology 18:1-19.

Hardin G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162:1243-1248.

Harner, M. 1977. The ecological basis for Aztec sacrifice. American Ethnologist 4:117-135.

Harris, M. 1966. The cultural ecology of India’s sacred cattle. Current Anthropology 7:51-66.

Imperial Gazetteer of India. 1908. Vol. XXI.

Lal, K. S. 1995. Growth of Scheduled Castes and Tribes in Medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

Lund, C. 2001. Seeking certainty and aggravating ambiguity: On property, paper and authority in Niger. IDS Bulletin 32(4):47-53.

McCay, B. J. 1987. Human ecology of the commons. In McCay, B. J. & Acheson, J. M. (Eds.) The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Meinzen-Dick, R. & Zwarteveen, M. 1998. Gendered participation in water management: Issues and illustrations from water users associations in South Asia. Agriculture and Human Values 15(4):337-345.

Mosse, D. 1997. The symbolic making of a common property resource: History, ecology and locality in a tank-irrigated landscape in south India. Development and Change 28:467-504.

North, D. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.

Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rappaport, R. A. 1984. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. 2nd Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Robbins, P. 2012. Political Ecology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Wiley & Sons.

Scott, J. C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1995. Colonialism and forestry in India: Imagining the past in present politics. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1):3-40.

[1] Personal communication with people of Bakhatpura, Alwar district.

Grassroots Governmentality

Introduction

This paper holds as its central concern a new form of ‘eco-governmentality’[1] (Goldman 2004) that has emerged in neoliberal, postcolonial India. Specifically, it looks at NGOs as agents (i.e. both objects and subjects) of global green government, and at the discourses that inform their practice (see also Ferguson & Gupta 2002; Hilhorst 2003).

Background

The backdrop for this study is the semi-arid district of Alwar in north-west Rajasthan. A former princely state, Alwar had long been prized for its abundant forest and excellent hunting, both of which were already moribund when the region was reconstituted as a district of Rajasthan in 1949. In the early post-Independence period, widespread commercial felling of Alwar’s dwindling forests and a newfound (nationally mandated) interest in wildlife conservation led to the notification of the world-renowned Sariska Wildlife Sanctuary in 1959. However, commercial logging continued until 1979, when Sariska was reclassified as a Tiger Reserve and a strict programme of conservation initiated. Under the new system, human occupation within the Reserve’s core was declared unlawful; the planned eviction of villages gained widespread attention from environmentalists, NGOs and rights advocates, culminating in a series of high-profile legal disputes and public protests throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Since this time, Alwar has seen a rapid proliferation of non-governmental organisations concerned with issues of social justice, conservation and resource governance.  

Today, the area in and around Sariska Tiger Reserve remains a hotbed for development and conservation initiatives, home to a host of non-governmental organisations with a common concern for wildlife and humans, tigers and tribals. At present, there are well over 20 of these establishments operating in the region with financial and/or technical assistance from a plethora of international agencies (bi- and multi-lateral) and national governmental and non-governmental organisations. For those groups working in the environs of the Tiger Reserve, the traditionally conflicting imperatives of development and conservation have become almost inseparable, a corollary of the ‘merging’ of mainstream narratives thereon in the philosophies of the aforementioned agencies (Campbell & Vainio-Mattila 2003; Torri & Herrmann 2010). Now, any project geared towards biodiversity conservation must make efforts to involve communities, whilst those interventions undertaken in the name of community development invariably pay heed to sustainable livelihoods and environmental management.

Such syncretic or hybrid projects of conservation and development have garnered widespread favour from international funders, for whom local-level, community-driven interventions represent a welcome departure from the larger-scale programmes of previous decades (Torri & Herrmann 2010). They have also been embraced by certain sections of the rural populace, who see in such strategies not only alternatives to state-run schemes (still met with ire and suspicion) but also opportunities for employment, recognition, advocacy, and so on. With the actions of NGOs coming to reflect the imperatives of both local people and national and transnational donors, the grassroots have effectively been globalised. In this way, the communities in and around Sariska, while often overlooked (and even oppressed) by the state government, have been brought under the purview of various transnational systems of (eco)regulation. 

Grassroots Governmentality

As outlined above, the origins of Alwar’s nascent NGO sector are to be found at the intersection of historically constituted regimes of conservation and development, which made manifest a populist discourse long latent in the region. Centred on the inability of the state to deliver on either of these mandates, grassroots movements promise ‘people-first’ alternatives that, crucially, are locally configured and apolitical (i.e. divorced from government designs). However, such projects are invariably shaped by a variety of national/global (and often political) phenomena (e.g. modernity, colonialism, capitalism, development discourses, environmental movements) (see Gupta 1998). One is left to question, therefore, whether India’s growing grassroots sector should be viewed less as a counterpoint to dominant discourse than as an expression thereof (Hilhorst 2003). To put it another way, is the grassroots movement described above in fact representative of an extension, as opposed to curtailment, of government (in Foucault’s sense of the term[2])?

For their supporters, NGOs are a low-cost and scrupulous alternative to bungling state departments. Unencumbered by the red tape and rent-seeking that plague the public sector, these organisations are free to pursue locally responsive, bottom-up solutions to common development problems. More importantly perhaps, they contribute to a ‘rolling back’ of the state (seen as the seat of oppression) and hence bring about greater public freedoms.

In stark contrast to this portrayal, critics have argued that NGOs are little more than ‘missionaries of the new [neoliberal] era’ (Tandon 1996, cited in Hilhorst 2003:9). The notion that so-called bottom-up or grassroots action is inherently opposed to the top-down workings of the state has been challenged on the grounds that NGOs, though ostensibly autonomous, are part of the same system of neoliberal governmentality (Bryant 2002; Ferguson & Gupta 2002; Goldman 2004). According to this logic, the operations of government (in Foucault’s sense) are simply ‘franchised’ (Wood 1997:80) from a receding state to various non-state entities, all of which exhibit the same market-based rationality. Understood thus, the emergence of NGOs and grassroots groups ‘is not a matter of less government… Rather, it indicates a new modality of government, which works by creating mechanisms that work “all by themselves” to bring about governmental results through the devolution of risk onto the “enterprise” or the individual…and the “responsibilization” of subjects who are increasingly “empowered” to discipline themselves’ (Ferguson & Gupta 2002:989).

The Indian grassroots movement is in many ways suggestive of this new (neoliberal) modality, permeated as it is by the logic of the market and the parlance of populism. However, as Ferguson and Gupta (2002:990) observe, the notion of neoliberal governmentality, though illuminating, is too ‘closely tied to the idea of the territorially sovereign nation-states as the domain for the operation of government’. Viewing grassroots organisations simply as franchises of national government obscures the important part played by global regulatory bodies (e.g. IMF, UN, WTO) in shaping ‘civil society’. For this reason, it is helpful to analyse the grassroots encounter in light of a system of transnational governmentality (Gupta 1998, Ferguson & Gupta 2002). Specifically, it is indicative of an emergent ‘green neoliberalism’ or ‘eco-governmentality’ (Goldman 2004:166f.), a global regulatory regime whose focus, adapting Foucault (1992), is the conduct of ecological conduct.

The ‘Transnational Local’

In a system of transnational eco-governmentality, the grassroots are globalised. Local, ‘community-centred’ NGOs are at once international and ‘Earth-focused’, their work reflecting the (top-down) prescriptions of funders and other transnational allies as much as the (bottom-up) privations of target groups. These new, global grassroots confound traditional modes of state spatiality[3] (Ferguson & Gupta 2002). The NGOs around Sariska, for instance, are not simply below the state, the local lights of civil society; rather, they are part of a transnational regime of green governance that exists alongside the system of nation-states. Indeed, as Ferguson and Gupta (2002:994) argue, we should view such organisations ‘not as challengers pressing up against the state from below but as horizontal contemporaries of the organs of the state – sometimes rivals; sometimes servants; sometimes watchdogs; sometimes parasites; but in every case operating on the same level, and in the same global space’.

This understanding of the grassroots as a ‘transnational local’ constitutive of parallel mechanisms of governmentality has profound implications for both ‘state-society relations’ and their academic analysis. In the first case, and most obviously, a system of global green governance can be seen as a form of domination, with populations made subject to hybrid strains of conservation and development (e.g. community-based conservation, sustainable development) that comprise what Goldman (2004:168) calls ‘a hegemonic discourse of ecological difference rooted in neoliberal market ideology’. As numerous authorities have observed (see e.g. Escobar 1991, 1995; Esteva 1992; Apffel-Marglin & Marglin 1992; Ferguson 1994; Crush 1995), modern modalities of social and environmental regulation are in many ways comparable with their colonial forebears, leading some to depict development as a neocolonial project. Yet as Gupta (1998:22) notes, ‘notions of neocolonialism hark back to a model of competition between nation-states’ and thus fail to account for new forms of transnational government concerned with global (e.g. environmental) problems. The relation between these transnational entities and the nation-state is both complex and contingent. In many cases, the former may circumvent or undermine state apparatus (Appadurai 2001; Crewe 2007), much as the NGOs in Alwar district challenged the Forest Department. While some would herald this as an emancipatory move (i.e. freeing individuals from state control), it can also be seen as inherently undemocratic, allowing unelected and unaccountable actors to impose their designs on any amenable populace. As the Alwar case makes clear, such actions can serve to reinforce a populist ideology, in which the state is conceived as the ultimate obstacle to the satisfaction of needs. In this way, NGOs and grassroots groups legitimate their position, naturalising their authority and, in effect, monopolising a transnational moral economy. Concomitantly, they destabilise the developmentalist vision of Third World states as ‘western nation-states in embryo’ whose maturation is to be achieved by ‘hooking citizens up into a national – and ultimately universal – grid of modernity’ (Ferguson 2001:137); for grassroots groups and NGOs, development ceases to be a national (or even political) project and becomes instead a fractured and irregular process built on ‘the rapid, deterritorialized point-to-point forms of connection…central to both the new communications technologies and the new, neoliberal practices of capital mobility’ (Ferguson & Gupta 2002:994).

With regard to state-society relations, then, the grassroots encounter and its attendant forms of eco-rationality can be seen to have ‘fragmented, stratified, and unevenly transnationalized Southern states, state actors, and state power’ (Goldman 2004:167, original emphasis). While it is difficult to estimate the broad social effects of this spatial unbundling (Ruggie 1993), we would be wrong to assume that any reduction in state influence leads inevitably to the empowerment of marginal people; as Ferguson and Gupta (2002:995) remind us with reference to the recent political history of Africa, ‘the diminishment of state authority is as likely to undermine the position of subaltern groups as it is to enhance it’. On the other hand, it should not be supposed that grassroots NGOs are mere ‘expressions’ of discourse, the vessels of governmentality. While the Alwar case seems in some ways to support such a thesis, it should be remembered that there are myriad forms of grassroots movement. As Appadurai (2001:24) observes, ‘[s]ome are culturalist and religious, some diasporic and non-territorial, some bureaucratic and managerial… [There are] groups that have opted for armed, militarized solutions to their problems…[and] those that have opted for a politics of partnership.’ Thus, while the concept of transnational governmentality provides a useful lens through which to examine forms of grassroots action that involve global flows of ideas and capital (e.g. ‘grassroots development’), it may not be applicable to those that are more autonomous, that is, unconstrained by the ideological prescriptions of funding bodies and other partners.[4]

References

Apffel-Marglin, F. & Marglin, S. (Eds.) 1990. Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Appadurai, A. 2001. Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Environment and Urbanization 13:23-43. 

Bryant, R. L. 2002. Non-governmental organisations and governmentality: “Consuming” biodiversity and indigenous peoples in the Philippines. Political Studies 50:268-292.

Campbell, L. M. & Vainio-Matilla, A. 2003. Participatory development and community-based conservation: Opportunities missed for lessons learned? Human Ecology 31(3):417-437.

Crewe, E. 2007. Towards better outcomes for children globally: Alternative perspectives on international development. Journal of Children’s Services 2(4):59-70.

Crush, J. (Ed.) 1995. Power of Development. London: Routledge.

Dean, M. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage Publications.

Escobar, A. 1991. Anthropology and the development encounter: The making and marketing of development anthropology. American Ethnologist 18(4):658-682.

Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Esteva, G. 1992. Development. In Sachs, W. (Ed.) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed.

Ferguson, J. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ferguson, J. 2001. Global disconnect: Abjection and the aftermath of modernism. In Inda, J. X. & Rosaldo, R. (Eds.) The Anthropology of Globalization. New York: Blackwell.

Ferguson, J. & Gupta, A. 2002. Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. American Ethnologist 29(4):981-1002.

Foucault, M. 1982. The subject and power. In Dreyfus, H. & Rabinow, P. (Eds.) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldman, M. 2004. Eco-governmentality and other transnational practices of a “green” World Bank. In Peet, R. & Watts, M. (Eds.) Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (Second Edition). London: Routledge.

Gupta, A. 1995. Blurred boundaries: The discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state. American Ethnologist 22(2):375-402.

Gupta, A. 1998. Post-Colonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gupta, A. & Ferguson, J. 1992. Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7(1):6-23.

Hilhorst, D. 2003. The Real World of NGOs: Discourses, Diversity and Development. London: Zed.

Ruggie, J. 1993. Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing modernity in international relations. International Organization 47(1):139-174.

Torri, M. C. & Herrmann, T. M. 2010. Biodiversity conservation versus rural development: What kind of possible harmonization? The case study of Alwar District, Rajasthan, India. Journal of Human Ecology 31(2):93-101.

Wood, G. 1997. States without citizens: The problem of the franchise state. In Hulme, D. & Edwards, M. (Eds.) NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? New York: St. Martin’s Press.

[1] For Foucault, government ‘is an undertaking conducted in the plural. There is a plurality of governing agencies and authorities, of aspects of behaviour to be governed, of norms invoked, of purposes sought, and of effects, outcomes and consequences’ (Dean 1999:10). The mechanisms of government, as Ferguson and Gupta (2002:989) note, ‘cut across domains that we would regard as separate: the state, civil society, the family, down to the intimate details of what we regard as personal life’. Thus, ‘governmentality’ refers to ‘the myriad ways in which human conduct is directed by calculated means’ (ibid.989).

[2] For Foucault (1982:220f.), ‘government’ is the art of defining the proper ‘conduct of conduct’.

[3] For Ferguson and Gupta (2002), state spacialisation comprises two key images: verticality (i.e. the state as ‘above’ society) and encompassment (the state as ‘encompassing’ its localities).

[4] Of course, this notion of autonomy is largely theoretical; in reality, all grassroots groups are dependent on patrons and partners who inevitably shape their agenda. Indeed, as Appadurai (2001:30) points out, there is an ‘ever-present risk, in all forms of grassroots activism, that the needs of funders will gradually obliterate the needs of the poor themselves’.