Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects

New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century

by Arun Agrawal

In Kumaon in northern India, villagers set hundreds of forest fires in the early 1920s, protesting the colonial British state’s regulations to protect the environment. Yet by the 1990s, they had begun to conserve their forests carefully. In his innovative historical and political study, Arun Agrawal analyzes this striking transformation. He describes and explains the emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and shows how the two are related. In so doing, he demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combined—in an approach he calls environmentality—to better understand changes in conservation efforts. Such an understanding is relevant far beyond Kumaon: local populations in more than fifty countries are engaged in similar efforts to protect their environmental resources.

Agrawal brings environment and development studies, new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on his ethnographical and historical research. He visited nearly forty villages in Kumaon, where he assessed the state of village forests, interviewed hundreds of Kumaonis, and examined local records. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and archival research, he shows how decentralization strategies change relations between states and localities, community decision makers and common residents, and individuals and the environment. In exploring these changes and their significance, Agrawal establishes that theories of environmental politics are enriched by attention to the interconnections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities.

Genres: Environment, History, Anthropology

344 pages, Paperback

First published March 16, 2005

About the author

Arun Agrawal is Associate Professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People and a coeditor of Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India, both also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This new book, the first full work by Arun Agrawal, is both a captivating account of rural forest politics in India, and a clearly written and strikingly original theoretical political ecology text.

Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of Governmentality, introduced in Foucault's later essays, Agrawal argues that the very institutions of government shape the subjects that they are governing, and that this practice is particularily striking in the case of resource managment, thus: environmentality.

The underlying thesis of the book explores the way in which governments, being characterized by national institutions and ministries that are distant from rural village life in India, shape the subjective practices of the members of these communities in terms of their relation to their local environment and resource use.

In a clear and concise fashion Agrawal takes you through a very indepth case study of how devolution of forest authority to local institutions allowed for the community to reshape their forest practices and in doing so reshape their own relationships to resource use and ecology.

Highly recommeneded to say the least!