Neoliberalism and the environmental crisis

The paper aims to explore the connections of neoliberalization and the prevailing conception of the ‘global environment’ and its crisis. Thus far, the global environmental prescriptions (the policy decisions that are guided and justified by the prevailing understanding of ‘global environment’ and its crisis) have been complicit with and supportive of the growth of neoliberal systems of governance and depoliticized instruments of power. They have created a set of circumstances which increase the penetration of neoliberal markets and neoliberal ideas of organizing the social. The depoliticizing effects, in turn, reduce the sphere of democratic political deliberation and debate while issues are placed under technocratic management and consensual policy-making of global institutions.

These issues are studied through the works and ideas of Michel Foucault, especially through his ideas about how power works, and about governing, and his understanding of the nature of our social reality. He approached the world, and all the truths we hold about it, discursively. The paper views the construction of the ‘global environment’ as a creation of an object of knowledge and a sphere within which certain types of intervention and management are made possible, while contributing to the larger aim of managing the lives of populations. I focus my attention specifically on the implicit social order environmental prescriptions embrace. From the production of ‘environment’ as global and allencompassing it occurs that these prescriptions and their implications are biopolitical in nature. Thus, the paper analyzes the conception of the ‘global environment’ and its problematique as a part of what Foucault called “the regulatory biopolitics of the population."