Environmentality by the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change

Neoliberal ethos and the production of environmental subjects in Acre and Mozambique

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4464635
AutoresRaquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro (0000-0002-2306-8257, George Washington University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen3
Número2
Páginas442-461
Fecha de publicación2020-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/2514848619835134
OpenAlexW2973393652
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas38

As part of the transnational governance of the environment, platforms like the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) have created a regime that seeks to reinforce and reproduce the neoliberal ethos that informs current environmental conservation initiatives, as well as that seeks to produce environmental subjects. Such ethos is expressed through the preference for market-based solutions, principles of individual responsibility, or incentives to self-government. Drawing on ethnographic research in Acre (Brazil) and Mozambique, I explore some of the local elements of this neoliberal ethos. I use two public events about climate change to contend that such events constitute local instantiations of the UNFCCC's environmentality, by collectively performing and reproducing the neoliberal ethos that is encapsulated in the governance of the problem of climate change. These collective performances are important for the crystallization of a narrative that explains the reality and the terms of understanding future realities, thus contributing to processes of subjectification. The performances of these narratives are also important instances of mediation between the local and the transnational. I argue that although the production of environmental subjects promoted by the UNFCCC necessarily implies the erasure of localities, such subjectification depends on its indexation to local specificities. Ultimately, the reproduction of these environmental subjects-and the neoliberal ethos that undergirds their own constitution-has the potential to preclude the imagination of alternative models of development and of fighting climate change

Climate change · Ethos · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Ecology