Governmentality and political ecology

The relevance of the governmentality framework for addressing ecological issues is marked by a double paradox. Firstly, nature and ecology do not feature prominently in Foucault. His interest in nature was reportedly marginal. A biographical account claims he ‘detested nature’, preferring ‘visiting churches and museums’ (Eribon 1991, quoted in Darier 1999b, 6). Yet, the category of life is central to his work. On one side he shows how biopower builds on the overcoming of the traditional separation between history and humans’ biological constitution and relationship with their biophysical milieu (Foucault 1978). On the other, the very notions of life, or human nature, before concepts or objects of inquiry, are for him ‘epistemological indicators’, that is, historically movable signposts that define the boundaries and modalities of inquiry, the limits of investigation about ourselves and the world, or the conceptual grid through which such investigation can be conducted (Chomsky and Foucault 2006; Foucault 2000). Said differently, life and nature, and their shifting meaning, are cornerstones of the problematizations – the type of issues that arise and take centre-stage and the type of answers that become conceivable (Foucault 2001; see also Bacchi, this volume) – that characterize different historical phases.