4. Interrogating Governance

• Governance replacing conventional statehood 1970s, introduced 1980s
• Transition. What is difference between statehood and governance? - key features market-based, public participation, multilaterlism, influence personal behaviour. Rigid govt, more flexible governance.
• Governance (supposed to be) more flexible, inclusive, reactive, responsive etc
• But increased environmental problems. Failure of governance and institutions? Or not had a chance to develop?
• Acknowledge and embrace complexity - whereas projects & reports tend to be quite narrow.
• The state has its own internal logic
• Market based solutions
• Jevon’s Paradox - efficiency is counterproductive to reducing consumption
• Market based “solutions” - techno-managerial dispositifs. Payment
• Financial incentives for tree planting
• Appropriating the commons is ongoing
• Earth System Governance Project - apolitical
• Envronmental justice - Robert Buller
• Reducing consumption, exporting wealth
• Environmental Justice Atlas
• p54 Stengers book quote
• ’top down’ environmental governance and management
• “Philsophy is the most noble of the professions”
• “The madness of our time is to depoliticise conflicts in order to settle them” Jacques Ranciere 1990 (Aux Bords du Politique)
• “Ecology - understood as the philosophy "
• Can the state deliver postcapitalism
• Frederic Giros disobedience
• break the log of capitalism & address issues of growth
• Alternatives
  • Environmental Democracy & Justice
  • “The right to be equal when difference dimishes us and the right to be different when equality mischaracterises us” Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South - Warwick professor
  • Sumak kawsay - community-centric, ecologically-balanced & culturally sensitive.
  • Bolivia & Ecuador constitutions incorporated 2008 & 2009
• Language and domination
• non-Western concepts & decolonisation
• search for different relationship between humands and non-humans (whole reality)