Agrawal, Arun. Environmentality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Print.

Introduction

Environmental subjectivity as a result of “involvement in struggles over resources an in relation to new institutions and changing calculations of self-interest and notions of the self”. p. 3 So both complicated feedback loops but also agency.

Forests and villages defined in order to control fires: how categories are required to exercise power. Once you make the category “forest”, you can imagine a form of state power that would control the forest and human activity within it. So how to do you make the category forest? surveys, typologies, techniques of intervention and management, surveillance, etc.

But then why do villagers protest the creation and management of forest? Fires. Which is why you make the category! So you now are managing forest AND village and criminalizing in the process activities which had taken place within “the forest” but without any sense of “the forest” as a categorically distinct subject.

So in connecting, you create “environmental subjects”: people who govern forest; “governmentalized localities”. You teach ways of thinking about it (“you are now responsible for forest”; “you are a villager”). But this is not coercion and resistance; it is something more complicated. Not really “negotiation” either.

“Governmentalization of the environment was accomplished in India was accomplished in India by the creation, activation and execution of new procedures for surveying, demcarcating, consolidating, protecting, planting, managing, harvesting and marketing forests.”p. 12 Particular agencies and experts were responsible for these processes and procedures, and undergoing these procedures in turn changed how they saw and interacted with forests.

“New ways to govern forests were the result of changing perceptions about their potential uses, among them naval manufacture, sleeper ties for the railways, the production of turpentine, and of course revenue generation. Emerging demands because of greater commercialization, strategic imperial needs and the consolidation of empire were crucial in shaping how state officials regarded forests…new procedures and regulations based on statistical representations and numericized relationships also defined forests and redefined legitimate ways to use them. They rendered some types of uses inappropriate and wasteful, illegal and ill-considered. They validated other types of uses on grounds of efficiency. They excluded some existing users. They favored others. They were mediating organizational forms in the widespread extension of new views about forests.” p. 13

“There is a third facet to the process, which is given the singular name of decentralization: the making of environmental subjects. Environmental subjects are those for whom the environment constitutes a critical domain of thought and action.” p. 16

Governmentality: e.g., that which can be governed, as distinct from government, that which governs. Governmentality allows government itself to be dispersed over a wide range of institutions and actors.

“Concurrent processes of regulation and subject making that underpin all efforts to institute new technologies of government”. p. 24