Ecosystem services and neoliberal governmentality – German style
Section snippets
A programmatic “reorientation of biodiversity policies”?
‘Ecosystem services’ has evolved into a key term of debate on nature conservation and landscape management at the global, European and national level (Chaudhary et al., 2015). The concept has also become popular in Germany. Some regard it as an indicator of a programmatic “reorientation of biodiversity policies […] in an economic vein”1 (Bundestag, 2015, p. 12). However, it is largely unknown how governing is changing in Germany with the
Analytics of government
By ‘governmentality’ I refer to an “analytics of government” (Dean, 2010, p. 27), i.e. an approach to studying historically contingent forms of governing. The notion of governmentality is based on his concepts of governing and the power-knowledge nexus (Hutter et al., 2014). According to Foucault (1982, p. 221), government and the practice of governing include all attempts to “act upon the possibilities of action of other people”, which is why it has been termed “the conduct of conduct” (
State of the art in terms of governmentality research on ecosystem services
Many authors have scrutinised “neoliberal natures” (Wynne-Jones, 2012, p. 1035) (cf. the overviews in Castree, 2010a, Castree, 2010b, Castree, 2011, Büscher et al., 2012) and the possible relations between neoliberalisation and the ecosystem services concept. According to Turnhout et al. (2014, p. 584), IPBES contributes to making biodiversity “transparent” in order to “assess its values, evaluate policy performance, and enhance effective and efficient policies and market strategies”. Regarding
Empirical material and methodological approach
The empirical analysis looks at TEEB-DE, specifically the publications that have been issued since the inception of this initiative in 2012. The project is supported and coordinated by the BfN with funding from the Federal Department of the Environment (BMU). Its objective is to prepare two brochures and four thematic reports, which are intended to “present […] the economic case for nature conservation, as a complement to ethical and ecological arguments” (UFZ, 2016, without page numbering).
Results
In the following I present the major elements of the TEEB-DE discourse and its sub-discourses as regards problematisations and rationalities of governing, drawing on the questions introduced in Table 1.
Discussion
The most important finding of the current investigation is that the TEEB-DE discourse includes a relatively coherent neoliberal subdiscourse in terms of problematisations of governing: Nature is made visible as an economic asset, or at least as something which is highly relevant to the economy, by relating it to ‘ecosystem services’. Consequently, the problem to be addressed is cast as an economic one, consisting chiefly of costs. It is traced back to economic factors such as insufficient or
Conclusion
In the previous sections I have scrutinised the effects of the growing interest in the ecosystem services concept in Germany, especially regarding the project TEEB-DE. I examined the problematisations and rationalities of governing produced so far in the context of TEEB-DE and assessed them in the light of different ‘arts of government’. The question was not whether TEEB-DE represents a neoliberal project, but rather in which way it is neoliberal, how it engages with existing policy approaches
Acknowledgement
This research was partly funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) under the grant number LE 2255/4-1.
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