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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Global Environm

l se1. Introduction

Ecological threats, technological and scientic advancement,and social change intertwine in an oblique way. The world inwhich, decades ago, the environment emerged as a public issue isprofoundly different from the present one. The current state ofglobal affairs conveys a widespread perception of disorder(Sonnenfeld and Mol, 2011). Structures that had provided forsome predictability are breaking down and a trend towardsuncertainty and unpredictability is likely to characterize thepresent and foreseeable future (Arrighi and Silver, 2001, p. 258).Jessop (2002) talks of a transition from Keynesian welfare nationalstates to Schumpeterian workfare postnational regimes. The rst,developing in the post-WW2 decades, aimed at full employmentand economic planning, prioritised social policies over economicdevelopment, centred policy-making and implementation on thenational scale, and grounded public choice on neo-corporatistmodels. The second, emerging since the mid-1970s, aim atincreasing the competitiveness of national and local economies,focus on technological innovation, place economic developmentover social policies, centre policy-making and implementation atthe supranational and local scale, and ground public choice onpublicprivate partnerships and stakeholder consultations and

negotiations. With regard to the natural environment, sustainabil-ity has replaced limits to growth as a dominant theme, whilemarket-based and contractualised policy approaches taxes,incentives, cap-and-trade arrangements, voluntary agreements,non-binding standards and rules have gained growing relevance.

From sheries quota systems to agricultural trade liberal-isation, from water supply privatisation to the commodication ofgenetic resources, from carbon offset schemes to the sale ofecological services, there is ample evidence of a major shift inenvironmental governance. Such shift is often associated withneoliberal ideas, programs and policies. Neoliberalism is a complexand contested eld of inquiry. This article advances two inter-connected arguments about it. First, a distinctive and increasinglydominant neoliberal outlook on the biophysical world can beidentied. Second, this outlook is inherently troublesome forenvironmental social theory, affecting the latters understanding ofongoing changes in the relationship between society and nature.

Disorder is usually interpreted as the pathology of a transitionalperiod, bound to result in a new order (Arrighi and Silver, 2001).However, at least regarding the interaction between humans andthe environment, it is possible to argue that disorder better:uncertainty, contingency, instability has become a way ofgoverning. And this is related to a redenition of the ontologicalquality of the biophysical world. The next three sections elaborateon the neoliberal stance on the biophysical world. To clarifyneoliberal rationality I draw on the governmentality approach,using biotechnology patenting and the nancialisation of climate

Biotechnology

Carbon markets

Risk and uncertainty

Governmentality

modernization, neo-Marxism and poststructuralism, it is shown that behind contradictions and

reticence in their assessments of neoliberal governance lie difculties in making sense of the latters

theoretical core. This sets a challenging research program for social theory.

2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

* Tel.: +39 040 5583730; fax: +30 040 5587829.

E-mail address: pellizzonil@sp.units.it.

0959-3780/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.03.014Governing through disorder: Neoliberaand social theory

Luigi Pellizzoni *

Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Trieste, Piazza Europa, 1, 341

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Received 27 September 2010

Received in revised form 28 March 2011

Accepted 29 March 2011

Available online 22 April 2011

Keywords:

Neoliberalism

Ecological modernisation

A B S T R A C T

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approaches, often assoc

governmentality framew

nancialisation of climate

approaches lie in a novel u

conceived as fully plastic, c

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the public realm this idea

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jo ur n al h o mep ag e: www .environmental governance

rieste, Italy

the spread of an array of market-inspired environmental governance

d with neoliberal ideas, programs and policies. Drawing on the

and focusing on the examples of biotechnology patenting and the

d weather, the article argues that the conceptual underpinnings of these

rstanding of the ontological quality of the biophysical world. The latter is

rollable, open to an ever-expanding human agency. Neoliberal governance

despite, disorder that is, through contingency, uncertainty, instability. In

nstitutes a sort of shared horizon of meaning; but environmental social

ounting for it. By reviewing three major perspectives, namely ecological

ental Change

vier . co m / loc ate /g lo envc h a

and weather as especially tting examples. The subsequentsections turn to three major perspectives in environmental socialtheory: ecological modernisation, neo-Marxism and post-struc-

however, sounds unconvincing, not only because these achieve-

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803796turalism. Their engagement with neoliberalism differs to aremarkable extent. Behind contradictions and reticence, I argue,lies a commonality in that all three perspectives have difculties intackling the ontological core of the neoliberal approach to thebiophysical world. The article concludes with reections on somelines of further development in environmental social theory.

2. Neoliberalism and nature

In a relatively short time, a huge amount of literature hasemerged on neoliberalism.1 Neoliberalism is often portrayed as aproject of social change, for which human well-being can best beadvanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms andskills within an institutional framework characterized by strongprivate property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of thestate is to create and preserve an institutional frameworkappropriate to such practices (Harvey, 2005, p. 2). Centralcharacteristics are thus rational, self-interested individuals andthe market as the main regulative mechanism, while a lessenedrole is assigned to traditional politics (Hay, 2007).

Many scholars, it has to be remarked, stress that talking ofencompassing, hegemonic, projects sounds like an overstatement.The reality which we are confronted with is rather a complex,contested, contradictory assemblage of policies, practices anddiscourses (Ong, 2006; Birch and Mykhnenko, 2009). There aredifferent waves of neoliberalization (Brenner et al., 2010). There arediverse ways of reacting in terms of promoting, adjusting orresisting to the global neoliberal turn (Jessop, 2002). Yet the veryrecognition of world-wide thrusts and counter-thrusts, albeitspatially and temporally differentiated, conveys some sense of unity.

In this context, a growing (mostly, but not uniquely, neo-Marxist) scholarship has identied the neoliberalization of nature(McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Castree, 2008) as the increasingmanagement of natural resources and environmental issuesthrough market-oriented arrangements, by off-loading rightsand responsibilities to private rms, civil society groups andindividual citizens, with state power, in its national andtransnational incarnations, providing the rules under whichmarkets operate (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008; Castree, 2008).Sustaining growth in a market economy entails a ceaseless searchfor new products, techniques, markets and raw materials. In thissense neoliberalism and classic liberalism share a basic commit-ment to restructuring social relations with nature. The privatisa-tion and commodication of land, forests and many otherresources was justied by liberal thinkers by arguing that, sincenature gains value through the application of human labour,conferring exclusive control of natural resources on thoseindividuals who work them is both morally right and collectivelybenecial. This is basically the same rationale used to advocatecurrent market-based environmental policies. Yet, while inclassical liberalism there was a sustained debate over the materiallimits to economic growth, the neoliberal discourse is dominatedby Promethean accounts of technology and economic expansion,where the case for the limits to growth is reverted into a case forthe growth of limits (Lemke, 2003; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004).

There is, thus, no total equivalence between the liberal and theneoliberal outlook on the biophysical world. It would be temptingto ascribe the difference to the amazing record of technoscienticachievements accumulated over recent decades. Such explanation,

1 Peck et al. (2009) account for 2500 English language articles in the social

sciences that cite neoliberalism as a keyword, the vast majority of which published

after 1998.ments have been complemented with an equally astonishingrecord of disasters, but above all because the transformativecapacity of human labour is central to classic liberalism andneoliberalism (and Marxism) alike. It is more likely that thereexists a difference in the way nature is conceived. In contrast toliberalism, neoliberalism regards nature no longer as an ultimateirreversible barrier [but as] a constraint that can be strategicallymanipulated (Fuller, 2008, p. 2). This idea of a constraint that canbe strategically manipulated is worth elaborating.

3. Disorder and contingency in neoliberal governance

For such an elaboration the governmentality approach lookspromising. Foucault, who coined the governmentality concept,noticed that government is more than state power. It is theensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses andreections, the calculations and tactics (Foucault, 1991, p. 102)that allow the exercise of a particular form of rule. Governmentincludes a variety of practices, techniques and mentalities throughwhich subjects are governed, in the sense of both being led tofollow certain rules (subjection) and taking shape with respect tosuch rules (subjectication). It is this mentality or rationality ofgovernment that one has to understand to make sense of theneoliberalisation of nature.

For governmentality scholarship, the key feature of suchmentality is government at a distance; its key actor is theresponsible, enterprising, self-governing individual. Neoliberalgovernmentality does not refer, as the liberal one, to the natural,private-interest-motivated conduct of free, market exchangingindividuals [but] to articially arranged or contrived forms of thefree, entrepreneurial and competitive conduct of economic-rationalindividuals (Burchell, 1996, pp. 2324, italics original). On this view,the regulation of conduct becomes a matter of each individualsdesire to govern their own conduct freely in the service of themaximization of a version of their happiness and fullment that theytake to be their own (Rose, 1996, p. 57). Moreover, in order topromote competition, the market needs active regulation. Ifneoliberalism shares with classic liberalism a commitment tolimiting state intervention in favour of individual choice in themarket, the latter is no longer seen as the spontaneous expression ofan anthropological propensity to exchange, as with Adam Smith; itmust be purposefully crafted (Lazzarato, 2009).

All this entails a profoundly different conception of therelationship between action and the world, thus of risk anduncertainty. The way in which risk is built into governmentalpractices [varies] under differing governing conditions speci-cally, in relation to differing political rationalities [. . .] Differingapproaches to risk give shape to different forms of liberalism(OMalley, 2008, p. 69, italics original). The liberal view of freedom,rationality and responsibility entails a future neither totally xednor totally random. On the one hand, risk means a future eventrelated to behavioural choices, the probability of which isamenable to calculation (Luhmann, 1993). On the other, protstems from those unpredictable risks, as related for example toinnovation, which no insurance company will cover, nor anyinvestment programme can calculate.2 So on the one hand,through calculability it is possible to transform a radicallyindeterminate cosmos into a manageable one (Reddy, 1996, p.237). On the other, non-calculable uncertainty prevents humansfrom being prisoners of an inevitable path: we create the future ininnovative ways and escape the bonds of a statistically knowablefuture (OMalley, 2008, p. 73). Moreover, the reference of risk tobehavioural choices entails that the difference tends to vanish

2 Knight and Keynes were arguably the rst economists to stress this point.

between states of the world independent of any observerconcerning stochastic laws of chance processes and cognitivestates concerning degrees of belief in propositions. Bayesian

rules of thumb, and so on (OMalley, 2008, p. 73). This is reectedin the growing use of scenario techniques (Cooper, 2010).Scenarios are not proper forecasts but alternative images of thefuture, where likelihoods of occurrence are replaced by degrees ofcondence. Scenarios seek to identify discontinuities, possiblesurprises, effects of unknowable events, and so on. Their goal is to

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803 797theories of subjective probability actually refer all probabilities tothe agents knowledge, because relative frequencies are onlysample data of past events that inuence subjective probabilities offuture events (Stewart, 2000, p. 42).

This understanding of risk and uncertainty stands in starkcontrast with a perspective gaining salience in the environmentalsciences since the 1970s, which pinpoints complexity as the crucialfeature of natural and social systems and their interactions.3 Forvon Neumann, one of the founding fathers of complexity theory, anobject of inquiry is complex when its structure is simpler than thedescription of its properties, which means that the only way toknow how it works is to run it and see what happens (Dupuy andGrinbaum, 2004). Complex systems are therefore intrinsicallyunpredictable. Disorder, in the sense of instability and uncon-trollability, denes their ontological status. There is a permanentgap between biophysical processes like climate change or thespread of genetically modied organisms (GMOs) in the openenvironment and our calculated intervention on them (Wynne,1992; Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993).

What the governmentality literature shows, then, is that in itsaccount of the interaction between humans and the world,neoliberalism departs from both liberal and complexity perspec-tives. The basic conceptual move lies in a stretching of thesubjective approach to uncertainty the way uncertainty makesfree. The entrepreneur is depicted as possessing

the responsibility and skills for managing and creating notmerely wealth but the future. [. . .] An extensive and immenselyinuential managerial literature appearing since the early1980s [. . .] celebrates uncertainty as the technique of entrepre-neurial creativity, [. . .] the uid art of the possible. It involvestechniques of exibility and adaptability, requires a certain kindof vision that may be thought of as intuition but is neverthelesscapable of being explicated at great length in terms such asanticipatory government and government with foresight(OMalley, 2004, pp. 35).

Uncertainty, thus, is seen no more as a circumscribed situationon which to build a few strategic decisions, but as an empoweringeveryday condition. Entrepreneurial agency is located within thearticially arranged, ever-changing task environment produced byglobal trade, innovation-based competition and the nancialturbulence created by oating exchange rates. This affects howcontingency is accounted for. Indeterminacy, one could say, doesnot mean constraining non-determinability, but enabling non-determination. While in the rst case the causal chains are regardedas open in the sense that the events can take unpredictable turnsbecause of unknown intervening variables, emergent systemsproperties and so on, in the second case the causal chains areregarded as open in the sense that the agent does not nd thempredetermined, but can handle and orient them in the desireddirection. Contingency means lack of limits rather than lack oforder. Better: disorder, as a positive, enabling systems condition,can be handled by carving out provisional room for purposefulmanoeuvre. The more unstable the world, the more manageable.

Entrepreneurial agents, of course, do not just close their eyesand jump. Rather, they estimate the future in much the same waythat people do engaging in extreme sports: that is by accumulatinginformation, relying on experience, using practiced judgment and

3 One early, well-known expression of this view is Weinbergs (1972) notion of

trans-science, that is of a eld of scientic questions that cannot be scientically

answered.prepare for the unexpected. They construct possible worlds on theidea that imagination and belief have a creative, and not justdescriptive, force. Radical contingency, rather than risk, is theirtarget and resource.

The basic orientation of neoliberalism, thus, is speculative,rather than predictive: proper calculations of risk are seen as anexception, while reasoned bets over unpredictable futures areregarded as the rule. Rather than paralysing, the eventuality offuture, or the subjectivity of expectations, enables the constructionof purposefully designed task environments where new opportu-nities take shape. The fundamental difference between the liberaland the neoliberal entrepreneurial agent, therefore, is not only thatthe latter corresponds to the citizen or the human being as such,but that this entrepreneur operates within an articially craftedworld. Abstraction is the key to this creative capacity.

Abstraction is a long-noticed feature of capitalism. For Polanyi(1944) free market capitalism treats many elements of nature,such as water or trees, as ctitious commodities, that ismarketisable resources disembedded from their socio-culturalmeaning and biophysical function. Being a quantitative andimpersonal way to express things, use values and needs, capitalabstracts the real world, transforming itself into increasinglyabstract forms, as the dematerialization of money testies.Abstraction translates differences into exchangeable equivalences,which means giving disorder or contingency an ordered, manage-able form.

Since its beginning, the neoliberal era has been characterized byprocesses of intensive abstraction.4 Such work is qualitativelydifferent from previous capitalist performances, in that it operatesat an ontological, rather than epistemic, level. This point is crucialand is developed in the next section, drawing on the examples ofbiotechnology patents and the nancialisation of climate andweather.

4. Biotechnology patents and the nancialisation of climateand weather

The basic justication for biotechnology patents is straightfor-ward. Innovation is benecial to the whole society and patents arethe best way to promote and spread it, since they encourageinvestment in research and make its results publicly available. Theenduring question of patenting is the distinction betweendiscovery and invention. The requirements for patentability differto some extent from place to place. In the US a patent must be novel(not previously made public), non-obvious (to someone skilled inthe art) and useful; in Europe a patent must be novel, constitute aninventive step and demonstrate industrial applicability (Calvert,2007). Though legally relevant, these differences do not affect theunderlying logic of the patenting of biotechnology, which may besynthesized as follows: (a) a mechanistic conception of the world:both organic and inorganic matter are assemblies of parts; (b)isolation and purication as criteria for distinguishing what ismanufactured from what is not (in other words, making things

4 The obvious example is the fall of the Bretton Woods regime of xed exchange

rates, in 1971, which allowed the growing nancialisation of economy. Of no lesser

relevance is the scal crisis of New York City, in 1975, when the employees pension

funds were for the rst time used to buy corporate bonds (of the Municipal

Assistance Corporation). Linking the workers future incomes to the uctuations of

the stock exchange market means transferring in an abstracted form the capital-

labour conict over the distribution of resources within labour itself.

usable counts more than whether such things already exist innature in some form); (c) dematerialization of physical matter intoits informational contents, that is pure function; and (d)presumption of manufacture by virtue of the very demand of a

Carbon markets commodify climate regulation by assigninghighly speculative capacities to allegedly equivalent (thus valuable

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803798patent (it is the task of the denying authority to prove thatsomething exists in nature). So, for example, a product patent for agenetic sequence entails regarding it as a composition of matter,novel in that in its isolated and puried form it is not available innature, and the utility or industrial applicability of which lies inthe disclosure of its function. Such disclosure basically correspondsto understanding the biochemistry of the protein a gene producesand how this leads to a specic trait of the organism.5 Thereforegenes are regarded as carriers of information, suitable fortranslation into different media (Kay, 1999). Though informationas such, like ideas, scientic theories or laws of nature, is excludedfrom patenting, the demonstration of some technical effect orfunctionality allows for property rights claims. In the end,

the gene has an ambiguous status where it is simultaneouslythought of as both a material entity and a carrier of information.[. . .] This duality of the genome is exploited in patenting, wherea slippage has occurred between patenting the material DNA,disclosing the sequence, and patenting the genomic informa-tion, in computer or other media (Calvert, 2007, p. 215).

On the one hand, therefore, any difference between living andnon-living entities is erased. On the other, a living entity isconsidered an artefact if its basic functional parameters can becontrolled, thus reproduced, and a correspondence is implicitlyestablished between matter and information, so that rights inproperty over information can be subsumed into rights in propertyover the organisms incorporating such information, and vice versa.This ontological ambiguity or oscillation translates into actualcourt rulings when, as with the Monsanto Canada Inc. v. PercySchmeiser case (2004), patents are recognized to cover genesprovided with specic capacities (in this case, resistance to theRoundupTM herbicide), yet at the same time also cover the wholeorganisms where such rights in property reside (in this case, theRoundup ReadyTM canola plants) (Carolan, 2010).

With biotech patents, one may say, discovery becomes aresidual, shrinking category, in front of the expanding space ofinvention. Nature is what provisionally belongs to the ill-claried,non-domesticated world lying beyond the boundaries of com-modication, as set by commodity producers. Nature andmanufacture become distinctions internal to the manufacturingprocess (Pellizzoni, 2010). The object of property oscillatesbetween material and information. Biotechnology patents areuid objects (Carolan, 2010); their ontological identity ows andgently changes shape, bit by bit (Law and Singleton, 2005, p. 338).This uidity is doubled by the substantial equivalence argumentcentral to commercial applications, by which, for any practicalpurpose, patented artefacts are indistinguishable from nature, thusthey do not require any specic regulation. Artefacts are thussimultaneously identical to and different (more usable, morevaluable) than natural entities.

Equivalence of difference; difference of equivalence. Theontological uidity of nature and culture and of the living andnonliving world transforms virtually everything into a commodity-in-the-making. The same way that complexities and ambivalencescan be translated into manageable contingencies can be found inthe nancialisation of climate and weather.

5 Genomic research has shown, however, that the connection between genes and

traits is often complex, since one gene may be involved in the production of many

proteins and there are typically several molecular interactions, cascades and

feedback loops responsible for the nal phenotype.according to their cost effectiveness and tradable) emission cuts.For example, a factory in China that produces chlorodiuoro-methane (HCFC-22), a substance mainly used as a refrigerant, canearn CER (Certied Emission Reduction) credits under the CleanDevelopment Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto protocol byinstalling an incinerator furnace capable of decomposing triuor-omethane (HFC-23) a by-product of HCFC-22 and a greenhousegas and showing that in this way it cuts its emission below abaseline level (the minimum achievable without using theincinerator). With the EUs Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), then,these CER credits can be transformed into emission permits for anoil power plant in a European country. By decomposing a tonne ofHFC-23 in China one can via the link between the CDM and ETS earn allowances to emit 11,700 tonnes of CO2 in Europe(MacKenzie, 2009, p. 445). The 11,700 multiplier corresponds tothe global warming potential (GWP) of HFC-23 established by theInternational Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Behind this gure lieconsiderable processes of abstraction and speculation. Thecomparison of the GWP of CO2 and HFC-23, respectively, is basedon an estimate of their atmospheric effects according tomathematical models and the conventional xing of a 100-yearperiod; an estimate which is theoretically debatable and empiri-cally surrounded by signicant uncertainties.6 Yet the gure worksas a black box and is accepted in carbon markets as exchange rate.In this way the intractable complexity of the real impact ofdifferent quantities of diverse gases emitted in opposite parts ofthe world at different times is transformed into a matter ofcalculation.

The potentials for prot offered by CDM-ETS and othermechanisms are huge for those who nd themselves in the rightgeographical, technological and cognitive place (high levels ofpollution in 1990, for example, or easily achieved efciencies, orthe professional capacities related to verication, insurance andnance). Yet it is important to reect on what these mechanismsimply. On the one hand, carbon markets are completelyconstructed task environments, heavily dependent on the inter-vention and authoritativeness of political, economic and scienticinstitutions. On the other, what look like calculations are highlyspeculative evaluations, not only of underlying biophysicalprocesses, but also of the stability and evolution of these marketsand their supporting institutions and regulations.

This combination of articiality and speculation is even moreevident with weather derivatives. These are products designed tohedge and trade securities contingent on unpredictable states ofweather, either catastrophic or not. The level, timing and swings oftemperature, rain or wind, for example, may affect a number ofenterprises, from energy companies to food producers. Investors,then, make their choice as to whether or not to take risks insubjective terms, that is according to degrees of trust and beliefs(Cooper, 2010). The price assigned to the future depends on theexpectations of all traders. Derivatives, thus, turn the contest-ability of fundamental value into a tradable commodity. In sodoing, they provide a market benchmark for an unknowable value(Bryan and Rafferty, 2006, p. 37). Similar to carbon markets (whichhave their own derivatives as well), physical turbulences andincommensurabilities are translated from puzzling problems intoenabling opportunities.

What is important to stress, then, is that the logic underlying sodifferent elds as biotechnology patenting and climate-weathernancial markets is the same. Complexities and uncertainties arerendered tractable, rst of all by redening the ontology of

6 Establishing the baselines for carbon reduction calculations presents similar

problems (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008; MacKenzie, 2009).

biophysical matter. The latter is not simply decomposed andrecomposed via abstraction, but conceived as intrinsically unstableor ambivalent. Genes, carbon and rain oscillate between difference

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803 799and equivalence, materiality and virtuality, substance andinformation. In this, we are not confronted with a simplereproduction of the venerable capitalist strategy of creatingctitious commodities. This latter strategy works at an epistemiclevel. The neoliberalization of nature works, instead, at anontological level. There is more than an as if at stake here: thereis the actual crafting of entities that did not exist beforehand, likethe patented gene with its organic-informational ambivalence orthe variably embodied GWP. There is nothing ctitious in thesecommodities: they are commodities, their reality is nothing elsethan this.

This point requires attention. Carolan (2008) suggests that theontological instability of patents seeks to protect and reproducewhat Latour (1993) and many scholars in science and technologystudies regard as a ctitious divide between nature and culture,object and observation; it seeks to hide and deny the presence ofhybrid entities, by keeping the threshold between the two realmsopen to ad hoc redenitions. However, at a closer look,biotechnology patents, CERs and weather derivatives do not seemto hide at all, but rather to assert the ontological indeniteness oftheir biophysical referents nor do experts working in these eldslook unaware of, or unwilling to admit, this (Calvert, 2007;MacKenzie, 2009). Neoliberal governance, thus, seems to entail asubtle and novel conceptual move. One pillar of modernity isabandoned: the core distinction between inner and outer worldsdisappears in favour of what, to all intents and purposes, is an anti-essentialist ontology. At the same time, another pillar ofmodernity, traditionally linked to the idea of objective knowledge,is reafrmed and expanded in scope: human agency as havingcapacity of control. Such agency nds no limits since it includes themanufacturing of its own task environments. For this hypertrophicagency any outside (nature) is just functional to distinguishingwithin the inside (manufacture); it becomes an element of endlessand ever changeable internal differentiations, as the controversiesover the object of patents or the intricacies of carbon markets andweather derivatives testify. Neoliberal governance is not afraid ofbut feeds itself with contingency.

5. Neoliberalism and environmental social theory

It is at the ontological level, then, in a peculiar combination oftradition and innovation regarding the way the human agent andher operational eld are conceived, that one can nd the ideationalcore of the neoliberalisation of nature. This core is relevant, inturn, to the confrontation of environmental social theory withneoliberal environmental governance; this may be illustratedthrough an exploration of three theoretical perspectives from theenvironmental social sciences: ecological modernisation, neo-Marxism and post-structuralism.7

Neoliberalism does not feature prominently in the ecologicalmodernisation (EM) literature. When it is mentioned, efforts aremade to avoid conation, which is indeed rather easy. EMmaintains that economic growth and industrial developmentcan be accommodated to environmental sustainability. Marketcapitalism can be redirected and transformed in such a way that itless and less obstructs, and increasingly contributes to, thepreservation of societys sustenance base (Mol and Janicke,2009, p. 24). This corresponds, to a remarkable extent, to policyinstruments and styles that scholars often depict as neoliberal:

7 There are other relevant perspectives that I cannot consider here, for example

ecology-inspired scholarship. The latter, however, does not seem to express a

distinct standpoint in regard to neoliberalism.technological innovation and institutional change focused ondecentring, networking, adopting market-based and voluntarypolicy instruments, promoting corporate and consumer responsi-ble self-regulation (Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2002). Much, then, mustdepend on how such instruments and styles are applied. Mol, forexample, stresses that answering todays environmental problemsand challenges entails rejecting neoliberal solutions, withoutembracing anti-globalization and state-centred strategies. Demo-cratic designs for global (including environmental) governance andglobal civil society are the best means for controlling unrestrainedcompetition and neoliberal policies. Rather than refusing globali-zation, therefore, the task is attacking certain elements or forms ofa globalizing world while strengthening others (Mol, 2001, p. 10):for example expanding the arenas for public reasoning andconsultation of citizens and NGOs.

There is little resemblance between arguments that EMscholars largely subscribe, such as the idea of an ecologicalcitizenship based on non-reciprocal, non-contractual, non-terri-torial obligations of justice, care and compassion (Dobson, 2003;Spaargaren, 2011) or the case for urgently addressing worldinequalities simultaneously affected by social and natural factors(Beck, 2010), and the neoliberal stress on inequality as the engineof competition on which social growth depends (Lazzarato, 2009),or its account of citizenship as modelled on the self-reliant, self-managing individual owner ideal (Ong, 2006). Yet, in concrete, theextent to which EM approaches can be distinguished from softvarieties of neoliberal policy adjustment remains unclear. Consid-er, for example, those which Jessop (2002) calls neostatist andneocommunitarian. The former give relevance to regulatedcompetition, publicprivate partnerships under state guidance,auditing performances, protection of core economy; the lattervalorise fair trade, social cohesion, third sector expansion and localgovernance. These elements, variously combined, are typicallyincluded in the recipe for environmental reform proposed by EMscholars.

Neo-Marxists are highly sceptical about the possibility ofeffective environmental reform of contemporary market societies.This scholarship reads ecological problems in the light of thecapacity of capitalism to displace its built-in imbalances acrossspace and time. Today, it is argued, there exists not simply arenewed accumulation process, but a qualitatively distinct one.This becomes apparent when Marxs notions of formal and realsubsumption of labour are applied to nature. Formal subsumptionoccurs when capital exploits natural resources according to theirfeatures, as with mineral extraction and traditional shery. Realsubsumption occurs when industries alter the properties of nature,increasing or intensifying its productivity and consequentlyenhancing capital accumulation. The present prominence ofbiotechnologies suggests that real subsumption is increasinglygetting at the core of capitalism (Boyd et al., 2001). Moreover,Current environmental policies are often read by neo-Marxistsaccording to Polanyis notion of double movement: that is, ascounteractions aimed at limiting the socially and environmentallydisruptive effects of self-regulating market capitalism. This isinterpreted as a way to protect capital and expand opportunitiesfor prots, while offering a discursive and material response topublic concern and pressure for regulation (Bumpus and Liver-man, 2008, p. 131).

Despite the commonality of analytical frameworks, however,neo-Marxists disagree on a major point. If environmental concernsare regarded as a major source of political opposition (McCarthyand Prudham, 2004), what such opposition does or should consistof is not clear. For example, Hardt and Negri (2004) or Virno (2009)believe that political identities, institutions and processes arelosing relevance in favour of civil society groups and the ourishingof ad hoc, ethically minded mobilizations, such as critical

market ideology (2005, p. 230) as carbon markets exacerbateglobal inequalities and negatively affect climate change mitigation(Lohmann, 2009). Callon, in his turn, takes a prospectively

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803800consumerism and product boycotts. On the contrary, for Harvey(2005) or Mouffe (2005), traditional politics and the state as asovereign regulatory and military entity have lost none of theirrelevance, requiring commensurate counter-forces, while thegrowing involvement of NGOs as policy advisors or delegateson behalf of the citizens is suspect, being in line with theneoliberal privatising and depoliticizing aims. For some even OpenSource informational networks can be a vehicle for control andsubjugation (Suarez-Villa, 2009).

Post-structuralism in the social sciences includes a number ofinterlinked literatures, the common trait of which is a commitmentto deconstructing the modern ontology of the subject, as a full-edged self having cognitive access to, and agency on, anobjectively given world. The governmentality approach representsa prominent example. One might expect, again, that commonalityof analytical perspective would entail commonality of evaluativeattitudes, yet again this is hardly the case. Nowhere does thisappear more clearly than in the way biotechnology policies areassessed. For some poststructuralists, gene technologies areindividually empowering, producing an innovative new ethicsof biological citizenship and genetic responsibility (Rose, 2007, p.39), expanding the opportunities for choice, prudence andsociality, self-actualization and enterprising, improvement orcorrection of body and mind vis-a`-vis some ideal. Others, instead,maintain that geneticisation redirects scarce resources away fromsocial solutions to social problems, transforming the latter inquestions of self-care. These scholars also argue that geneticresearch, screening and testing extends disciplinary powers, andthat experts, institutions and social norms frame the cognitive andmoral conditions in which individuals make their choices (Lemke,2004; Raman and Tutton, 2010). In other words, then, ifgovernmentality implies at the same time processes of subjecti-cation and subjection, some scholars emphasise the former andothers the latter, and the case for an expanding ethical selfhoodclashes with the case against a shrinking political agency. The lineof division largely runs between those whose interest indeveloping the Foucauldian approach lies, to a major extent, inits capacity to sidestep the limits of neo-Marxism, and especiallystructural Marxism (Miller and Rose, 2008), and those who insteadcombine Marxist and Foucauldian insights, with explicit aims ofsocial criticism.

Other examples of post-structuralist approaches relevant to ourargument can be found in the eld of science and technologystudies. Here again the confrontation with neoliberalism leads todiverging replies. The clearest evidence is perhaps offered bystudies on carbon markets. Drawing on actor-network theory,Michel Callon and associates have made a strong case for analysingmarkets from the viewpoint of the performativity of economics:the idea that economics performs, shapes and formats theeconomy, rather than observing how it functions (Callon, 1998,p. 2). Markets are a matter of design and construction selectingwhat is to be taken in consideration (internalities) and leavingoutside all the rest (externalities). The basic goal of markets isformatting the networks that connect human agents with eachother and with non-human entities in such a way that calculation,that is the establishment of relations of equivalence, is madepossible. From this viewpoint, carbon markets offer an excellenteld of inquiry, in that they are built up from scratch based oneconomic theories, but in an experimental way through theconstitution of collectives comprising large numbers of differentactors from diverse temporal and spatial horizons (Callon, 2009, p.538). Starkly different evaluations, however, are developed byadopting this analytical perspective. MacKenzie (2009), forexample, nds no realistic alternative to carbon markets. Bycontrast, for Lohmann, political activists, physical scientists andtechnocrats alike have been captured and constrained by freeoptimistic standpoint: the constructed character of markets leavesroom for change and adjustment. The challenge of climate changecould be one of the rst opportunities on a planetary scale to raisethe question of how to better civilize markets, [that is] transformunsolvable issues into solvable problems (Callon, 2009, p. 547).

6. Ontological questions

As one can see, clarity and consistency feature inconspicuouslyin environmental social theory perspectives on neoliberalism. EMhas trouble distancing itself from neoliberal styles of governance.Neo-Marxism is unsure whether counter-forces to neoliberalismcan nd any space outside and beyond traditional politics.Poststructuralists may be illuminating on the neoliberal way ofgoverning, but reach divergent evaluations of the latters effects.One might say that current changes resist simplied (or simplistic)judgements, and that a variety of opinions is sign of intellectualliveliness. There are, however, theoretical difculties in tacklingthe ontological core of the neoliberalisation of nature, which mayhelp make sense of this somewhat problematic picture.

The neoliberal approach to nature can be condensed in areconguration of the biophysical world as not ctionally butactually plastic. The ontological, rather than epistemic, uidity ofnature entails an increase in its manipulability and controllability,since the limits of the world as manufactured represent also itslimits of meaning and salience. World-making deploys its owncontingency, much in the same way as a big-bang universe deploysits material contents together with its time and space frame.Actually, the neoliberal entrepreneurial agent looks similar to agod, since the full pliancy of materiality to human designs leads todepicting agency in terms of an ultimately unconstrained will. Amarked step in this direction is represented by the recent,inuential narrative of a potentially unlimited human enhance-ment through a synergistic combination of nano-bio-info-cogni-tive technosciences allegedly bound to revolutionise not onlyindustrial productivity but also and above all human biological andmental capacities (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002; Nordmann, 2004).This ontology is troublesome for all the three theoreticalperspectives considered.

The ontological underpinnings of ecological modernisationtheory are straightforward: nature and society are seen asinteracting but distinct realms. The original, more technocratic(Spaargaren et al., 2009) outlook of EM, which most evidentlyimplied this perspective, has been gradually tempered byincorporating aspects of actor-network theory and Becks theoryof risk and reexive modernisation. Increasing concerns forenvironmental ows (of energy, water, biodiversity, waste, greenproducts, etc.) and production-consumption practices have ledvarious scholars to conceive the natural and the socio-technicaldimensions as merging into a material world that impinges onhuman agency. Such hybrid networks, however, are mostlydescribed in terms of mixed ontologies, that is by presupposingtraditional distinctions between what pertains to nature and whatpertains to society (Spaargaren et al., 2006; Spaargaren, 2009).8 Asfor Beck, he highlights the connection between discursiveconstructions and materiality of threats. Human appraisal of risks,often incalculable yet corresponding to actual events andphenomena, is mediated by knowledge, perception, value commit-ments, and social organization. This means that the intertwining of

8 On the other hand, EM scholarship that is more inclined to making a case for

proper hybrid ontologies is exposed to the same problems discussed below with

regard to post-structuralism.

materiality and construction is located at an epistemic level, withreference to the limits of human cognitive access to reality. Theontological separation of environment and society, nature and

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803 801artefact, is not questioned (Beck, 1992, 2009).9 By contrast, as wehave seen, neoliberalism regards uncertainty as crafted in athicker sense. Uncertainty does not depend on human interven-tions on materiality, but on the extension of human capacity tomanufacture the latter, to build it while appraising it, to give shapeto the contingency one is confronted with. Uncertainty, therefore,is amenable to a treatment which is still calculative, albeit not inthe same way as it used to be. Contrary to Beck, reexivity does notmean self-questioning and amending in front of the interpellationsof an unassailable world, but self-assertion in the moulding of suchworld. The examples of biotechnology patenting and carbonmarkets are telling in this respect.

In short, there is a basic discord between neoliberal and EMontologies. This discord accounts for the ambiguous implications(contrasting or supportive of neoliberalisation) of the environ-mental reforms advocated by EM scholars. In turn such ambiguitymay be regarded as a reason for the latters reluctance to engage ina close confrontation with neoliberalism.

In line with Marxs vision of nature as the inorganic body towhich humans are inextricably tied, neo-Marxists regard allbiophysical barriers and opportunities as mediated by culture andtechnology (Benton, 1989). Through their metabolic interactionwith nature, humans change the latter and change themselves,producing new kinds of social relations and new kinds of persons(Dickens, 2004, p. 62). Yet this transformative capacity is not seenas unlimited. Natural entities have their own reality and play anactive role in human history. This view is insistently portrayed inrecent literature. Nature is described as recalcitrant, capable ofresisting its incorporation into particular political-economic andspatial forms, to shape or recongure [in unpredictable ways] thelandscape of capitalism (Braun, 2008, pp. 668669). Moreover,and crucially, humans cannot entirely transform their own nature.Some core agential and biological elements remain unchanged.This stability is related to Marxs notion of labour as thedistinguishing feature of humans, from which their operationalability depends. On the one hand, economic agency, as thetransformative capacity that represents the condition of possibilityof society, is logically premised on neo-Marxist analyses.10 On theother hand, the neoliberalisation of nature is seen to draw also, andrst of all, on a human biological invariant: the dearth ofspecialized instincts, the lack of a denite environment and thecapacity of language, of symbolic communication. A ourishingliterature on immaterial labour, bioeconomy and cognitivecapitalism (Lazzarato, 2004; Fumagalli, 2007; Cooper, 2008)stresses that the most noteworthy resources today are thebiological prerogatives of the human animal: [. . .] the habit notto acquire lasting habits, that is the capacity to react promptly tothe unusual (Virno, 2009, pp. 100101). The hallmark of currentcapitalism is the exploitation of creativity (Suarez-Villa, 2009).

What remains mostly unacknowledged, however, is that, if realsubsumption of nature lies at the core of the neoliberal appropriativegesture, human biological ontology is involved in this process rstand foremost. Accumulation does not build so much on a biologicalinvariant, but regards the features of the species as a mere templateopen to modication and enhancement. Subsumption of humannature is also real, and not just formal. So it may be that capitalistorganizations, which appropriate creativity by compartmentalisingand systematising it, cannot reproduce the latter on their ownbecause of the fundamentally social character of this resource

9 On this point cf. also Dean (1999, Ch. 9).10 This despite current criticisms towards traditional views of the economic as

the essential driver of historical events (Gibson-Graham, 2006).(Suarez-Villa, 2009, p. 15) a character that includes formal andinformal knowledge and languages, imagination, mentalities,identities, ethical views, and the technical and material means thatshape and convey symbolic ows. Yet compartmentalisation andsystematisation are unlikely to impinge only on corporate-ledcreative processes. If creativity is affected by, or a matter of, socialcontext, then shaping and inuencing such context, its horizons ofmeaning, is arguably the primary target of a government at adistance the limits of which are hard to assess. Moreover, locatingthe fundamentals of human agency in the economic sphere impliesan involuntary but substantial alignment with the neoliberal case fora human agency absorbed in, or reduced to, its entrepreneurialcapacities.

The consequences of these problems surface in the controversyover neoliberal counterforces, hinted above. If the traditional linksbetween economic articulation and political representation losegrip, and if neoliberalism is capable of subsuming under its logicevery aspect of humanity, then it is hard and perhaps pointless toadjudicate which, between conventional political mobilisationsand civil society ethical effervescence, constitutes the mosteffective oppositional instrument.

Environmental post-structuralism is at the same time pro-foundly consonant and dissonant with neoliberal ontology. Thegovernmentality approach shows a radical historicist leantowards a nominalist conception of actions and practices, [where]anthropological universals appear as historical constructs with noxed contents (Bevir, 2010, p. 427). Risks are described as notintrinsically real, but a particular way in which problems areviewed or imagined and dealt with (OMalley, 2008, p. 57); atechnology of government aimed at individuals (self-)monitoringand (self-)control in the service of specic ends and with denite,but to some extent unforeseen, effects (Dean, 1999, p. 178). Natureis portrayed as a product of deliberate intervention, [. . .] a locus ofarticiality, an object produced by humans (Gibbon and Novas,2008, p. 4). This plasticity includes human nature, in both itsagential and biological inections: norms of responsible person-hood, enterprising and self-actualising affect and bond togetherpersonal identity and biological identity, leading to the creation ofsubjects (Novas and Rose, 2000, p. 489, italics original) in a full,encompassing sense. Similar anti-essentialist accounts are provid-ed by scholars in the science and technology studies tradition,where uidity, contamination, inventiveness, instability, perfor-mativity and comparable notions are common parlance (e.g.Szerszynski et al., 2003; Braun, 2008). Knowing, the words ofknowing, and texts do not describe a pre-existing world [but] arepart of a practice of handling, intervening in, the world and therebyof enacting one of its versions up to bringing it into being (Moland Law, 2006, p. 19). On this view the world takes shape andmeaning, emerging from an indistinctiveness that constitutes the(moveable) border of thinkability, only together with the cognitiveact, and this act is inseparable from history and esh. Objects comeinto existence together with the discursive formations that make itpossible to talk about them. The world, and we who act upon it, areontologically plastic, as the notion of the performativity ofeconomics perfectly synthesizes. Object and subject, nature andculture are contingent stabilizations of networks of mutuallyaligned materialities, subjectivities and knowledge-practices, nottheir given priors (Wynne, 2005, p. 69).

This idea of a making-sense-of-the-world that overlaps withworld-making looks fully aligned with neoliberal ontology. This isprobably not by chance. In their analysis of the new spirit ofcapitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) argue that the latter hasbeen able to integrate the criticisms that intellectuals and socialmovements had raised between the 1960s and 1970s, using suchcriticisms as a way to reorganize itself and expand. Oftendeveloped in terms of an artistic critique where nature represented

policy-making (as with GMOs) or to call for policy-avoiding (as withunwarranted restrictive measures related to climate change). The

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803802a fundamental site of authenticity and aesthetic value, counter-discourses took issue with the Fordist mode of production(bureaucratic, hierarchical, planned, standardized, alienating) inthe name of freedom, autonomy and creativity. Translated intoexibility, networking, communication, and permanent education,these are indeed the qualities that post-Fordism valorises, whilethe authenticity and aesthetic worth of nature are transferred tothe spheres of green consumerism and corporate responsibility.

The consequence of the alignment of the poststructuralist andneoliberal cases for world uidity, contingency, ambivalence canbe observed in the clash of evaluations of carbon markets and genetechnologies, as hinted at above. Such discord points to thedifcult, ultimately idiosyncratic, adjudication of whether natureand its signicance can be integrally transferred to the exibleparadise of neo-liberalism (Lemke, 2003, p. 64), or the worldretains an irreducible surplus or overhang in its material andsymbolic scope. Alignment, for sure, does not mean overlap. Ifeverything is intimately related, poststructuralists typically argue,human agency has a limited reach and everything is to be treatedcarefully, respectfully. If everything is invented, the neoliberalreply goes, everything can be redened, commodied andappropriated. On the one hand, world-making means affectingand being affected; on the other, it means building, crafting, andmanufacturing. On the one hand, nature is inventive andrecalcitrant, on the other it is fully pliant. Yet the differences aresubtle and hard to articulate using the same conceptual categories.Uncomfortable that this may sound to many scholars in govern-mentality and science and technology studies, neoliberalism andpoststructuralism inhabit the same cultural fold of modernity,which makes their critique intrinsically problematic.

7. Conclusion

This article started out with two aims: rst, to identify at thedeepest, ontological, level the underpinnings of widespreadenvironmental policy approaches often associated with neoliber-alism. Second, to show that different socio-environmentaltheoretical perspectives have had difculty confronting theseunderpinnings, which affects their capacity to interpret the lattersimplications for the governance of the biophysical world.

Neoliberalism draws on established traditions in politicalliberalism and market capitalism, yet is characterized by a novelunderstanding of the ontological quality of nature. Nature is nolonger conceived as an objectively given, though cognitivelymediated, reality, but as a constitutively uid entity, a contingencypurposefully produced and controlled for instrumental ends.Governance through uncertainty, instability or disorder thusseems to be the distinguishing feature of the neoliberalisation ofnature. This ideational core may be considered the rst reason forthe sense of unity often felt when contemplating the array ofsectors, approaches and cases characterizing current market-oriented environmental governance, and at the same time for thesense of uneasiness towards neoliberalism that environmentalsocial theory conveys.

Whatever the judgment, it is important to grasp what is at stakewith neoliberal governance of nature. Browsing social science booksand journals, one realizes that much critical energy has been focusedon questioning the objectivist account of nature that allegedlydominates current policy narratives and practices. Only a discerningscholarship has begun to realize that objectivism and anti-objectivism are losing relevance as categories capable of distinguish-ing intellectual and stakeholder positions, and that they increasinglybecome claims usable in power games over the biophysical world.Attention, for example, has been recently paid to the instrumentaluse of uncertainty (Freudenburg et al., 2008; Jacques et al., 2008),which, depending on the circumstances, is used either to ask forvery possibility of appealing to sound science either for evidence ofno problems, or no evidence of problems indicates the fundamentallyanti-objectivist attitude that characterizes present political andcultural frameworks. Policy promoters share this attitude with theiropponents. Those who ask for precaution use the same arguments inreverse, requiring action when and where there is no evidence of noproblems.11This commonality entails that appeals to uncertainty aredevoid of any strategic relevance in current controversies; rather,they play a tactical role. This is likely to represent a problem above allfor counter-forces to neoliberalism, to the extent that in a tacticalstruggle the most advantaged are those provided with greaterorganizational, economic, cognitive and legal resources (to saynothing of military ones).

In short, we are today in front of a refashioning of the symbolicorder of society vis-a`-vis its biophysical underpinnings. In thischange, neoliberal discourses, policies and practices are at thesame time a powerful driver and a result. Disorder becomes orderto the extent that uncertainty, contingency and instability areregarded not as disabling by-products of governance but asenabling ways of governing. In the public realm, this ends upconstituting a sort of shared horizon of meaning: not only is nonew order (in the traditional sense) in sight, but anti-essentialismoverows from intellectual avant-gardes to become a widespread,albeit often implicit or negotiable, worldview.

This sets a challenging research program for social theory.Neither of the three frameworks discussed above seems fullycapable of making sense of current trends in neoliberal environ-mental governance. Still essentially faithful to a traditionalontology, ecological modernisation perspectives advocate market-and innovation-oriented reforms, yet nd problems in dealingwith the ambivalent implications of such reforms. Neo-Marxismmakes a strong case against a further submission of nature to theexploitative logic of capitalism, yet the scope of the lattersunderstanding of human transformative and self-transformativecapacity remains basically unacknowledged. Post-structuralismmay offer an enlightening access to the neoliberal ontology of thebiophysical world, yet accounting for the latters radical butselective anti-essentialism proves troublesome for both govern-mentality and science and technology studies scholars.

The necessary point of departure for renewed socio-environ-mental theoretical elaborations, I believe, is the hyper-modernist,post-calculative, disembodied, entrepreneurial agent that repre-sents the theoretical engine of neoliberalism and the primaryresponsible actant for the conation of manufacture or assemblageand proprietorship in its politics of nature. This agent penetratesthe governmental machinery involved in green reforms andweakens from within neo-Marxist and poststructuralist critiques.This agent, therefore, constitutes a common issue, addressingwhich may offer an opportunity for strengthening existingtheoretical cross-fertilizations as between neo-Marxism andpost-structuralism, and between post-structuralism and EM andfor rearticulating long-lasting controversies, such as the dividebetween EM and neo-Marxism on the possibility of reform ofmarket-oriented societies. This agent nds today its promissorymaterialization in the image of an unlimited, technology-enabled,biological and mental enhancement, in front of which majortheoretical efforts are required. What is arguably needed is anotion of the biophysical world and humanity as carriers of afundamental alterity to human agency itself; an unattainabilitythat prevents their full reduction to the status of commodity andthat allows for criticism of the neoliberal celebration of will in the

11 This argument has notoriously disparate applications: from GMOs to weapons

supposedly hidden in some foreign country.

L. Pellizzoni / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 795803 803name of a humbler, historically and biologically embedded,account of human autonomy.

Acknowledgments

A rst version of this article was presented at the WorldCongress of the International Sociological Association, Goteborg,July 2010. I wish to thank the editors and two anonymous refereesfor their comments and suggestions, that allowed me to reworkseveral aspects of my argument.

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Governing through disorder: Neoliberal environmental governance and social theoryIntroductionNeoliberalism and natureDisorder and contingency in neoliberal governanceBiotechnology patents and the financialisation of climate and weatherNeoliberalism and environmental social theoryOntological questionsConclusionAcknowledgmentsReferences