Re-discovering the social: neo-liberalism and hybrid practices of governing in rural natural resource management
By Vaughan Higgins, S. Lockie. 2002
124 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Since the 1980s, natural resource management (NRM) in rural Australia has been underpinned by rationalities and technologies of governing that constitute agricultural landscapes and resource managers in economically rational terms. While it is tempting to interpret these forms of regulation as part of a broad shift away from social forms of governing, this paper argues that ‘the social’ remains of crucial significance in understanding how both natural environments and the capacities of individuals to manage these environments are constructed. Drawing upon recent work in the Foucauldian-inspired literature on governmentality and, in particular, Stenson and Watt's (Urban Studies 36(1) (1999) 189–201) concept of hybrid governance, this paper examines how particular representations of ‘the social’ are assembled through strategies of NRM. Using the National Landcare Program (NLP) and Natural Heritage Trust (NHT) as examples, we consider how ‘social’ data is being incorporated into resource management strategies, and how this re-shapes both ‘the social’ and NRM as domains of governance. While the NLP and NHT incorporate concerns about social responsibility, they define these in terms of the capacity of individuals to respond to changing economic circumstances. This effectively defines land managers as socially and ecologically responsible only to the extent that they have the managerial capacities to pursue economically ‘rational’ practices. In concluding, we argue that hybrid practices of governing are indeed evident in NRM in Australia and that the concept of ‘hybrid governance’ requires further attention in understanding how rural spaces are made knowable and shaped as objects of knowledge.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b134c33f5ba67cdf3aa8f7b5e4840c076c808469
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Contesting the neoliberal project for agriculture: Productivist and multifunctional trajectories in the European Union and Australia (2009, background): “, through intensive farming practices, farm consolidation, displacement of smaller, less ‘efficient’ farmers, and developing better business management capacities (Gray and Lawrence, 2001; Higgins and Lockie, 2002).”
- Responsibility and agency within alternative food networks: assembling the “citizen consumer” (2009, background): “Far from abandoning individuals and communities to the vagaries of the global marketplace, the neoliberal state promotes capacity building, active citizenship, and self-responsibility, on the one hand, and monitoring, audit, and accountability, on the other (Dean 1999; Higgins and Lockie 2002 ).”
- Creating culturally sustainable agri-environmental schemes (2011, background): “However, the state provides funding for peer support networks, experimental projects, training and planning exercises (Higgins and Lockie, 2002) and, critically, participation has become “a prerequisite for those farmers wishing either to access direct financial assistance for drought relief and/or…”