ABSTRACT
How should we understand contemporary changes in the governance of
nature? Do these changes necessarily involve the imposition of marketised
individualised processes that have negative consequences for nature? At first
glance, the four chapters in this part would encourage us to be pessimistic.
These analyses convincingly demonstrate the perils of neoliberalism: the
eroding of public property through community gardening schemes in Van-
couver; the failure to preserve public ownership of urban forests in Mil-
waukee; the targeting of disadvantaged communities in environmental justice programmes in the Southeastern United States; and the deaths in
Walkerton following regulatory failure that led to the contamination of the
town water supply. However, because they assume that new governmental
forms are univocal and focus on their negative effects – described by the
editors in their introduction as the weakening of environmental regulations,
the loss of access for those who are less privileged, the introduction of
marketised forms of governance – they only tell part of the story about the
changing nature of environmental governance. These articles examine key concepts in contemporary governmental pro-
cesses, including property, privatisation, targeting and risk. There is a ten-
dency to assume that these concepts are unequivocally associated with the
political formation we have come to understand as neoliberalism. Yet read-
ing across the four cases shows that each of these is more complex than
initially expected. Indeed, seen together the chapters show that ‘actually
existing’ environmental governance involves complex discursive formations,
and that these discourses aren’t always associated with those we might expect. For example, Nick Blomley’s chapter suggests that community gar-
dening schemes have complex genealogies that owe as much to the work of
urbanist Jane Jacobs and subsequent efforts to reduce crime through envir-
onmental design, as they do with the individualised concepts of property
associated with marketisation. Nik Heynen and Harold Perkins, albeit lar-
gely unintentionally, themselves reinscribe market logics when they use the
discourses of the entrepreneurial city to support their ecological arguments
for urban forests. In Ryan Holifield’s discussion of the environmental justice movement, we see that the claims of grassroots activists, including those of
community empowerment, citizen involvement and economic self-
sufficiency, have had significant consequences for the Clinton administra-
tion’s approach to the clean-up of hazardous waste sites. And even in the
tragic case of Walkerton, we learn from Scott Prudham that the first steps towards environmental deregulation were not part of the ‘Common Sense
Revolution’ of the conservative government of Mike Harris but rather were
taken under the social democratic government of Bob Rae.
