ABSTRACT
Early predecessors of environmentalism succeeded in expanding the power and capacities of the modern state to administer nature scientifically (Hays 1980; Frank et al. 2000). With the emergence of neoliberal thinking, especially after 1980s, a biopolitical mode of governmentality, where the state ceases to relate to its people as citizen-subjects with certain social rights and functions, under the presumption that subjects will respond to the economic incentives in all aspects of their lives, has been imposed to exercise political power (Foucault 2008). New conservation projects and bureaucracies have sprung up around the world as extensions of the governmentalizing tendencies of the regime of biopower (Grove 1995; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Hannah 2000). Scholars have argued that there are deeply interwoven connections between neoliberalism and environmental politics (Peet et al. 2011). Neoliberal rationality changes societies’ relationship with biophysical nature and tends to generate serious environmental consequences around the world. In this sense, environmental concerns represent one of the most powerful sources of contemporary political opposition to the neoliberal order (McCarthy and Prudham 2004, 275).
