Rethinking sustainability, neo-liberalism and environmental managerialism in accounting

Rethinking sustainability, neo-liberalism and environmental
managerialism in accounting

John Girdwood,
School of Accounting, Faculty of Economics and Business, The University of
Sydney,
Phone: 61-2-95143857
Email: J.Girdwood@econ.usyd.edu.au


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Abstract

This paper problematizes sustainability in order to unsettle often
taken-for-granted understandings of the concept and add diversity to
its common conceptions. It challenges essentialist notions of
sustainability as a self-evident and universal good, a central theme in
contemporary government policy and regulation debates about
environmental accountability and auditability in many advanced
liberal democracies. After a brief discussion of an analytics of
government approach, the paper focuses on: the co-emergence of neo-
liberalism and environmentalism; the emergence of the desirability of
sustainability in policy and political discourses; and the linkages
between styles of neo-liberalism, management rationalities and
environmental discourse. The paper also briefly explores the
discourses beyond neo-liberal environmental managerialism, such as
survivalism. It concludes with a brief schematic discussion of the
ways these regimes translate ‘environmental problem solving’ and a
desire for ‘sustainability’ to the social and institutional practices of
accounting and auditing in enterprises and their regimes of
management.


Introduction
In many advanced liberal democratic nations, the co-emergence of neo-liberalism and
environmentalism in the 1960s that formulated and framed many policy debates is
often either ignored or underestimated. Its complexity and fragility is also
oversimplified in relation to reinventing liberal democratic styles of political
government (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992) and their management regimes in neo-liberal
ways. The emergence of neo-liberalism and its policy effects on liberal styles of
political regime reform and economic government since the 1960s has also mediated
and reshaped political debates about what counts as “environmental policy” in
political discourse. For example, it limits the politics of the earth to environmental
management and sustainability as an object of hope and desire.

An analytics of government approach provides a different way of understanding
environmental discourses and sustainability in current historical circumstances,
foregrounding its linkages to different styles of neo-liberal rationalities and their
regimes of management reason, or managerialisms. Many other accounts limit this
discussion to a singular and homogeneous understanding of neo-liberalism where
neoliberalism is a political ideology or hegemony, political principles, political theory
or party policy. However, neo-liberalism is not a unitary exclusively bounded political
rationality. The term is thus used here with an emphasis on its multiplicity. By
highlighting the linkages of the different styles of neo-liberalism, its associated
regimes of management or managerialisms and environmentalisms, a more complex
understanding emerges. It has particular currency for those interested in government
and not-for-profit community organisations, in highlighting the emergence of neo-
social liberal reason (Girdwood, 2007), its styles of economic management regime
and its linkages to environmental discourse. It also importantly highlights a different
way of thinking about sustainability.
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This paper is part of an exploratory research project and is limited in that it attempts
to be illuminative and theoretically driven. Utilising an “analytics of government”
approach with a focus on governmentality based on the later work of Foucault and
neo-Foucauldian writers (Rose, O'Malley & Valverde, 2006), it seeks to make a
contribution to debates at the intersection of the critical tradition of ‘environmental’
and ‘management’ accounting and auditing. The concern is with the relation between
accounting as a social and institutional practice (Hopwood & Miller, 1994),
sustainability not just as a process of becoming (Sotirin, 2005) but also an enabling
and organizing concept (Miller & O'Leary, 1994) in governmental terrains, and
finally, the character of discursive struggle over policy statements and their truth
claims, linked to environmental management and green politics in nations which have
assembled advanced liberal regimes of government (Rose, 1993; 1996a; 1999b).

After a brief discussion of the perspective, the paper focuses schematically on the co-
emergence of neo-liberalism and environmentalism; the emergence of the desirability
of sustainability in policy and political discourses; and the linkages between styles of
neo-liberalism, management rationalities and environmental discourse. The paper also
briefly explores the discourses beyond neo-liberal environmental manageralism and
the professionalisation of accounting, such as survivalism, that constitute a “politics
of protest”. It concludes with a brief discussion of the ways these regimes translate
‘environmental problem solving’ and a desire for ‘sustainability’ to the social and
institutional practices of accountancy (Hopwood & Miller, 1994), and including
auditing (Power, 1994; 1996; 1997), in enterprises and their regimes of management.
It explores the governmental effects of some of these more significant political
discourses about the environment and sustainability in (re)assembling the character
makeup (Hacking, 1986) of identities and subjectivities associated with the ethico-
political conduct of the autonomous and responsible accountant. The character
makeup of the accountant is made manageable through the education practices of
professionalisation (Cooper & Robson, 2006) and citizenship that guide the ethico-
political conduct of the free and enterprising subject in economic life (Miller &
O'Leary, 1987; Miller & Rose, 1990).

Approach: An analytics of government perspective

An “analytics of government” perspective (Rose et al., 2006) is adopted in this paper
to understand advanced liberal problematics of national government and associated
environmental policy effects. These are mediated by the programmatic interventions
of, for example, intra-national, national and international systems of political
governments; an assemblage of agencies of international government (World Bank,
IMF, WTO, OECD; MNCs; INGOs) making progress necessary in terms of economic
growth framed within a liberal politics of hope and desire. An analytics of
government ‘examines the conditions under which regimes of practices come into
being, are maintained and are transformed’ (Dean, 1999, p. 21). It questions our
taken-for-granted or common sense ways of thinking and doing things that make them
natural or essential to popular conduct in life and thus detached from their historical
circumstances. It seeks to ’interrogate the problems and problematisations through
which ‘being’ has been shaped in a thinkable and manageable form, the domains and
sites where these problems were formed, the techniques and devices invented, the
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modes of authority and subjectification engendered and the telos of these ambitions
and strategies’(Du Gay, 2000, p.168, emphasis in the original).

This paper thus, following Foucault and the internationally dispersed ‘post New Left
diaspora’ (Donzelot & Gordon, 2008, p.52) of neo-Foucauldian writers, Marxist
revisionists (Jessop, 2007) and others contributing to the governmentality literature
(Donzelot & Gordon, 2008; Lemke, 2001; O'Malley, Weir & Shearing, 1997; Rose,
1999b; Rose et al., 2006) understands that liberal and neo-liberal reason as
rationalities of government (Barry, Osborne & Rose, 1993; Barry, Osborne & Rose,
1996; Rose, 1999b) and their practical governmental mutations and hybridity (Baxter
& Chua, 2003; Miller, Kurunmaki & O'Leary, 2008) dominate modern government
regimes. Modern government is understood here as a programmatic form of power
reformed by liberal problematizations of government and (re)assembled by discursive
truth claims and other social and institutional practices of arts of government
(Donzelot & Gordon, 2008; Lemke, 2001; Rose, 1999b; Rose et al., 2006). This
understanding of modern government expands upon the ‘seriously incomplete’
accounts of mainstream academic orthodoxy about liberalism and neo-liberalism with
its central themes of liberal problematics of the state and its legal and administrative
regimes, the free and enterprising subject and the security of individual liberty and
private property (Hindess, 2004).

One of the strengths of an analytics of government as a perspective with a focus on
governmentality is the way it has made visible the liberal rationalities of government
– classical, social liberal/welfarist and neo-liberalisms (Rose, 1999b). Using this
perspective, writers on governmentality, following Foucault (2007), have provided
insightful analyses of the shifts at play in the West over the past century, tracing the
effects and reinventions of liberal government; the formation of what Rose (1999b)
calls the ‘social’ and the emergence of neo-liberalisms and their translation to
advanced liberal regimes of government in many advanced liberal nations. These
shifts are highlighted in this paper in relation with the co-emergence of
environmentalisms and truth claims about sustainability.

Desiring sustainability

Using an analytics of government perspective foregrounds how sustainability over
recent decades has emerged not as a concept with an “essentialist” meaning in policy
making but as an important enabling and organizing concept (Miller & O'Leary,
1994). It has been constituted by processes and practices and their historical
circumstances such as systems of environmental political thought including
‘sustainable development’ or ‘ecological modernization’ (Dryzek, 1997).
Sustainability has mobilized dividing practices of management regimes that include
and exclude truth claims of policy debates in political discourse by being deemed
(un)sustainable solutions to environmental management problem solving. In political
discourse on the environment, sustainability is made a contingent nodal point of neo-
liberal discursive formations in and around which, forms of political discourse and
their truth claims are articulated, voiced and dispersed or marginalized and silenced.
Corporate policy strategy, for example, is often the artifact of making green politics
necessary for policy making, like ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘corporate social
responsibility (CSR)’ (Barry, 2004).

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Further, in contemporary political discourse on environmental management,
sustainability is often stated in the form of policy statements of, amongst others, a
government, political party or corporation connected to an ideal state, like a green
state (Eckersley, 1992), an ideal society, a set of principles, a social movement or a
political theory of environmental practice (Eckersley, 1992). The making of the
apocalyptic ‘global ecological crisis’ in political discourse on the future of planet
earth, unless linked to state responsibility and ‘sustainability development’ (Barry &
Eckersley, 2005) is often marginalised and absolutely or partly denied or silenced in
environmental management policy debates about political projects mobilized by a
desire for sustainability variously defined (Dryzek, 1997) .

Thus, in these historical circumstances of political discourse on the environment and
green politics, sustainability emerges as an enabling concept linked closely to political
discourses on ‘sustainable development’ and to a lesser extent, ‘ecological
modernization’ (Dryzek, 1997) with an array of calculated and partisan meanings
that reinforce specific truth claims. On the other hand, a truth claim deemed to be
unsustainable is an attempt to disable, weaken, marginalize and sometimes silence an
argument and rationale about environmental management. Given a multitude of
possible perspectives and historical circumstances, a meaning of sustainability in a
location with its milieu is usually associated with competing truth claims of political
discourse on how to make the future political security of economic terrains (the earth,
nations, multinational corporations, SME enterprises, households) manageable. In this
way it is not understood as inherently or essentially a radical enabling concept in the
way it enables discursive struggle over policy truth claims but contingent on the
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political milieu of their historical circumstances.

Hence, sustainability needs to be understood in relation to the historical circumstances
of systems of dispersion and translation, including global governmentality (Larner &
Walters, 2004) and the political project of governing international and other hybrid
spaces (Baxter & Chua, 2003). In this context, sustainability enables the
transgression of limits of dominant political regimes of truth about the desired
progress and futures of parts (geopolitical terrains, the oceans and seas, the
atmosphere, etc.) or the whole curved, morphing surface of the earth. Here the earth is
understood to be an historically contingent assembled artifact of a shifting ensemble
of forces without any essential intrinsic nature.

Liberal Governmentality, Management Rationality and Environmental
Discourse: Co-emergence of neo-liberalisms and environmentalisms

The western political project of neo-liberalism was the countering and reassembling
of the discursive truth claims and other social and institutional practices associated
with social liberal regimes of government, their public administration management
regimes, as assemblages of practice, and systems of social security. This links with
another western political project – environmentalism, countering, marginalising and
silencing the economic reason of industrialism and the enduring discourse of
industrial society. This discourse was mainly formulated in terms of a social liberal
politics of hope through unlimited nation building and economic growth built on the
unlimited exploitation of apparently infinite natural resources. An ideal of Western
lifestyles of a good life (Dryzek, 1997) became characterized by post World War II
twentieth century North American industrial society and by North American norms
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and standards of living built on household goods and service consumption; white
family formation; highly educated and technically skilled professional, scientists and
tradesmen; and the loyal company male worker in the manufacturing industries. This
followed the post World War II decline of industrial society associated with British
and European imperialisms.

Further, political discourses linking managerialism and environmentalism have
emerged limited to the technical modalities of managerialism as a form of economic
reason. There are a number of thematic threads in mainstream political debate and
policy formulation about making the environment manageable enabled by the
political authority of sustainability. The emergence of this political discourse on
policy and the environment privileging ‘administrative rationalism’ (Dryzek, 1997),
‘democratic pragmatism’ (Dryzek, 1997; Eckersley, 1992; Light & Katz, 1996) and
‘market economism (Dryzek, 1997) are not necessarily mutually exclusive and, as is
argued here, different styles of neo-liberalism under particular historical
circumstances and specific contexts have tended to differently configure these
thematic threads and privilege some over others. For example, advanced liberal
reason tended to privilege a specific form of ‘market economism’ as a policy
framework shaped by the intellectual technologies of the Chicago School of
economics (Marginson, 1993) dispersed internationally by mobilized agencies and
disciples of North American norms and standards formulated and modeled as ‘world’s
best practice’ or the ‘US model’ (Djelic, 1998). Further in the North American
context, advanced liberal reason made problematic for government key elements of
neo-social liberalism and its ‘new public administration’ (Harmon & Mayer, 1986)
associated with ‘Third Way politics (Rose, 2000) such as ‘administrative rationalism’
with its particular privileging of managers and other experts (Dryzek, 1997) and also
environmental or ‘democratic pragmatism’ with its particular privileging of the ‘voice
of the people’ (Dryzek, 1997). This section therefore explores these linkages between
liberal styles of thinking, management rationality and environmental discourses,
focusing on the shifts from social liberal styles of thinking, to advanced liberal and
neo-social liberal styles.

Social liberal styles of government
These social liberal styles of government dominate present memories and text-based
political discourse about the post World War II political milieu of western liberal
democratic nations and international government through the management regime of
the UN system and its policy discourses and other social and institutional practices.
Social liberal reason, its management reason of public administration and public
service ethos of socially responsible politico-economic citizenship, had been shaped
predominantly by the intellectual technologies of social corporatism, social welfare
statism and Keynesian economic reason. The value of recreation to economic
productivity in industrial society was manifest in the scenery of the institution of
“park land” in urban and rural settings. The urban and rural parklands as part of the
public estate were to preserve nature in perpetuity as the ‘aesthetic and spiritual
appreciation of wilderness’ (Eckersley, 1992, p. 39). This is in contrast to city urban
residential and industrial scenery and in contrast to rural industrial farming scenery,
made possible by widespread clearing of wilderness forests and grasslands for
agricultural pursuits (e.g. fenced paddocks, machinery, buildings, dams, plantation
forestry). This city and town urban residential and industrial scenery included the
greening of the landscape with the scenery of the trees, shrubs and lawn of the
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Eurocentric formal geometrically planned garden in houses, municipal parks,
churches and schools with opportunities for (re)creation for the industrial workers and
their dependent families through physical fitness, cultural pursuits and sporting
activity. Pristine wilderness valued for preservation tended to be limited and excluded
many other aspects of this landscape of formal gardens (e.g. tidal wetlands,
everglades). However, the virtues of industrialism under social liberal regimes of
government and their public administration regimes were problematized and their
institutionalized practices dismantled and reassembled by advanced liberal regimes,
with rationales for sustainability utilizing theories of nature resource conservation
(Eckersley, 1992).

Emergence of advanced liberal regimes of government
The emergence of North American advanced liberal governmentality and its
dispersion and translation, often as the ‘US model’ (Djelic, 1998), has had significant
policy effects internationally, including the effects of its politico-economic citizenship
ethos of business community entrepreneurship (Marshall, 1995). It has been
mobilized by disciplined expert agencies (e.g. World Bank) to particular locations and
milieu of governmental terrains of political practice and environmental management
policy making. ‘Green politics’ and the ‘greening’ of practices of economic
management, like accounting’ (Gray, Walters, Bebbington & Thompson, 1995) and
auditing (Power, 1991) in advanced liberal democracies, a contemporary discursive
terrain of ethico-political calculation and environmental policy struggle over truth
claims, has been mediated and shaped under historical circumstances by dispersed,
translated and mobilized styles of neo-liberalism. It was this dominant neo-liberal
thinking in the historical circumstances of North America from the 1970s that was
translated and became known as a liberal style of government called advanced
liberalism (Rose, 1993; 1996a; 1999b). Neomanagerialism is a technical modality of
economic reason shaped by advanced liberalism and in some locations like the US
and Britain has been also named “new public management”. The dispersion of North
American advanced liberal practices of government has been mobilized and
reinforced through the concentrations of US centres of calculation and government in
locations like the city milieu of Washington DC and New York. Further, US
government authority in governing international spaces beyond the national borders
was translated in various ways including through the intelligence gathering capacities
of US and allied government security systems; the immanent threat of capabilities in
the exercise of coercive military, terrorist and economic force; and flows and
movements of an assemblage of mutually reinforcing international policy-making
enterprises (e.g. World Bank, IMF, WTO, UN, US-based MNCs, etc.).

With the co-emergence of environmentalism, advanced liberal discourse has also been
dominated by theories of nature resource conservation and their conception of
sustainability. Here sustainability is about the ‘sustainable development’ of the
‘natural resource base for human production’ with a primary concern being the
improvement of ‘economic productivity by achieving the maximum sustainable yield
of natural resources’ with a focus on ‘the waste and depletion of natural resources
(factors of production)’(Eckersley, 1992, p.37). The present dominance of advanced
liberal regimes of government is linked in political practice to, the partisan, partial,
calculated appropriation from political theories of the Chicago School of neoclassical
market economics (Marginson, 1993) reformulated and translated to theories of nature
resource conservation (Eckersley, 1992) and their conception of sustainability. In
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practice, this advanced liberal appropriation also, amongst others, included and
excluded truth claims of theories of human welfare ecology (Eckersley, 1992), which
were also partially appropriated in calculating ways in neo-social liberal discourse.

Further, under present historical circumstances, sustainability in environmental
discourse is translated in partial and partisan ways and accommodated and dispersed
by the management regimes and global governmentalities (Larner & Walters, 2004)
of advanced liberal regimes of government governing international spaces. The
artifact of a immanent ‘global ecological crisis’ (Barry & Eckersley, 2005), while it
emerged as an eco-centric concept in protest political discourse on the environment
dealing with the time and timing of interventions in environmental management, has
been embedded, dispersed, calculated and translated in the social and institutional
practices of globalization (Hirst & Thompson, 1999). Globalization thus rather than
being a neo-liberal ideology or hegemony, is very important as an interpretive grid
(Dean 2002) that provides a matrix of neo-liberal formulae utilized in, firstly, the
advanced liberal problematization of the social and institutional practices of social
liberal government of economic systems, particularly as national economic systems
(Hindess, 1998). Secondly, globalization formulates the (re)assembling of regimes of
government (Li 2007) in advanced liberal ways through the translation and other
discursive practices of ‘global policy communities’ (Edwards & Usher, 2008, p. 8).
There has been a partial and partisan attempts at normalization and standardization of
policy making mentalities on environmental management internationally in global
policy communities (Edwards & Usher, 2008, p. 8) as well as the ethico-political
conduct of the accountant as expert professional in policymaking sites.

Neo-social liberalism
Neo-social liberalism emerged as a neo-liberal counter to the governmental practices
of advanced liberalism since the 1960s in those liberal democratic nations where there
were sophisticated social liberal regimes of government and intimate links with the
western intellectual and political milieu. As a counter neo-liberal discourse, neo-
social liberal discourse is shaped also by theories of human welfare ecology with its
political project of environmental quality (Eckersley, 1992) that emerged from neo-
social liberal problematization of welfare state theories of public health and industrial
safety in urban, industrial and agricultural aspects of life. Further, neo-social liberal
discourse tends to reinforce a liberal democratic ethos in the form of environmental or
democratic pragmatism (Light & Katz, 1996) which often suggests a balance, an
equality between or at least a serious consideration of social as well as environmental
concerns in contemporary practices of liberal government of economic systems.
Reinventing ‘the social’ (Rose, 1996b), ‘the environmental’ and ‘sustainable
development’ (Dryzek, 1997) since the 1960s in neo-liberal ways is important to the
legitimating discourses of the Third Way politics (Rose, 2000) of neo-social
liberalism and its management reason, known in the USA as ‘new public
administration’ (Harmon & Mayer, 1986, p.26).

For neo-social liberalism, participation meant putting a different form of “the social”,
“a Third Way” (Rose, 2000), back into neo-liberal rationality of government,
including the policy debates about environmental management and sustainability, in
order to undermine the authority of market fundamentalism of neoclassical economic
reason. Neo-social liberalism, like advanced liberalism, privileged ‘the community’ as
a key element in governing society in a mutually reinforcing relation with the socially
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responsible free enterprise and free and enterprising workers as key elements in
governing economies and their industries in social liberal ways. Further, the
revitalization of communities by reinventing government by including and governing
through the ‘Third Sector’ (Rose, 1999a), was a response to neo-social liberal
problematizations of commercial market fundamentalism as well as a response to neo-
social problematizations of the bureaucratic public service delivery, redistributive
socially progressive taxation and universal social insurance character. Hybrids
(Baxter & Chua, 2003; Miller et al., 2008), assembled by government project
partnering activities and financing, reinvented and reformed community-owned and
managed QANGOS (quasi-non government organizations), religious and other
charities, consumer and citizen advocacy associations and volunteer associations
(Rose, 1996a).

In the co-emergence with environmentalism, the neo-social liberal promise of
environmental or democratic pragmatism (Eckersley, 2002; Light & Katz, 1996) was
not so much to solve but to achieve a stakeholder consensus and limit conflict in
relation to environmental problems through the social and institutional practices of
liberal democratic government. The active, calculating market consumer was
mobilized by reshaping their consumption habits through an ethos of socially and
environmentally responsible politico-economic citizenship. Also, governments within
the limits of popular deliberative liberal democratic political practice have been
mobilized by introducing market disciplines and punishments (green trading markets,
green technology subsidies, carbon taxes, etc.) on, for example, suppliers, producers,
distributors, consumers and farming and other land owners in order to make them
socially responsible for environmental quality. The political project was to include the
economic risks and costs of industrialism in calculations about political order,
security and popularity and make measures of accountability and auditability about
environmental quality for mobilized, active citizen-subjects in the markets of popular
party political practice in green politics. The popularization of government regulatory
and commercial practices attempted to make desirable a socially responsible
environmental ethos in the ethico-political conduct of populations of individuals and
their associations in economic life. Further, neo-social liberalism has provided the
coalitions and alliances of an international New Left diaspora in green politics with
arguments and rationales for the possibilities and opportunities afforded by active
deliberative democratic participation and voicing protest in the form of social issues
in mainstream liberal democratic government and party electoral politics.

Also associated with neo-social liberal practices of government was another form of
neo-liberal style of managerialism, including its politico-economic citizenship ethos
of community social entrepreneurship, for example in the United States named ‘new
public administration’ (Harmon & Mayer, 1986 p. 26). This North American ‘new
public administration’ for reinventing government was dispersed and translated
during the 1970s and early 1980s to national reforms of management regimes of
public administration in many western liberal democratic nations. It also privileged
democratic participation by affected people in policy making, problem solving and
decision-making, and further, attempted to converge social and environmental
concerns in questions about governing economic systems (the enterprise, the industry,
national economy, the household) in neo-liberal ways.


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Beyond neo-liberal environmental managerialisms and sustainabilities

For populations of individual accountants with an ethico-political ethos of protester,
there is often a fear of capture as a professional by the state, fear of capture by the
management regime of the enterprise as executive managers and fear of capture by
mainstream neo-liberal environmentalisms as protesters. Disciplinary and supervisory
practices of the management regimes in these specific terrains linked to these fears
made punishments of becoming a protester an immanent condition of possibility when
order and security limits were reached and transgressed. Many liberal and other forms
of political reason (socialisms, anarchisms, theisms, etc.) have struggled to penetrate
the mainstream discursive truth claims and rationales about environmental
management circulating in the policy discourse and debates of green politics, a
politics of the earth. These have often attempted to resist the authority of truth claims
of policy statements shaped and formulated by mainstream neo-liberal thought about
making the environment manageable and have often been marginalized or silenced in
sites of policy making.

Of course, political discourse problematizing the neo-liberal reason of environmental
management associated with protest mentalities are also accommodated and included
in calculated, partial and partisan ways in policy making processes and practices. In
environmental management policy statements, for example, elements of the language,
vocabulary, concepts and reasonability associated with the marginalised
environmental discourses of the protester, like ‘survivalism’ and those named ‘green
radicalism’ (Dryzek, 1997), are entwined in text-based and other political discourse.
Survivalist discourse does effect much present policy making practice even though its
dispersion and translation by regimes of government and management can be strongly
resisted in the regulatory detail of environmental management programmes through
the legal (Hunt, 1997; Hunt & Wickham, 1994), financial and administrative
machinery of political government.

Survivalism, as a political discourse is linked to a wider, popular acceptance in
political discourse of the earth’s limited resources and carrying capacities necessary
for survival of the human species. It is made a protest mentality in the ethico-political
practice of mainstream environmental management policy making as it makes
problematic neoclassical (Marginson, 1993) and other economic arguments linked to
advanced liberal regimes of government that privilege the competitive free enterprise
market and trading to solve environmental management problems of contemporary
industrialism. It also problematizes the necessity of continuous national economic
growth for human progress and the environmental sustainability of the economic
reason of industrialism whereby environmental limits and costs are excluded from
calculations and accountability and auditability practices. From this perspective,
management regime efficiency is central to reforming liberal styles of government,
including more intensive enforcement of accountable and auditable regulatory
regimes of industrial practices within the limits of a ‘politics of efficiency’. This
policy effect is desired within the security limits of environmental management and in
concert with a desire for a particular form of sustainability reinforced by the authority
of scientific knowledge and expertise.

Further, as a political discourse on the environment, survivalism’s present policy
effects are linked to oppositional protest political discourse in a green politics,
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