Developing planetarian accountancy: Fabricating nature as stock, service, and system for green governmentality

Abstract

This preliminary survey begins to probe a few purposes and practices of “Earth System Science” to rethink the ways in which Nature is “taken into account” by this new power/knowledge formation. The workings of “environmentality,” or green governmentality (Luke, 1999c), and the dispositions of environmental accountancy regimes depend increasingly on the development and deployment of such reconceptualized interdisciplinary sciences (Briden & Downing, 2002). These practices have gained much more cohesion as a technoscience network since 2001 Amsterdam Conference on Global Climate Change Open Science. Due to its brevity, this study is neither an exhaustive history nor an extensive sociology of either Earth System Science or the new post-2001 Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP), which acquired new legitimacy during and after this professional-technical congress. Instead this critique reexamines these disciplinary developments to explore the curious condition of their rapid assembly and gradual acceptance as credible technoscience formations. This reevaluation allows one, at the same time, to speculate about the emergent interests hoping to gain hold over such power/knowledge programs for managing security, territory, and population on a planetary scale (Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991; Foucault, 1991c, pp. 87–104).

Citation

Luke, T.W. (2009), "Developing planetarian accountancy: Fabricating nature as stock, service, and system for green governmentality", Dahms, H.F. (Ed.) Nature, Knowledge and Negation (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 129-159. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2009)0000026008