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spine 6 mm ISSN: 0972-4923 Conser Conservation v ation & Society & Society Volume 16 n Number 1 n 2018 V Highlights olume 16 Special Section: Affective Ecologies www.conservationandsociety.org n Number 1 n 2018 Conservation and Society 16(1): 52-63, 2018 Special Section: Affective Ecologies Volunteer Environmental Stewardship and Affective Labour in Philadelphia Alec Foster School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, 440 Church St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Recent research has critically evaluated the rapid growth of volunteer urban environmental stewardship. Framings of this phenomenon have largely focused upon environmentality and/or neoliberal environments, unfortunately often presenting a totalising picture of the state and/or market utilising power from above to create environmental subjects with limited agency available to local citizens. Based upon qualitative research with volunteer urban environmental stewards in Philadelphia, affective labour is proposed as an alternative explanation for participation. Stewards volunteered their time and labour due to the intense emotional attachments they formed with their neighbourhoods, neighbours, and nonhuman others in relationships of affective labour. Volunteer urban environmental stewardship as affective labour provides room for agency on the part of individuals and groups involved in volunteer urban environmental reproduction and opens up new ways of relating to and being with human and nonhuman others. Keywords: Environmental Identities, Affective Labour, Environmentality, Neoliberalism, Volunteerism, Philadelphia INTRODUCTION and neoliberalism, sometimes combined in discussions of neoliberal governmentalities/environmentalities. Despite the Recent research has suggested that volunteerism is on the utility of these two approaches, critics have argued that they rise in the United States, with over a quarter of the population lack room for local agency against the power of the state volunteering at least once a year for a charitable organization and the market (Larner 2003; Barnett 2005; Ferguson 2010; (Fisher et al. 2011). The phenomena is not limited to the Brownlow 2011; Singh 2013). U.S., as similar or higher rates of volunteer participation Qualitative research with urban environmental volunteer have been found in Australia, Canada, the UK, and Germany stewards in Philadelphia who planted and pruned trees, (Measham and Barnett 2007). These volunteers include worked in urban gardens, and participated in neighborhood growing numbers of urban and rural stewards maintaining cleanups produced results that serve to contest the hegemony and improving local environmental conditions. While there of environmentality and neoliberal environmental governance are many possible interpretations of this sort of volunteerism, in the understanding of urban environmental volunteerism. the two dominant in the critical geographic literature on urban Participants were found to be performing affective labour, (and rural) environmental volunteerism are environmentality labour “that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion Access this article online (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108)”, “even a sense of connectedness Quick Response Code: or community (Hardt 1999: 96)”, caring for and developing Website: relationships with nonhuman others along with their fellow www.conservationandsociety.org participants in local neighborhood environmental stewardship. The intense attachments (Ahmed 2004) they formed to DOI: their neighbourhood, neighbours, and nonhuman others 10.4103/cs.cs_16_49 (both specific (such as individual trees) and in general (such as neighbourhood environments)) motivated their participation. Copyright: © Foster 2017. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and distribution of the article, provided the original work is cited. Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow, Mumbai | Managed by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore. For reprints contact: [email protected] Affective Labour in Philadelphia’s Urban Environment / 53 Finally, participation in affective labor opened participants up can respond (Gordon 1991). An incorporation of techniques of to new subjectivities and socialities, new ways of being in and the self, alongside technologies of domination would improve of the world, through the joy associated with their increased environmentality studies’ understanding of the formation of ability to effect material environmental improvements in their subjects, recognising the constant negotiations between outside neighborhoods (Ruddick 2010). structural forces and individual and/or group agency. Green neoliberalism or neoliberal environmental governance LITERATURE REVIEW (Heynen et al. 2007; Perkins 2009a, 2011) theorise a reliance on volunteers to produce urban natures as in line with larger Environmentality approaches to urban environmental structural shifts that have hollowed out the state and its provision volunteerism and environmental identities draw upon of public services. Brand (2007) provides a generalised Foucault’s (1991) theory of governmentality, which interpretation of neoliberal urban environmental management’s understands the goal(s) of the state as “to arrange things in goals in fostering environmental citizenship and identities. He such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and sees urban regimes’ dependence upon volunteerism as a shift in such ends may be achieved (Foucault 1991: 95).” Working responsibility for urban environmental management, dependent towards an arrangement or disposition of things, where things upon citizen’s enrollment as environmental stewards: “urban are understood as humans in their relations is contrasted environmental agendas increasingly depend on and actively by Foucault to previous regimes of sovereignty that were promote changes in collective and individual behavior in a concerned with imposing laws, and shifting from laws to tactics diversity of spatial scales and settings, in turn producing a new is also associated with the move from a punitive approach frame of reference for personal decision-making and conduct in towards past transgressions to influencing and guiding future everyday life (Brand 2007: 624).” Speaking generally regarding behavior (Foucault 1991). Understanding governmentality as a volunteering and neoliberalism, Griffiths (2014) argues that: bricolage of modes of managing relationships between men and “it seems impossible nowadays to consider volunteering things, especially things such as “the territory with its specific without attending to neoliberalism and its expansion into all qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc. (Foucault 1991: 93)”, parts of our lives (Griffiths 2014: 206).” Dean (2015) traces makes human-environment relations a facet of governmentality, the increase in individualised volunteering as a replacement although Foucault was never much of an environmentalist for state services and cautions against the appropriation by (Darier 1999). Agrawal’s Environmentality (2005) led to many capital “of those human activities which seek to reproduce more studies of environmental governmentalities (Hanson the caring social relationships that make our lives liveable 2007; Li 2007; Birkenholtz 2008; Dowling 2009; Mawdsley (Dean 2015: 146).” With regards to conservation tourism, where 2009; Seki 2009; Fletcher 2010; Gabriel 2011; Jepson et al. customers are actually paying large sums of money to volunteer 2012; Leffers and Ballamingie 2013; Ward 2013). as conservationists, Cousins et al. (2009) are more pragmatic, Much of the critique of environmentality and governmentality arguing that “the progressive commodification of conservation focusses upon how the concepts often have been applied in will need to be tempered by some form of regulation (np).” an overly structural and totalizing manner (Rutherford Another important critique of the neoliberal dependence on 2007; Cepek 2011; Singh 2013). Unfortunately, many volunteerism for social reproduction instead of the state is that environmentality approaches do not fully take into account it can maintain and even increase uneven development due to some of Foucault’s later works (1988, 1990, 1993) that look at correspondences between uneven development and uneven the positive construction of the self along with the domination voluntary sector capacity (Fyfe and Milligan 2003; Pincetl 2003; of the self by others: Perkins 2009a,b). Given the neoliberal reliance on localized “he has to take into account the interaction between those two and individualized environmental responsibility (Perkins types of techniques-techniques of domination and techniques 2009a,b; Harris 2011), areas that are unable to respond to calls of the self. He has to take into account the points where the to take charge of their own urban environments are increasingly technologies of domination of individuals over one another marginalised. This marginalisation is explained away as a have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon failure of residents to take interest in and responsibility for himself … governing people is not a way to force people to do their neighborhoods (Brownlow 2006, 2011). Given that many what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, studies have found that unequal access to urban