Environmentality by the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change: Neoliberal ethos and the production of environmental subjects in Acre and Mozambique

Abstract

As part of the transnational governance of the environment, platforms like the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) have created a regime that seeks to reinforce and reproduce the neoliberal ethos that informs current environmental conservation initiatives, as well as that seeks to produce environmental subjects. Such ethos is expressed through the preference for market-based solutions, principles of individual responsibility, or incentives to self-government. Drawing on ethnographic research in Acre (Brazil) and Mozambique, I explore some of the local elements of this neoliberal ethos. I use two public events about climate change to contend that such events constitute local instantiations of the UNFCCC's environmentality, by collectively performing and reproducing the neoliberal ethos that is encapsulated in the governance of the problem of climate change. These collective performances are important for the crystallization of a narrative that explains the reality and the terms of understanding future realities, thus contributing to processes of subjectification. The performances of these narratives are also important instances of mediation between the local and the transnational. I argue that although the production of environmental subjects promoted by the UNFCCC necessarily implies the erasure of localities, such subjectification depends on its indexation to local specificities. Ultimately, the reproduction of these environmental subjects—and the neoliberal ethos that undergirds their own constitution—has the potential to preclude the imagination of alternative models of development and of fighting climate change.