Arun Agrawal

Arun Agrawal's latest book 'Environmentality:Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects' mainly examines the pragmatic relationship between environmental governance structures, the form of government bodies and policies, and the way local people involved in the management of natural resources that, overtime, gave them a transformative sense and action of themselves as natural conservationists participating in the environment regulations as the author termed it the 'environmental subjects'.

Agrawal proposed that by using the idea of 'subjectivities', in contrast to 'social identities', it allows us to see dynamic transformation and the reproduction of peoples' selves through their actual practices in resource regulation. The changing position of individual in relations with resource management will impact the way the individual thinks about their surroundings and him/herself regarding such context. In that sense, the way environment policies and government institutions are structured is crucial as it can be considered as a technology of power in turning each actor to be an environmental subject. The author asked a very question of when and for what reason particular social actors come to care, think about themselves in relations to, and get active in the local realm of 'environment'. In addition, Agrawal tried to understand the specific point where the production of subjectivities of individual takes place in different social and ecological background as well as at different level of regulatory involvement.

Using historical review of government archival documents, ethnographic studies and structured interview, the author showed in his book several statistical tables depicting varied changes in different communities where different structures of environmental regulatory regimes have been set up and enforced. One of the main conceptual arguments here is that by shifting environmental governance regime and government body from central administration to local regulation and participation in monitoring and managing of local resources, the mentalities of people in communities have changed toward a more conservative fashion. The reason for this is the chances of local people to define their own interest regarding communal regulatory policies and implementation which was controlled by the forest officials before. This is a crucial point in understanding the process of subject production using technology of self in inserting their own identities and interests into the environmental management. Agrawal referred to the effect of this change as an establishment of 'intimate government' as opposed to the former 'government from distance'.

I am not very much convinced by what the book trying to say though. First of all, I feel that the methodology is quite weak (if I read it right) in the sense that the author based his historical study on background of the communities solely from colonial government archives. When Agrawal use official reports to depict situation of the forest management and community participation during the colonial administration, and basically concluded that local involvement was very low, I think there should be another resource of information to cross-check with the official discourse, e.g. elder peoples’ memories. Just to compare the information is worthwhile doing, I guess. I also feel like his interpretation of information got from local point of views based on his questionnaires is quite simplistic. It seems to me that the research thesis already has an answer and that the interview with local people was merely for getting supportive evidence to his pre-set argument. I know that bias in social research is unavoidable, but in this case I think it was too obvious. Another point I feel uncomfortable with is that the author used his case, which yes he did a very detailed statistic study, to explain the social phenomenon in a larger scale. I think this is a flaw point as his study based on a very contextual situation.

What I think is interesting from the book is the idea of intimate government. This asks me a question of how local people can create their own of what so-called intimate government, besides the involvement in regulations of resources as the author already proposed. For example, in the Mekong region, would it be any kind of intimate “govern-mentality” (my fancy term) on resources that ‘regionally’ shared among the people. If yes, then can such “govern-mentality” be derived from the shared ideologies of cultures and environments? To make it narrower, whether Mekong cosmology and mythologies are strong enough to bring people together and act upon conservation scheme on river resource management? This would contrast to the idea of Mekong transborder governance promoted by the ADB/GMS which, based on Agrawal argument, can be considered as a centralized government in controlling resources.… (mais)