The Original Governmentality Approach

The governmentality approach originally developed by Michel Foucault is not a fully elaborated theory (Walters and Haahr 2005; Bröckling et al. 2012a: 7-8, 15), and there is no consensus about its proper interpretation, scope or methodology. Rather, it is a starting point for critique or for the problematisation of existing theories, a way of seeing things differently and complementing other theories and concepts. Each application of the approach combines its various parts in new ways and creates a new operationalisation and understanding of the concept (Dean 2010: 13). Thus, the governmentality perspective developed in the following is not a general framework of governmentality, but a very specific version tailored to answer my research questions, to extend the concept of securitisation and to study contemporary climate security discourses.

3.1.1 Power and Governmentality: Cutting the Kings Head

Michel Foucault originally developed the governmentality approach in the 1970s based on his research on political power and particularly in his lectures at the College de France, which now have been published in two books ‘Security, Territory and Population’ and ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ (2006b, 2006a). The starting point of these lectures is a critique of the Political Science research of that time, which, according to Foucault, focused too much on repressive forms of power and government (Foucault 1983: 83; Oels 2010: 172). To rephrase Foucault, Political Science still had not ‘cut the kings head’ (Foucault 1979, 1983; Lemke 2002: 51).

Governance was widely understood as top down enterprise carried out by a sovereign state without too much interference of non-state actors or the governed entities themselves.

Additionally, even though there had been some nuanced research on power (Lukes 2005;

Bachrach and Baratz 1962), in the predominant, as Foucault calls it, ‘juridico-political discourse’ (1979: 88, 1983: 84), there persisted a view on power as something that could be possessed and wielded at will. Power was directly tied to the capacity of specific actors to control the actions of others (Barnett and Duvall 2005) and hence conceptualised as something constraining, dominating and essentially bad, exercised from a top down perspective over the governed subjects without many possibilities to resist.

Against this mainstream view on power, Foucault developed his own understanding of the subject as resting in the ‘discourse’ or later in the ‘dispositive’. Coming from a philosophical

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and psychological background, Foucault took inspirations from many disciplines and sources often not to be found in Political Science or International Relations. Nonetheless, his conceptualisation of power contains various linkages to the central debates in those disciplines, which is why I briefly discuss some of the key arguments.

Skipping older debates on power that started in ancient times and culminated in Machiavellis famous ‘Prince’ (2005 [1532]), one of the most basic understandings of power in modern Political Science goes back to Max Weber who defined power as the probability of an individual to realise its will over others despite their resistance (Weber 1976: 28). In their famous studies about the exercise of power in New Haven Robert Dahl and others later adopted and extended this understanding. Dahl’s studies approached power from a behaviourist perspective defining it as getting things done i.e. prevailing in conflictive situations (Dahl 1961). Being discontent with this fairly narrow or ‘one-dimensional’ understanding of the concept, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) developed a ‘two-dimensional’ approach.

Here, power was not only defined as directly enforcing ones will over others but also as preventing certain disputes from materialising, making ‘non-decisions’ and thus setting the agenda in the first place (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). In the 1970s Stephen Lukes (2005) added a third dimension in which the ultimate exercise of power happens when the addressees do not even become aware of power being exercised. In Lukes’ view, power shapes the perceptions and preferences of individuals in such a way that they accept a given situation as natural and unchangeable (Lukes 2005: 28–30). Lukes’ third dimension is in some respects similar to another important strand in the research on power coming from a Marxist tradition and focusing on the idea of hegemony. Going back to the ideas of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, the

‘neo-gramscian’ approach, amongst others developed by Robert Cox (1981, 1983), states that power can be found exactly where it is least visible. That is, when almost all resistance is muted and a single viewpoint of particular social forces has become hegemonic over most others (Cox 1981: 137–138, 1983: 169).

Rather similar to the ideas of Lukes and Cox, but mostly resting on his extensive genealogical research on the history of political thought, Foucault developed his own concept of power. He sees power as taking very different forms, e.g. strategic games, structuring fields of possibility and particularly as being productive, as enabling things and constituting subject positions. The most important aspect in the Foucauldian understanding of power is the concept of the discourse. A discourse is a power-knowledge nexus constituting reality in a certain way,

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thus defining what is right or wrong and who is empowered to speak the truth. It is only through discourse that humans can access reality and knowledge. Thus, all reality and truth are exposed to and shaped by certain power dynamics:

Power is a relationship between actors that produce knowledges and truths that lead to individual and social practices that in turn tend to disseminate those truths. Knowledge transmits and disseminates the effects of power [...], while truth is a status given to certain knowledge by power. [...] Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it. (Foucault 1980: 133).

Power in Foucault’s sense is everywhere not only in instances of direct influence nor in the hands of seemingly powerful individuals. Instead, its most central functions include the constitution of subject positions, desires and truths in the first place. Since power in this view is productive and empowering it is not seen as something essentially bad from which people have to be rescued. In contrast, Foucault would call the common understanding of power, which is conceptualised as an asymmetrical force against which no resistance is possible, domination (Lemke 2002: 53; Dean 2010: 58). While discourse remained a central theoretical device in his thinking, Foucault later also used the term ‘dispositive’. This is an extension of the discourse concept inasmuch as it also includes non-verbal practices such as architecture, institutions, or organisations (Foucault 2003; Dean 2010, 2012; Jäger and Meier 2009; Aradau et al. 2014a:

64). However, a broader understanding of ‘discourse’ also is not limited to verbal or textual representations because certain practices or architectural arrangements cannot become meaningful outside their discursive representation (Milliken 1999). Hence, it is a matter of debate whether this new concept really is necessary (Bührmann and Schneider 2008; Keller 2013) and I will largely stick to the concept of discourse in the following.

3.1.2 Developing the Concept of Governmentality

Working with this more nuanced concept of power and trying to overcome the shortcomings of the debate on governance, the concept that Foucault developed in the governmentality lectures starts out from an extensive genealogical analysis of the term ‘to govern’ and its underlying power forms since the ancient times. Foucault understands genealogy as a way of comprehending the present by problematising taken for granted assumptions and by refusing to use contemporary meanings of concepts to understand the past. Instead, the original meaning of concepts is used as a starting point (Dean 2010: 3). Thus, Foucault tries to condense the

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dominant meaning of the term in different epochs to capture its continuous transformation. For Foucault’s analysis, not the first appearance of the term is important but the point in time when people consciously deal with it, enabling the development of certain tactics, strategies and modes of action in relation to the term (Foucault 2006b: 425).

Concerning the contemporary debates on governance and power Foucault suggests a new line of thinking, which takes the older, much broader meaning of the term ‘to govern’ as starting point. Here, governing is not restricted to the state, but also applies to the governing of the family, the economy or even the self (Foucault 2006b: 183). Contrary to the mainstream understanding, Foucault claims that the term only gradually has become so closely tied to the idea of the state (Foucault 2006b: 135). Consequently, he takes the much broader meaning of governing and combines it with the idea of different ‘mentalities’ underpinning governance processes. The basic question that Foucault tries to answer here was how it became possible that in modern societies power and governance could concentrate in the institution of the state (Lemke 2002: 58). In this view, governance in the form of the state is only one very specific way to exercise power and the state itself becomes a specific ‘tactic’ of government.

Government or governmental power³ as specific form of power does not work in a direct, top-down fashion but tries to influence processes at the level of what Foucault called ‘the population’ (Foucault 2006b: 103). It also tries to use the potential for self-governance of every individual or other actors in society and only to intervene if absolutely necessary (Dean 2010:

121). In its ideal form the exercise of power in this way goes almost unnoticed, as it shapes the identities, the needs and desires of the governed and the knowledge of what is right and wrong.

3.1.3 The Different Meanings of Governmentality

Having said that, Foucault’s lectures offer at least three different meanings of governmentality (Walters and Haahr 2005; Dean 2010: 24). In the first more general meaning, governmentality is a certain way of how one can think about governing. A specific governmentality highlights the different rationalities, technologies and power forms that are being used in the governance process, so governmentality: ‘(…) deals with how we think about governing, with the different rationalities or, as is has been sometimes phrased, `mentalities of government´’ (Dean 2010:

3 In Foucault’s writing, he uses the term ‘governmental management’, which, despite some differences, sometimes is also equated with ‘bio power’ Kelly (2009: 60); Foucault (2006b: 161). However, for better comparability with the other power forms and in order to delineate my approach from the existing literature, I use the term ‘governmental power’ throughout this thesis.

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24; Walters and Haahr 2005: 290). Secondly, Foucault describes governmentality as the

‘conduct of conduct’, which entails the government of others as well as the government of oneself and is often connected to neoliberal forms of power (Walters and Haahr 2005: 289;

Methmann 2011: 4; Dean 2010: 17). The third meaning, which forms the centre of my theoretical approach, is a historically specific variant of the first (Foucault 2006b: 162–165;

Walters and Haahr 2005: 292): ‘Here, ‚governmentality‘ marks the emergence of a distinctively new form of thinking about exercising power in certain societies’ (Dean 2010: 28). In his lectures, Foucault identifies this new way of governing especially in Western societies since the 18^th century. Instead of governing a territory with traditional security institutions such as the police or the army, the focus has shifted towards the governance of populations: ‘During this era of governmentality political rule is exercised through a complex triangle of sovereignty, discipline and governmental management, which has the population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism’ (Foucault 2006b: 161).