Interrogating the Neoliberal Biopolitics of the Sustainable Development-Resilience Nexus

Abstract

One of the defining features of post‐Cold War international relations has been the correlation of development practices and rationalities with those of security, and the emergence of what has been called the “development‐security nexus.” While the development–security nexus remains relevant, semantic shifts in the conceptualization of both development and security are occurring. Demands for development are increasingly tied not simply to demands for “security,” but to a discursively new object of “resilience.” And this shift from security to resilience is likewise tied to a reconceptualization of development as “sustainable development.” Are these, then, merely semantic shifts, or do they signify changes in the rationalities that have shaped the “development–security nexus” during the post‐Cold War period? Are the rationalities that distinguish resilience different to those underpinning demands for security? And are those of “sustainable development” different to what was once known simply as “development”? Does the weaving of a nexus of relations between “sustainable development” and “resilience” represent a departure from the “development–security nexus” in some way? And, if so, what explains that shift and what are its political implications? This article answers these questions through an analysis of the neoliberal biopolitics of the “sustainable development‐resilience nexus.” While sustainable development deploys ecological reason to argue for the need to secure the life of the biosphere, neoliberalism prescribes economy as the very means of that security. Economic reason is conceived within neoliberalism as a servant of ecological reason, claiming to secure life from economy through a promotion of the capacities of life for economy. This is the paradoxical foundation on which neoliberalism constructs its appropriation of sustainable development. Sustainable development and neoliberalism are not the same, nor is the former simply a proxy of the latter, but they do come into contact powerfully on the terrain of their rationalities of security which, on account of the interplay between ecological and economic reason, is increasingly conceptualized as resilience. This surface of contact ought to make for a tense and political field of contestation, but has instead made largely for a strategically manipulable relation between the two doctrines.

Segmented prizing: biopolitical differentiation in education for sustainable development

“…Duffield's biopolitical analysis of how poor people are targeted in the name of sustainable development has been further elaborated by Reid and Evans in their works on the resilient subject (Evans and Reid 2014;Reid 2012Reid , 2013. There are also a few studies that explore how sustainable development functions as a biopolitical regime of governing wealthy populations in high-income countries (Skoglund 2014;Skoglund and Börjesson 2014).…”

I Want to Tell You a Story: How Narrative Water Ethics Contributes to Re-theorizing Water Politics

“…For many reasons, this model reached the limits of its capacities, but also failed to meet its normative standards (e.g., marginalization, corruption, environmental destruction). In contrast, the governance approach provided an alternative model that promised to do justice to the complexities of political realities and to take further actors and scales into account when coordinating political action [78,79]. Political rule was no longer just steering, but rather negotiating in networks and political structures that could also emerge spontaneously according to the requirements of the problem at hand [10,65].…”

“…In the early 1990s, neoliberal water governance emerged fusing the notion of modern water with the deliberate disregard of issues of power and dominance in particularly extreme ways [12,26,78,79]. While the first reduced water to a contextless resource in the hands of technocrats who supplied it to capitalist exploitation, the latter left the search for political goals to self-organization processes of which it could not really say how they could lead to just solutions, but which at least knew no democratically legitimized actor of political steering that would set moral limits to market forces.…”

“…Probably, an approach emphasizing the value of plural perspectives on water worlds is closer to agonistic than to antagonistic conceptions. Another theoretical challenge relates to the subjects narrative ethics envisages, for each theory has an implicit understanding of actors and appropriate actions [65,79]. In this respect, McNay accuses radical democratic or narrative political theories of a "socially weightless mode of theorizing that forecloses a developed account of social power" and of ignoring "patterns and particularities of the lived reality of oppression" [127].…”

The tools of globalization: ways of regulating and the structure of the international regime for pharmaceuticals

“…This literature also shows that the policy logic underpinning global regulatory dynamics is predominantly neo-liberal. Research on climate, carbon capture, genetic resources, sustainability or genetically modified organisms (Raustiala andVictor 2004, Bartley 2007;Kleinman and Kinchy 2007;Reid 2013;Zelli et al 2013) all demonstrate that regime complexes are overall informed by a neo-liberal logic. They tend to align on the idea that a free market is more optimal than pervasive public interventions, and result in the adoption of policy tools that contribute fulfilling industry perspectives on product circulation and market expansion.…”