The neoliberal turn in environmental governance in the Detroit River Area of Concern

Critical environmental justice and the state: a critique of Pellow

“…Neoliberalism as a governing logic prioritizes market-based responses to environmental problemsthough it does not, as is sometimes assumed, oppose a strong role for state intervention to create and maintain those markets. From an environmental justice perspective, neoliberal governance involves a turn towards NGOs as stand-ins for the public, diminishing effective democratic control (Alstyne 2015). The diffusion of neoliberal ways of thinking within state agencies also tends to weaken the power of non-market based issue framings, even in regulatory bureaucracies that adopt the language of environmental justice (Liévanos 2012).…”

“…I believe that this view of the state is compatible with the claim, made by theorists of governance, that the configuration of power has changed in advanced capitalist societies, away from a preference for government, centralized and bureaucratic, and towards a logic of governance, with social power and authority seemingly 'decentered', networked, and non-hierarchical (Brown 2015, 122-27). Markets are the key model and technology of this neoliberal form of administration (Lockie 2014), which favors 'partnerships' to mobilize non-state actors (Alstyne 2015) and involves a depoliticized fetish for 'problem-solving' and 'consensus' between 'stakeholders'. State agencies structured around a logic of governance struggle to integrate movement framings based around justice, or even agent-driven politics as such (Liévanos 2012).…”