Foucault and governmentality

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was arguably one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century. While he has written on a lot of different subjects, like sexuality, mental hospitals, and prisons, in this chapter I would like to focus on his ideas about power. More specifically, on his concept of ‘governmentality’ and how this theoretical tool can be used to understand the way in which our behavior is shaped in relation to climate change.

The concept of ‘governmentality’ is often thought to be a combination of government and mentality. However, since Foucault never used the word ‘mentality’ in this context, the concept is more plausibly connected to government in the same way that ‘spiritual’ and ‘spirituality’ are related. Governmentality is concerned with how we think about government. It refers to the practices and procedures through with subjects are governed, and what rationalities and techniques are used. To understand this, we first need to look at Foucault’s understanding of government. While this word has a certain meaning and connotation in ordinary use, Foucault uses it with a specific meaning in mind.

Government refers in this case to what he calls the ‘conduct of conduct’. The first ‘conduct’ means to guide or to direct, while the second ‘conduct’ refers, as a noun, to behavior or actions. When we put the two together, government, as the conduct of conduct, means to guide or direct behavior. However, there is also a normative element to conduct. Think of the reflexive verb ‘to conduct oneself’, or of things like a ‘code of conduct’ or the mental disorder ‘conduct disorder’. This implies that there is a way one should behave, according to certain norms. In this way, government is also very much related to the self and identity. These norms form an ideal by which actual conduct can be judged, but also guided and directed, either by yourself, or by other agencies.

Government, then, as the conduct of conduct, is the attempt to guide or direct behavior according to certain norms. This is of course a very broad definition of government, but this is precisely Foucault’s point. Our behavior is shaped by a lot of different agents, including ourselves, with a lot of different goals in mind and a lot of different instruments and techniques to achieve those goals. Our behavior is shaped and regulated in different ways, for example by criminal law, but much more often, I believe, by the norms at school, university, or work. We are even subject to our own regulations of our conduct. Think for example of dieting, which is a form of self-government, according to norms that say that it is good to be slim or healthy.

These norms are based on what we consider to be knowledge and truth. According to Foucault, truth is produced by social, political, and cultural practices. These truths determine how we shape our own conduct and the conduct of others. In this way, Foucault states that we can identify three general axes of government: power, truth, and identity. Power refers to the techniques of government, how conduct is shaped. Truth refers to the knowledge according to which our behavior is shaped. Identity, lastly, refers to the way in which we shape our own conduct and how we relate to forms of power and knowledge that attempt to shape our conduct. These three axes influence each other and can schematically be visualized in the following way:

Foucault’s Government

From the point of view of those that want to govern, behavior is something that can be controlled and regulated in a rational way. But what does rational mean in this sense? Rational, in this case, just means that the thinking about government is done explicitly, in a clear and systematic way. However, according to Foucault, there is not one clear rational way of doing this. We should rather speak of different ‘rationalities’ of government (or ‘mentalities’ of government, as they have also been called, leading to the confusion of the supposed neologism).

Rationality, in this context, refers to the ways in which we think about government and power. These ways of thinking are made explicit through language and other instruments and techniques that are involved in the practices of government. It is important to note that, while different agencies can have different goals and techniques of government, rationalities are collective. They are shared ways of thinking, circulating within society through different agencies. Rationalities are not necessarily rational, as they can rely on myths or symbols for example.

These rationalities are based on forms of knowledge, both knowledge that is taken for granted and assumed, as well as knowledge that is derived from certain specific scientific bodies, like economics, psychology, and medicine. Think for example of government on a national scale. A crucial task of the government in our modern society is managing the economy. This can be done by means of different policies and by using different techniques or instruments derived from economics and statistics. However, the fact that it is necessary to manage an economy at all is an element of the rationality of national government that is taken for granted.

Governmentality, besides referring to this general relation between thought and government, also refers to a more specific period or rule during which the concepts of ‘economy’ and the ‘population’ became the objects of rule, contrasting it with two other forms of power. Foucault argued that the rationalities of government in the West have changed dramatically since the 17th century. Power and the control over people used to be based on violence and exercised by taking things away. Foucault calls this repressive power ‘sovereignty’. Another form of power is what Foucault called ‘discipline’. This form of power can be found in military training but also at school or work. It is concerned with ordering and regulating individuals, for example by surveillance and normalization.

In the modern period, these forms of power have for the most part been taken over by the power of government, as the conduct of conduct. Foucault wants us to imagine these three forms of power as a ‘triangle’, in which government does not replace sovereignty and discipline, but rather applies them to the economy and the population in totality, looking after its optimalisation and well-being in terms of wealth, health, happiness, etc. This triangle of power can be imagined in the following way:

Foucault’s Triangle of Power

The differences and relations between these forms of power are explained in the following table:

Foucault’s governmentality and climate change

How can we use Foucault’s concept of governmentality and apply it to climate change? It is clear that a lot of our behavior needs to change in order to do reduce climate change as much as possible. And in order to accomplish this, our behavior is being shaped and directed in a lot of different ways. The concept of governmentality allows us to look beyond the authorities and institutions that play a role in the government of climate change and the decisions that they make. It allows us to question how our behavior can be governed in the first place.

Following Foucault’s method, we should not be looking at who has the power and authority in the governing of this crisis. Neither should we question whose interests are represented the best in designing and implementing climate policy, nor whether the policy is just or effective. We are rather interested in how this power operates and how it has control over people’s lives. In the case of climate change, a governmentality approach should look at the procedures, or regimes of practices as Foucault calls them, by means of which climate change is made thinkable and consequently governable.

In his lecture, Foucault focuses on a specific application of governmentality, which he calls bio-politics. As the word suggests, this application of governmentality is concerned with life. It is both concerned with disciplining individual bodies as well as regulating populations as a whole. By means of demographics, statistics, and other forms of knowledge, regular phenomena, like deaths, births, and diseases, could be aggregated and studied as a whole. A consequence of this is that the population could also become the subject of governance, in the sense that it then becomes something that can be maximized and optimized. In this way, the population is shaped, directed, and governed.

We can apply this same method to nature or the climate. The climate is also something that is studied extensively. All this knowledge is not only used to understand how the climate works, but is also meant to influence and shape it. In this way, the climate is also subjected to governance, however, not as directly as the population. The climate is governed through the government of the population. By influencing the conduct of individuals, the conduct of populations is shaped, which is how the climate is made governable.

Climate change is of course very broad, and it affects us in too many ways to apply the tool of governmentality to it as a whole. Therefore, I will look specifically at the practices and procedures that have made carbon emissions into something that can be governed. We call these practices and procedures ‘carbon accounting’. In the previous century, a lot of research went into precisely measuring and tracking the emission of carbon and precisely identifying the flow of the carbon cycle through the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans. Even though this seems like a necessary element for mitigating climate change, as it seems necessary to first measure the carbon before we can do something about it, we should not take these forms of accounting for granted.

The governmentality approach considers these forms of measuring and calculating carbon as a mentality of government that turns carbon, as flows or stocks, into things that can be governed. These flows and stocks are not pre-given in nature, waiting to be found. They are rather constituted and made visible and calculable, which allows them to be translated from nature into the political and social realm. In this sense, carbon accounting is much more than just an instrument to measure with, it is also a way of looking at, knowing, and controlling the climate.

There are two examples of carbon accounting that I would like to focus on in this chapter. The first one is the idea of a carbon market, which is a regime of practice that shapes the conduct of others, while the second one is the idea of a ‘personal carbon footprint’, which is a regime of practice that relates to self-government. By focusing on these examples, I hope to show how carbon emissions are made governable through different mentalities, by shaping the conduct of others as well as by making people into responsible subjects who shape their own conduct.

The carbon market is one of the main ways in which human beings try to respond to climate change. Carbon emissions are exchanged and traded on a global level. This usually works via a so-called cap-and-trade system. In this system, the total quantity of emission within a certain territory is determined. The rights to emit carbon are distributed between emitters. If certain emitters emit more than they are allowed to emit, they need to buy these rights from other emitters. The cap-and-trade system allows emitters to sell and buy rights to emit to and from other emitters. In this way, the total amount of emission is supposed to decline, as the authority that sets the limit is supposed to reduce this limit every year.

However, before this is possible, these emissions need to be turned into something that can be traded across the globe. At first glance, this seems to be a purely scientific process. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has to be measured using scientific methods, as well as the amount of carbon dioxide that particular states, companies, or even specific machines emit into the atmosphere. But once we know this, it should be straightforward how these can be traded and exchanged, right?

However, the measurement is not as straightforward and scientific as it might seem. The emission of carbon has to be constructed in such a way that it becomes tradable. In order to do this, the emissions have to be transformed into a standard unit of carbon, which can be compared to other forms of carbon emission that might be of a totally different nature. Think for example of the cutting down of a forest and compare this to driving a car. In order for carbon markets to work, these different types of emission have to be made visible and measurable in a standard unit that can be compared to other forms of emission.

These processes transform carbon from a scientific concept into an understandable unit that can be traded and compared. In this way, carbon becomes subject to political and economic governance. Only once this standard carbon unit had been established, did it become possible for different states to measure how much carbon they were emitting within their borders. Even though climate change is a global problem, these national measures are necessary because the mitigation of climate change is a problem that has to be broken down into the conventional nation-state model.

This is especially important for the allocation of responsibility for emission mitigation efforts to certain states, which is important in setting the limit for the cap-and-trade system. In the effort to establish how much a certain state emits, many technical questions became political. Questions like: What is a forest and how exactly should it be defined? How should states calculate emission from natural processes, like volcanoes? Which and how many categories should be invented to differentiate between different sets of emissions?

Once these were eventually decided on, the conduct of people and businesses still had to be shaped in a way that would ensure that emissions were ultimately reduced. Considering the current neoliberal rationale of government, the obvious way to do this was by pulling the emissions into the economic realm. By putting a price on these units of emission, the idea was that businesses would be incentivized to lower their emissions.

A second example of governmentality in relation to climate change is the idea of a personal carbon footprint. As the emissions of carbon were made measurable on a national scale, it became possible for individuals to measure how much carbon they were emitting with regard to their personal life choices. Eating meat, going on holiday by airplane, turning on the radiator instead of putting on a sweater, all these individual emissions became part of a personal carbon footprint, which could be measured by means of various carbon footprint calculators.

Even though individuals are not legally required to reduce their footprint or anything like that, our conduct is still shaped by it. People are considered to be responsible subjects that can limit their emission themselves through self-government. The footprint calculators provide certain new norms based on which people will shape their own conduct regarding emissions. In order to reduce emissions, individuals are encouraged to reduce their emission by eating less meat or not traveling by plane. Airplane companies provide a voluntary extra fee that lets you compensate the emission of your flight. The extra money is usually used to plant a tree somewhere, which is then supposed to cover the emission of your flight.

As the carbon market and the individual carbon footprint illustrate, the governmentality perspective allows us to look at the ways in which the climate is made into something that can be governed. It allows for an investigation into the power relations that are inherent in technical decisions. Asking ‘how’ instead of ‘who’, it goes beyond the traditional view of the nation state as a center of power, looking at the power relations that are hidden in these seemingly apolitical decisions based on scientific knowledge. It also looks at how this knowledge is eventually transformed into something that can be governed, for example by putting a price on it, or by turning people into responsible individuals who reduce their own emissions through self-government.