Governing sustainable development: partnerships, protests and power at the World Summit, by Carl Death, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010, 197 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN 9870415569262
There is a lot to like about this book. Carl Death has done a great job turning his PhD thesis into an insightful, concise, well-written and well-structured book that provides a good balance of theoretical and empirical material. The book examines the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg. It asks questions about the legacy of the summit for global attempts to achieve sustainable development, about the role that summits of this kind play in contemporary international politics, and how various kinds of arguments were deployed within and outside the summit. The particular answers the book gives to these questions derive from a Foucauldian theoretical perspective.
Death does a good job in demonstrating the strengths of this kind of analysis. He draws in particular on Foucault's understandings of power and discourse, governmentality, and resistance. For Death, Foucault's analysis of power suggests that we should not see it as something that forbids, denies or oppresses, but as something that produces and shapes, and which is ‘everywhere’ in all social relations (p. 15). This is an important step as it opens the line of investigation, pursued in Chapter 3, into how the summit itself is a place of power – not just in the traditional sense of ‘powerful actors’ imposing themselves upon others, but in terms of how the processes of summitry work to shape regimes of knowledge, and alongside this, to shape and reshape legitimate forms of agency, and to legitimise and delegitimise certain kinds of practices. The concern with governmentality allows Death to analyse the kinds of practices for governing that are produced and reproduced with the summit. This is put to particular use in Chapter 4, which examines the tensions between a disciplinary and bio-political rationality of government and a liberal rationality of government, with the latter eventually triumphing within the summit in the form of a stress on voluntary partnerships (governing through freedom). Foucault's understanding of resistance has been much examined, and here it is used in Chapter 6 to explore the actions of groups ‘outside’ the summit and their relationship to the official summit proceedings. In particular, Death follows Foucault in abandoning the idea of ‘pure resistance’ and instead sees these groups as engaged in ‘counter-conducts’ – struggles against the processes implemented for conducting others – and, importantly, sees these struggles as themselves implicated in the kinds of discourses and practices they profess to oppose. In addition to these Foucauldian elements, Death employs the work of Clifford Geertz to explore in Chapter 5 the WSSD as a form of political theatre involving processes, rituals, symbols and choreography that are political, particularly in the sense of establishing the summit as what Death calls an ‘exemplary centre’ – as itself an enactment of the kinds of governing practices that emerged from the summit. And it is here that the focus on resistance to the summit becomes important, as does its location in South Africa.
The application of these theoretical insights to the empirical material is impressive and persuasive. It certainly helps to get beyond the traditional approaches to international summits and environmental negotiations found in much of the literature. It also has implications beyond the particular case. The analysis of the summit as a form of political theatre resonates far beyond the issue of sustainable development, and the particular kinds of governing practices (partnerships as forms of advanced liberal rule) that emerge from the summit have clear counterparts in other fields – notably international development and global health and disease management.
The book also shows some of the problems and limitations of this kind of Foucauldian approach. Moving away from seeing sovereign power as the only or most important form of power is certainly liberating, but it also raises two issues. First, whether there are more and less important manifestations of power such that some ought to be the concern of social scientists and others not. Someone unconvinced by the utility of Foucault's ideas might want to argue that the really important issues about sustainable development are not to be found in the pageantry of a global summit. Second, Foucault himself seemed ambiguous about whether ‘cutting off the king's head’ meant we should not analyse forms of governing practices as emanations of particular projects – the institutionalisation of capitalism for example. The forms of liberal governmentality that emerge from the summit are related to broader political and economic projects and there might be a case for saying they should be primarily analysed as such. Finally, there is the question of where, within a Foucauldian theoretical universe, we can finally take a stand. Death seems to think that something needs to be done about looming ecological crises, and there is a sense in his discussion of those protest groups who were marginalised at the summit that there really ought to be a more radical, perhaps a more fundamental, approach to sustainability. But as he says, Foucault-inspired approaches must resist the search for a supposedly ‘purer’ form of ecological protest. Death notes one of Foucault's glosses on this: ‘work with and be intransigent at the same time’ (p. 165), but it also reminds one of Habermas's description of Foucault as a ‘young conservative’. Nonetheless this is an impressive book that will be of interest to scholars beyond those concerned with sustainable development.