Organizational Enablers for Project Governance and Governmentality in Project-based Organizations

How is it that feminist strategies of empowerment and government can come to operate in a regulatory and coercive manner? While this question has been considered in light of the recent carceral turn involving feminist interventions into violence against women, it has not been explicated in the context of women’s economic empowerment This is in spite of increased evidence of nonstate actors, including feminist NGOs, operating coercively toward their target populations, namely poor women of the global South Beyond the empirical evidence, our conceptual schemes also remain inadequate to capture the multiple workings of feminist governmentalities, rooted in sources of power that we tend to keep separate A closer reading of governmentality, or “the conduct of conduct,” also provides a better sense of its flip side, namely counter-conduct, or the resistance that the governed might pose to the “will to empower” The article probes the interrelated question of feminist conduct and counter-conduct in th

Enacting/Disrupting the Will to Empower: Feminist Governance of “Child Marriage” in Eastern India

What is being sustained in education for sustainable development (ESD)? Drawing on biopolitical theory, this article puts forth the hypothesis that it is in fact the very life-chance gulf that separates wealthy ‘sustainable’ mass consumers from poor ‘sustainable’ subsistence-level populations. Hence, in sharp contrast to the cosmopolitan buzz that characterizes the international policy discourse on ESD, it is argued that ESD feeds into the global life-chance divide as it prepares different populations for entirely different lives and lifestyles. In previous research that has dealt with global aspects of ESD, a dividing line can be drawn between scholars who emphasize tendencies towards neoliberal homogenization and those who highlight contingency, local re-articulations and spaces of contestation. This paper offers a third theoretical position that while sharing a deep unease with global neoliberal government is primarily concerned with its ‘will to divide’. As a corollary of this biopolitical per...

Sustaining the life-chance divide? Education for sustainable development and the global biopolitical regime

This paper draws upon Foucauldian theories of governmentality and biopower to examine the recent growth of greenhouse cultivation on the island of Jamaica. Greenhouse farming has been widely promoted as a means to enhance the efficiency, technological sophistication, and profitability of the island’s traditional small-scale farmers. Following Foucault, and drawing on a series of interviews with greenhouse growers, we read this intervention as form of governmentality acting on the conduct and attitudes of Jamaican farmers. As a form of governmentality, greenhouse farming also represents a new and distinctive regime of biopower, one that intervenes with greater precision into the metabolism between the natural processes of the rural population and the vital properties of growing plants. Viewed as a form of biopower, the greenhouse calls particular attention to the ways in which assemblages of materials and technologies enable new forms of control and surveillance over the life processes associated with crop...

Greenhouse governmentality: Protected agriculture and the changing biopolitical management of agrarian life in Jamaica:

Influence of new curriculum policies on mathematics teachers' work.

In this article, I discuss the extension of Foucault’s work on governmentality into the fields of global studies in general and development studies in particular. Drawing on insights from postdevelopment theory and critical race theory, I present an adaptation of governmentality—labeled developmentality—that is intended to bridge the gap between those studies dealing with the regulatory aspects of development in the global South and those dealing with construction of ethical identities in the North.

Peter Ove

Papers

Governmentality and the Analytics of Development