Eco‐Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation

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Abstract
Examines the impact of the sustainable development discourse on the academic curriculum and the ways in which the ecological emphasis on technical rationality affects the training of professional ecologists. As with Keulartz in the preceding chapter, it recognizes that nature is an interpreted construct whose meaning is essentially contestable. This leads to the argument that ecological training, notably in the USA and in Britain, has incorporated a particular set of cultural assumptions about the purpose of ecology, by which managerial concepts of objectivity, rationality, and utility have been skewed towards endorsement of the performative norms embedded deep within capitalist theory and practice. This gives ecological management, or ‘eco‐managerialism’, the qualities of government, whereby nature loses its transcendental qualities and its locales, resources, and systems become objects of capitalist manipulation.

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