Calculating climate: ‘advanced liberalism’ and the governing of risk in Australian drought policy

Abstract

For most of last century, governments in Australia treated drought as a ‘natural disaster’, an event that could best be dealt with through public forms of financial assistance. However, following a Review of Natural Disaster Relief Arrangements in 1990, the official definition of drought was changed to a ‘manageable risk’ that farmers were seen to be able to predict and control through formal business planning techniques. Through the use of the literature on governmentality, this article argues that such a shift was of crucial significance in changing the rationalities and technologies of drought management. Farmers were, from this point, constituted as key agents in the management of risk. However, the article argues also that drought as a natural disaster was not completely abandoned and continues to remain important in defining the limits of drought as a managed risk, and in calling into question the capacities of farmers to plan for so-called exceptional events. This contestation of managed risk shows one of the ways in which advanced liberal forms of rule can be shaped in a ‘social’ manner.