Death by a Thousand Cuts? The Moral Terrain of Neoliberal Environmental Governance in the South Carolina Lowcountry, USA

Abstract

The South Carolina “Lowcountry,” known for its antebellum history, has been rapidly transforming from a landscape shaped by an agricultural and natural resource economy to one also shaped by a real estate economy. In this chapter, we explore the role of specific actors in materializing the exurban vision through the planning process: specifically, we examine the formation of for-profit and nonprofit neoliberal environmental governance regimes in the ecologically sensitive landscapes of East Edisto and the Savannah River Preserve. Through a political ecological approach, we used participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis to explore how these neoliberal actors in environmental planning—both within nonprofit and for-profit entities—develop a moral discourse that shapes how people will live on the landscape. In contrast to literature suggesting that the commodification of nature in contemporary neoliberalization results in a “tragedy of the commons,” we found corporations and civil society filling a gap where state governance has been diminished in the neoliberal context, motivated by their “emotional responsibility” for the future of local cultural traditions related to the natural landscape.