Governing vulnerability: The biopolitics of conservation and climate in upland Southeast Asia

Abstract

Forest dependent communities are increasingly at the centre of intensifying global aspirations to alleviate both climate change vulnerability and environmental degradation. In Southeast Asia in particular, varied forms of conservation practice fuse concern for biodiversity outcomes with the desire to support ‘resilience’ and build ‘capacity’ in the face of environmental change. Drawing on Foucault's notion of biopolitics, this article explores the consequences of efforts to govern both forest decline and human vulnerability. Through this framing, we consider indigenous experiences with the 1997/8 El Niño event in the southern Philippines where conservation efforts have produced unintended outcomes for upland households negotiating the impacts of extreme drought. We demonstrate that efforts to comprehensively reform indigenous life as part of a twinned concern for environmental decline and human vulnerability have produced acute food insecurity during El Niño events by diminishing swiddening practices and related lifeways that buffer against extreme drought – some of the very environmental changes that forest management efforts had hoped to buffer indigenous households against. These insights offer a bridge between contemporary Foucauldian treatments of ‘vulnerability’ as a potent discursive construct and work within political ecology that aims to empirically understand uneven experiences of environmental change.