How to Manage a Forest: Environmental Governance in Neoliberal Chile

Abstract

Knowledge transfer is a central feature of environmental governance worldwide. Over the last three decades, state action targeting small land holders has been increasingly shaped around managerial ideals of natural resource use and conservation. By drawing on ethnographic research among farmers and forest officers in Chile, this article highlights the intersections between knowledge and monitoring in forest governance. In a departure from rigid narratives of power/knowedge in environmental governance, I show that forest management programs do not lead to the formation of uniform environmental subjects among farmers as functions of state discourses on natural resource use. Yet, forest management is far from being a neutral instance of knowledge transfer. By inserting farmers’ and officers’ actions within complex auditing systems, environmental programs serve to promote new strategies of monitoring through which ecological knowledge among both groups is marginalized in favor of legal regulatory frameworks and understandings of forest livelihood. Environmental auditing targeting small landholders constitutes a governmental solution to the restructuring of state intervention under neoliberalism, which aims at favoring the inclusion of smallholders in the global market in line with the principles of individual accountability and self-realization.