Logics of participation: Rural environmental governance under neo‐liberalism in Australia

Abstract

This article examines recent developments in participatory environmental governance under the neo‐liberal regime of Australia. The farmer‐based Landcare movement is representative of this tendency towards participatory environmental governance. At the same time, extensive and rapid rural restructuring has typified a neo‐liberal approach to the economy over the past decade. In seeming contradiction to the ‘new right’ economic project, forms of participatory management of rural environments have been allowed for, and indeed promoted by state and federal governments. Through an analysis of the development and implementation of these participatory programs, we show how neo‐liberal reforms can be enabled, supported and legitimated through forms of local ‘bounded’ democratisation and participatory rhetoric. We argue that these arrangements, deployed at localised, economically deregulated rural sites, constitute new forms of regulation that attempt to develop the entrepreneurial conduct of subjects. In the absence of effective broader scale monitoring and co‐ordinative institutions, environmental governance is localised and dependent on the production imperatives of farmers and local communities who are increasingly immersed in globalised economic relations. We conclude that this localised form of governance cannot effectively deal with the broader spatial aspects of environmental quality which are so significant in the rural Australian context.