The paradoxical (post-)politics of scale: exploring authoritarian state environmental policymaking in Brunei

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues how the politics of scale is paradoxically used by the Bruneian state in environmental policymaking to legitimate its internal authoritarian regime. The literatures on post-politics, green authoritarianism and green as ‘spectacle’ are used in conjunction with personal observation findings on forestry protection and climate change policymaking processes, and triangulation with global environmental performance indices, to explore this paradox. The Bruneian state must justify a strong environmental policy implementation rhetoric, whilst simultaneously having to maintain its domestic authoritarian functioning that relies on fossil fuel extraction and exportation. It does this by engaging in a ‘consensual’ neoliberal post-politics that uses supra-national and international environmental policy frameworks and settings that are liberal democratic and polycentric in nature, through a ‘post-politics of scale’. This article contributes to the wider territory, politics and governance literature by illustrating how internal enviro-political tensions are remedied, inculcated across, and discursively influenced by, wider geographical spaces and politics beyond individual states, regardless of their political regime type.