Michael Deflorian

In modern democratic consumer societies, decentralized, participative, and consensusoriented forms of multi-stakeholder governance are supplementing, and often replacing, conventional forms of state-centered environmental government. The engagement in all phases of the policy process of diverse social actors has become a hallmark of environmental good governance. This does not mean to say, however, that these modes of policy-making have proved particularly successful in resolving the widely debated multiple sustainability crisis. In fact, they have been found wanting in terms of their ability to respond to democratic needs and their capacity to resolve environmental
problems. So why have these participatory forms of environmental governance become so prominent? What exactly is their appeal? What do they deliver? Exploring these questions from the perspective
of eco-political and sociological theory, this article suggests that these forms of environmental governance represent a performative kind of eco-politics that helps liberal consumer societies to manage their inability and unwillingness to achieve the socio-ecological transformation that scientists and environmental activists say is urgently required. This reading of the prevailing policy approaches as the collaborative management of sustained unsustainability adds an important dimension to the understanding of environmental governance and contemporary eco-politics more generally.

Die sozialwissenschaftliche Transformationsforschung hat unlängst den Begriff der Lebensweise ins Zentrum gestellt. Dabei werden etwa eine „imperiale Lebensweise“ oder ein „Externalisierungshabitus“ festgestellt und ein „gutes Leben“ skizziert, das universell gerecht und damit normativ wünschenswert ist. Unterbelichtet ist bisweilen die affektive Dimension der dominanten nicht-nachhaltigen Lebensweise. Diese scheint auch deswegen so attraktiv zu sein, weil sie „dionysische“ Gefühlszustände ermöglicht: Begeisterung, Entgrenzung, Rausch, Übermacht, Ekstase. Mit anderen Worten, die nicht-nachhaltige Lebensweise ist „geil“. Und diese Attraktivität wird nur selten dadurch gemildert, dass sie mittlerweile fragwürdig geworden ist. Gerade der value-action gap in den post-materiellen Milieus legt nahe, dass das „gute Leben“ und das „geile Leben“ für viele wie zwei Seelen in einer Brust existieren. Ziel dieses Forum ist es, das dialektische Verhältnis zwischen den beiden Lebensweisen entlang der Moderne zu erörtern. So hat in der Vergangenheit der fordistische Kompromiss zu einer Verallgemeinerung des „geilen Lebens“ geführt. Heutzutage werden unterschiedliche Wege gesucht, um Konflikte zwischen nicht-nachhaltigem Genuss und nachhaltigem Lebenswunsch zu bewältigen. Und für die Zukunft stellt sich die Frage, ob Erlebnisse der Ausgelassenheit nicht auch fester Bestandteil eines „guten Lebens“ sein müssen, wie etwa die Idee von „dépense“ verspricht.

This thesis deals with the discourse of “sufficiency” as a response to the question of how government should be achieved in times of climate change. Sufficiency implies the critique of the imperative of economic growth and a return to a “sufficient” degree of consumption and partial subsistence in order to reach qualitative well-being. “Government” is understood in the Foucauldian sense as any attempt to shape the behavior of individuals, groups and the self, which can be examined through the lenses of “governmentality”, the rationalities and technologies involved. Drawing from Michel Foucault's endeavor to write a “history of problematics” and Mitchell Dean's framework of an “analytics of government”, I develop a discourse analytical method to scrutinize how government is reconceived through the practice of thought. Three books by leading advocates of the idea of sufficiency, which all hold potential programs of climate government, serve as case studies. By focussing on the fields of visibility, knowledge, technical means and identities of government, I reconstruct the problematization of forms of government, the reconfiguration of governmentalities and the planned subjectification of individuals. My results indicate that human conduct in various domains is to be steered towards the total reduction of energy, resource use and emissions in order to achieve a stable climate in 2050. Through techniques of disciplinary and sovereign power individuals should develop two new “technologies of the self”: the re-balancing of needs (through the reflection on personal aspirations) and the self-furnishing of demands (through practices like gardening, repairing and shared consumption). In that way, the governmentality of sufficiency remediates elements of liberalism and modern progress to guarantee a “good life” for all in a warming world.