Flexible Nature: Governing with the Environment in the Development of U.S. Neoliberalism

The environment is organic to the neoliberal turn, not just as more or less cooperative material inputs or as a surface on which the changes to production and labor relations play out. The frequent finding that nature is being privatized and commodified in new ways is often described as nature's neoliberalization, but these trends do not exhaust the ways in which nature is integral to recent economic transformations. This article is structured around two claims. First, the ways of representing the environment economically that the neoliberal natures literature tends to represent as quite new are actually present and important at the origins of neoliberal policy. A brief genealogy of neoliberalism and nature in U.S. economic policy of the 1970s is surveyed in support of this. Second, work on neoliberal natures has emphasized the commodification and privatization of nature under neoliberalism at the expense of analyzing the environment's role in other important features of neoliberalism. Using qualitative policy analysis and an examination of three modern cases of environmental policy, this article traces the connections between the governance of nature and the governance of other parts of the economy with reference to the more specific economic transformations identified as “post-Fordist.” These similarities are not due to the new application of an established set of techniques of economic governance but because nature was internal to neoliberalism from the beginning not just as resources but as a set of relationships useful for stabilizing capital accumulation.