Bio-politics of climate change governance : the Australian narrative

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.The central research question of this dissertation is how can a bio-political and historico-materialistic framework help define the specific features of climate crisis and its governance? Through a theoretical assemblage of Foucault’s governmentality supplemented with Marxist conception of primitive accumulation, the main objective of this thesis is to trace a genealogy of climate change governance in Australia in order to unravel different modalities and configurations of relationship between climate and capital creating socio-ecological links in neoliberal environmental governance. Within the broader context of international negotiations on climate governance this thesis focuses on the terrain and specificities of climate governance in Australia between 1990-2008, as a trajectory that connects the discourses of sustainable development from 1990’s to green economy concepts popularized during the course of 2000. The trajectory and policy terrain illustrates a continuing chapter in the history of neoliberalism as progressively hegemonic governmental rationality, creating new modes of regulation in converting nature from enacting limits to economic process to a fundamental element of market valorization. This thesis propose to understand climate policies as regime of power practices organized through problematization, rationalities, programmes and technologies of government. The concept of governmentality helps to explore the social and political logic of such practices as routinized, normalized, sedimented, contested and defended practices of a regime. The merit of a Marxist conception of primitive accumulation helps in the analysis of neo-liberalization of nature that facilitates the expansion of capitalist accumulation through the capture, valuation, monetization and pricing of climate