000 02250nab a2200181 4500
003 OSt
005 20230924145817.0
007 cr aa aaaaa
008 230924b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100 _aMontes, Jesse
_958108
245 _aNeoliberal environmentality in the land of Gross National Happiness/
260 _bSage,
_c2020.
300 _aVol. 3, Issue 2, 2020 ( 300–322 p.)
520 _aThis paper explores how a growing trend towards neoliberalization throughout Bhutan manifests within environmental governance in particular. Bhutan’s well-known Gross National Happiness (GNH) development strategy can be seen to represent a shift towards a variegated governmentality more generally that increasingly exhibits neoliberal tendencies as the country seeks to negotiate its further integration into the global economy. Part of this integration entails efforts to promote ecotourism as a key element of the country’s future conservation strategy. Ecotourism has been described as a growing manifestation of a “neoliberal environmentality” (Fletcher, 2010) within environmental conservation policy and practice, and hence Bhutan’s promotion of ecotourism can be seen as contributing to the promotion of neoliberal conservation. Yet in practice, my analysis demonstrates that environmental governance in Bhutan is a complex of external neoliberal influences filtered through local formal and informal institutions, specifically a Buddhist worldview, a history of state paternalism and the Gross National Happiness governance model, all of which express contrasting governance rationalities. This study thus contributes to governmentality studies by promoting a variegated environmentality perspective that calls for more nuanced analyses beyond “variegated” neoliberalization. This perspective also affords a holistic understanding of discrepancies between the vision and execution of neoliberal conservation that can be attributed to the articulation of alternative rationalities in policy formulation and implementation.
773 0 _012446
_917117
_dLondon: Sage Publication Ltd, 2019.
_tEnvironment and Planning E: Nature and Space/
_x 25148486
856 _uhttps://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619834885
942 _2ddc
_cEJR
999 _c14762
_d14762