Multiple environmentalities and post-politicization in a Canadian Mountain Park

Abstract

This research explores the centrality of multiple environmentalities at multiple scales in the post-politicization of conservation governance in Jasper National Park, Canada. Austerity politics in Canada contributed to the post-politicization of conservation as the interests of Parks Canada and private developers were brought into alignment in terms of increasing visitation and the revenue imperative. The Parks Canada Agency, under structural pressure, employed several post-political strategies to suture the space for dissensus and debate and orchestrate the appearance of consent for the private development and management of park services. Central to these strategies were multiple (sovereign, disciplinary, and neoliberal) environmentalities constructed at multiple scales by multiple actors (the federal government, the local parks department, and private sector interests) aimed at producing environmental subjects who understand and acquiesce to the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to a privatized conservation practice. In response, opponents attempted to mobilize an alternative environmentality, combining a social democratic critique of neoliberalism with a Romantic vision of wilderness conservation. Although opponents enrolled a sizeable number of allies, they fell short of stabilizing a liberation environmentality as several underlying points of ‘agreement’ contributed to the stabilization of post-political discourse and practice, foreclosing alternative political economies of conservation.

Keywords

Environmentality post-politics conservation neoliberalism nature-based tourism

Introduction

This article analyses the construction of a post-political art of conservation governance in Jasper National Park, Canada, through the multi-scalar mobilization of multiple environmentalities. I conceptualize a post-political art of government as incorporating neoliberal, disciplinary, and sovereign governmentalizing strategies that create the structural conditions for privatization while disciplining subjects, through force and through discourse, to acquiesce to neoliberal governance. In Jasper, within the context of austerity, federal and local park authorities and business interests employed a series of distinct but interdependent governmentalizing strategies that created the structural conditions for the privatization of park services. Multiple multi-scalar strategies also served to condition citizen-activists to a post-political ‘there is no alternative’ discourse in conservation, to disincentivize engagement in public consultation processes and protest activities, and to create a legal framework to expedite nature-based development projects while penalizing dissidents. This post-political project was bitterly contested by networks of citizen-activists who attempted to mobilize emergent and alternative environmentalities through various protest movement campaigns. Despite their efforts, several underlying points of ‘agreement’ (Forsyth and Walker, 2014), such as the colonial ‘wilderness’ ethic (Cronon, 1996), gave assent to the post-political conservation discourse. I argue that absent a cogent critique of colonial–capitalist conservation, emergent attempts to stabilize liberation environmentalities will not succeed in re-politicizing conservation practice.

To analyse the governmentalizing strategies that contribute to post-politicization, this research draws on the multiple environmentality framework (Fletcher, 2010), which is inspiring a new and growing body of literature in political ecology (Youdelis, 2013; Bluwstein, 2017; Boelens, 2014; Fletcher and Breitling, 2012; Lloro-Bidart, 2017; Wynne-Jones, 2012). This framework builds from Foucault’s 1978–1979 lecture series, The Birth of Biopolitics, published in English in 2008 (Foucault, 2008). In this work, Foucault distinguishes between multiple and discrete forms of governmentality (sovereign, disciplinary, neoliberal, truth, etc.) that may operate separately or in tandem to ‘conduct the conducts’ of citizen-subjects. Sovereign power is considered repressive and utilizes the law and the threat of force or violence to condition subjects into particular behaviours. Disciplinary governmentality ‘conducts conducts’ by encouraging subjects to internalize particular discourses (often ethical norms) and to thus behave in ways consistent with that internalized worldview. Neoliberal governmentality, by contrast, operates by manipulating the environment which enables or constrains subjects, not on the subjects themselves. Neoliberal governmentality ‘conducts conducts’ by setting up incentive (and disincentive) structures to encourage subjects, understood as rational economic actors, to act in circumscribed ways to maximize their own benefit. Neoliberal governmentality may also rely on disciplinary governmentality in order to condition subjects to see themselves as self-interested rational actors concerned first and foremost with maximizing their own utility.

Fletcher (2010) applies this more detailed understanding of multiple governmentalities to Agrawal’s (2005) concept of ‘environmentality’, or a ‘green governmentality’ (Luke, 1999) aimed at creating subjects who ‘care’ about a particular vision of ‘the environment’, and thus self-govern to act in conservation-friendly ways. Rather than treating environmentality as merely disciplinary, or as an imprecise conflation of disciplinary, sovereign, and neoliberal environmentalities, this framework allows scholars to analyse the ways in which multiple and discrete environmentalities operate in tandem and in potentially contradictory ways in any given conservation and development intervention. Ecotourism, for example, employs both neoliberal and disciplinary environmentalities, setting up incentive structures (neoliberal) to encourage entrepreneurialism while simultaneously encouraging the internalization of ethical norms to promote small-scale, conservation-friendly living (disciplinary) (Fletcher, 2010). These conflicting environmentalities can force conservation and development interests into opposition (Author, 2013).

Scholars are increasingly acknowledging the limitations of treating environmentality as a top-down form of subject creation and not taking seriously the agency and aspirations of subjects themselves. Haller et al. (2018), for example, have developed ‘constitutionality’ as a framework of inquiry that explores how local actors actively build institutions to manage natural resources for collective benefit. There is increasing recognition that subjects with their own unique understandings of and feelings towards nature and sustainability can also work to spread discourses to encourage others to self-govern in particular ways (Singh, 2013). Indeed, Foucault has alluded to the possibility of mobilizing a socialist art of government from below, and Fletcher (2010) describes political ecology’s opportunity to advance a liberation environmentality, which would champion ‘democratic, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical forms of natural resource management in which local peoples enjoy a genuinely participatory (if not self-mobilizing) role’ (178). This research builds on this body of literature to analyse how, within contexts of austerity, citizens are conditioned to a post-political environmentality, but also how networks of citizen-activists in Jasper are mobilizing a unique alternative environmentality to contest the corporate–government vision for conservation in Canada.

Departing from the literature on post-politics, this research theorizes post-politics as an art of government in itself, stabilized through multiple environmentalities operating at multiple scales. While the concept of anti-politics grew out of critical development literature focused primarily on interventions in the Global South (Büscher, 2010; Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007), the concept of post-politics grew out of conversations in political philosophy around the meaning of politics in (often Northern) liberal democracies (Crouch, 2004; Mouffe, 2005; Ranciere, 1998). French philosophers argued for a distinction between the institutionally co-ordinated sphere of policy-making (the police/la politique) and politics proper (the political/le politique), understood as radical dissensus and antagonism – a disruption on the part of ‘those who have no part’ (Ranciere, 1998) or those who are structurally marginalized. Liberal democracy posits the demos as encompassing the whole, imagining freedom and equality of opportunity to be universal, which obscures the domination of private property owners and the ‘monopolizers of the common property’ (Ranciere, 1998: 8). This, Rancière argues, is the ‘miscount’ of liberal democratic ideology, which imagines that there is a ‘common good’ that can be arrived at through a mere balancing of interests and not a fundamental reorganization of political economy. As capitalist hegemony consumes both land and labour to reproduce itself (Polanyi, 1941), I would add non-human natures to ‘those who have no part’.

In contrast to the properly political, ‘the police’ represent the institutionally driven field of policy-making that endeavours to manufacture cohesion and stability in an otherwise fractured social order (Marchart, 2007; Nancy, 1992; Ranciere, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2011). ‘The police’ therefore reproduce the miscount of liberal democracies by taking for granted and erasing the structures and processes that marginalize ‘those who have no part’, and by reducing democracy to the technocratic management of what Badiou (2008) calls the ‘capitalo-parliamentary order’. ‘The police’ depoliticize the economy itself and reduce politics to the construction and management of consensus around neoliberal capitalism as the preferred mechanism for resource allocation and social provisioning, which ‘limits or circumscribes the political choices offered to the citizen’ (Swyngedouw, 2011: 372). Crouch (2004) and others consider this new regime ‘post-democratic’, where public debate is a ‘tightly controlled spectacle’ (4) and citizens have increasingly passive roles while elected officials predominantly represent business interests. The understandable growing apathy of the citizenry with respect to political processes only allows for a more seamlessly choreographed spectacle (Crouch, 2004; Giroux, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2011).

In a post-political frame, the political dissensus and debate requisite for the practice of democracy is evacuated from the sphere of policy negotiation, and governance is reduced to ‘policing’ consensual politics and technocratic policy-making (Mouffe, 2005; Ranciere, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2010, 2011; Zizek, 1999). Post-political governance orchestrates the appearance of consensus around ‘there is no alternative’ thinking around neoliberal capitalism as the basic socio-economic order, which is elevated beyond critique. Importantly, consensus is never actually achieved, but the appearance of consensus is ‘orchestrated’ (Fletcher, 2014) ‘as one of the tactics through which spaces of conflict and antagonism are smoothed over and displaced’ (Swyngedouw, 2010: 226).

While the anti-politics of integrated conservation and conservation interventions has been explored through a political ecology lens (often focused on the Global South) (Büscher, 2010; Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007), post-politics has been employed to a limited extent in the critical political ecology literature.¹ Swyngedouw argues that the orchestration of consensus around environmental crises and potential solutions sustains ‘the deepening of the post-political condition’ (2010: 225) and post-democratic environmental management (2009). Through ethnographic analysis of the 2012 World Conservation Congress, Fletcher (2014) demonstrates that conservation discourse is becoming increasingly post-political, contributing to ‘the ideological hegemony of neoliberal logic in conservation policy and practice’ (33). While these analyses identified certain post-political strategies, my analysis goes further in analysing the governmentalizing mechanisms through which post-politicization is enacted. Additionally, while critics point out that post-political analysis can be totalizing and disempowering (Beveridge and Koch, 2017; Larner, 2014), my analysis understands post-politics as an always contested and precarious achievement. I explore post-politicization not as the seamless imposition of one political ideology over another, but as enacted through struggle as a multitude of stakeholders employ governmentalizing strategies to enrol allies and stabilize certain ‘truths’ into policy. Post-political bureaucratic power requires a certain degree of public assent (Matthews, 2011), and often there are underlying points of ‘agreement’ between stakeholders that inadvertently legitimate authoritative knowledge and ‘restrict democratic debate about environmental policy’ (Forsyth and Walker, 2014: 409).

The novelty and contributions to the literature of this paper are thus threefold. While prominent scholars have elucidated the ways in which development interventions in the Global South operate as ‘anti-politics machines’, conspicuously neglecting structural issues in discussions and interventions around poverty alleviation (Büscher, 2010; Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007), this paper elucidates the ways in which post-political conservation governance is constructed in the Global North where citizen-subjects are not recipients of development programmes (and their associated techniques of government) but middle class environmentalists. In this northern post-political frame, disciplinary techniques focus less on conditioning subjects to participate in interventions in particular ways but instead condition subjects to cease to participate in consultation processes or to act in protest of neoliberalization. While work in political ecology has begun to explore how conservation discourse is becoming increasingly post-political (Fletcher, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2010), this paper theorizes post-politics as an art of government in itself – combining multi-scalar sovereign, neoliberal, and disciplinary tactics mobilized by variously positioned actors – and demonstrates how these multiple governmentalizing strategies interact to render conservation post-political through grounded empirical study. I demonstrate how each interrelated technique of government serves to subordinate ecology and politics to the technocratic management of the economy, suturing space for political dissent or meaningful engagement. Lastly, while both post-politics and environmentality as conceptual frames have been critiqued as being top-down and disempowering (Beveridge and Koch, 2017; Haller et al., 2018; Larner, 2014; Singh, 2013), this research illustrates an interesting attempt at mobilizing an alternative environmentality and analyses why this attempt has thus far failed to stabilize the kind of ‘liberation environmentality’ preliminarily sketched by Fletcher (2010). As little work has explored emergent alternative environmentalities and the conditions that give rise to their successes or failures, this research has practical relevance. Understanding the governmentalizing mechanisms that render conservation post-political is crucial to fortifying resistance movements aimed at mobilizing and stabilizing truly liberatory environmentalities.

Parks Canada and austerity politics

Canada’s mountain parks, particularly Banff and Jasper, have been embroiled in several fierce controversies around private development and privatization of services since major budget cuts to Parks Canada in 2012. Controversies include the Glacier Skywalk (Wittmeier, 2012), Maligne Tours’ hotel proposal (Mertz, 2015), the Lake Louise development guidelines (Derworiz, 2015), the private operation of the golf course and the Mother Canada Statue development proposal in Cape Breton Highlands National Park (Collins, 2012), the fracking controversy in Gros Morne National Park (CBC News, 2013), and controversies around privatizing the Banff and Miette hot springs (Stephenson and Ellis, 2012). The mountain parks are rather unique, being both the oldest and most touristed national parks in Canada, and some of the few parks (7 out of 188) where private businesses have been grandfathered in. Because of the extraordinary visitation rates and the presence of private operators in Banff–Jasper, these are the money-making parks of the system and are perhaps under greater pressure to generate revenue in times of austerity.

The groundwork for austerity was laid in the 1980s when free park-run programmes and full-time park interpreters were being replaced by part-time, seasonal private outfitters. Austerity began to significantly affect parks in the 1990s, however, as the Liberal government under Jean Chretien cut $123 m between 1993 and 1998 (Kopas, 2007). The 1998 Agency Act then turned Parks Canada into a special agency headed by a CEO. The act legislated that Parks Canada would continue to receive a yearly budget, but that they would retain the revenues generated from each park. In times of austerity, then, the agency was pressed to generate enough revenue to make up the difference. Kevin Van Tighem, former superintendent of Banff, explained:

What [the Agency Act] did was it basically hardwired a potential for serious mandate drift, because it means that now we are completely in the same bed as the tourism industry in the sense that we live or breathe on revenues. So, there’s a real revenue imperative now. That revenue imperative becomes even more powerful … It gets magnified with every bit of budget cut you get.²

In 2005, the Visitor Experience branch of Parks Canada was formed and the agency began channelling more of its resources towards marketing and tourism offerings. Each park now has a conservation department and a visitor experience department, with conservation scientists primarily making up the conservation staff and business and marketing experts making up the visitor experience staff. Between 2012 and 2016, the Conservative government under Stephen Harper then cut a total of $84 m from Parks Canada (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2016), resulting in a 33% loss of scientific staff in the first year (Office of the Auditor General of Canada, 2013). Karsten Heuer, former warden, said:

When I started with Parks, for instance, we had 12 people covering the full extent of the backcountry. By the time I left there was basically one and a half of us, maybe two. It was just this progression of undermining how we could actually even track how the ecology of the park was doing.

Former wardens lamented that the cuts to conservation capacity outweighed those to visitor experience, which is reflected in Parks Canada’s corporate plans between 2010 and 2015. While spending fell in areas relating to ecological integrity (e.g. establishing heritage spaces, conserving heritage spaces), it increased in areas relating to visitor experience (e.g. enhancing visitor experience, townsite, and throughway management). For example, spending in conserving heritage spaces fell from 31% in 2009 to 21% in 2015 while spending on enhancing visitor experience rose from 34 to 41% (Parks Canada, 2009, 2017). This selective austerity is exemplary of the government’s neoliberal vision of conservation as a business that is self-funding.

Brewster Travel proposed the Glacier Skywalk in 2011 just before the 2012 budget cuts. Brewster began as an Albertan company in the late 19th century but has since been acquired by Viad Corporation based in Phoenix, Arizona. The Skywalk, now built, is a 400 metre interpretive trail complete with a glass-floored ‘skywalk’ that overhangs the Sunwapta Valley. The proposal elicited a significant countermovement. Concerned citizens, environmental groups, Indigenous nations, journalists, academics, and foreign tourists publicly opposed the project. Concerns included: corporate–government partnerships seeking profits over conservation principles, the ability for all Canadians to access park services, public resources becoming privatized, a commitment to democratic participation, and respecting the role of parks as understood to protect ‘wilderness’ or our national heritage. This project elicited the largest response to an environmental assessment in Parks Canada’s history, which was predominantly negative. Despite public outcry, Parks Canada framed opposition to the project as a matter of ‘personal values’ and not a legitimate reason to turn down the proposal. Then Minister of the Environment Peter Kent stepped in to approve the project, overruling the Superintendent of Jasper National Park’s request for further time to deliberate and a more robust environmental assessment. Several stakeholders believe the decision to approve was made in Ottawa prior to public consultation, pointing to the fact that Brewster Travel was lobbying the government (OCL-C, 2013). The experience left citizens and environmental groups concerned with the efficacy of public consultation and the ability of Canadians to democratically participate in park decision-making.

In 2013, following this approval, Maligne Tours proposed a luxury hotel and several other attractions such as tent cabins, a wildlife-themed maze, horseback riding trails, and more at Maligne Lake where the company currently runs daily boat tours to Spirit Island. This proposal would contravene Jasper’s management plan and the 2007 Outlying Commercial Accommodations Guidelines, and arguably would further disturb threatened and endangered species in the area such as woodland caribou (Plummer, 2013). Parks Canada turned down the hotel portion of the proposal, but greenlighted all of the other attractions including the overnight tent cabins which many argue would have similar impacts to the hotel and would similarly contravene the management plan. Opposition is thus ongoing, although it is unclear at this point if the company will pursue the rest of the attractions without approval of the hotel.³

In both controversies, public and Indigenous actors were invited to comment within extremely narrowly prescribed parameters. Park authorities positioned opponents’ political objections to the neoliberalization of conservation as outside the scope of what would be considered in final decision-making. This paper will focus less on the specifics of these cases, which I outline elsewhere (see Youdelis, 2016, 2018), and will instead focus on the ways in which post-politicization operated as an art of government contingent on multiple environmentalities to both create the structural conditions for private development and management of park services and to condition citizen-subjects to a ‘there is no alternative’ discourse around how parks should be funded and governed. In such a frame, disciplinary tactics aimed to decrease instead of increase public participation in governance. Post-politicization was not seamless but was fiercely contested by activists mobilizing an alternative environmentality. Despite their efforts, several underlying points of ‘agreement’ (Forsyth and Walker, 2014) between political opponents gave assent to certain management options and foreclosed alternatives.

Methods

This research was conducted over a six-month period in 2014, directly after the opening of the Glacier Skywalk and during the height of the Maligne Tours’ controversy. I lived in Jasper during this time, a small township of under 5000 people entirely within Jasper National Park, and gathered data primarily through in-depth semi-structured interviews, supplemented with document analysis and participant observation. I attended public protests and meetings and also visited and spoke with tourists at the two attractions. I interviewed the CEO of Parks Canada, the superintendent of the park, the senior land use manager, the visitor experience liaison, former bosses like the former superintendent of Banff and former Chief Ecosystem Scientist for Parks Canada, former wardens, environmental groups, local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Jasper, outlying commercial accommodation owners, journalists, academics, local residents (both opponents and proponents), the president of Brewster Travel, the general manager of Maligne Tours, and representatives from several First Nations, for a total of 51 interviews. I initially coded data in 2015, using Dedoose software, according to my dissertation research questions concerned primarily with austerity politics, post-politicization, and discourses employed by proponents and opponents of private development to enrol allies. Upon further reflection and in conversation with Dr Fletcher, one of the organizers of this special issue, I realized that the data could be productively re-read through the multiple environmentality framework. I recognized that the post-political strategies I had identified rested on the inter-scalar mobilization of multiple and contrasting environmentalities and that understanding post-politics as such could uncover productive possibilities for resistance. I thus re-coded data to include multiple environmentalities (sovereign, disciplinary, neoliberal, etc.) in May of 2018, and presented this paper in the panel series on new directions in environmentality research at the Political Ecology Network Conference in Oslo, Norway in June of 2018.

Multiple environmentalities and post-politicization

Austerity politics in Jasper brought the interests of private developers and the parks department into alignment in terms of increasing visitation and the revenue imperative (Youdelis, 2018). Under fiscal pressure, proponents employed a series of post-political strategies to circumvent political debate and streamline the approval of unpopular tourism development projects. These strategies relied upon the mobilization of multiple environmentalities at multiple scales which worked in tandem to stabilize a post-political environmental discourse and practice that posits no alternative to a privatized conservation. In the following sections, I will first detail the multiple environmentalities employed by proponents and how these contributed to this post-political discourse. Following that, I will examine opponents’ mobilization of an alternative environmentality. I end with a discussion of how a detailed understanding of the multiple environmentalities that shape post-politicization is useful in efforts to re-politicize conservation and in grassroots efforts to mobilize liberation environmentalities.

Federal government

Disciplinary

Peyton and Franks (2015) argue that the conservative Harper government (2006–2015), which was in power for both controversies, pursued a ‘totalizing strategy’ to reconfigure Canadian environmental subjects to self-direct public approval of resource or nature-based development projects. They argue that:

This design has several distinctive elements: totalizing discourses designed to amalgamate environment and resources within the economy; manipulations of legislative and regulatory apparatuses to favour extractive potential; the management of consent for the purpose of securing certainty over territory; and the promotion of a reductive post-politics that links environmental utility with desired social progress. (Peyton and Franks, 2015: 3)

As Canada’s economy is based in large part on natural resource extraction and capitalizing on wilderness-based tourism, the federal government’s business-focused regime pursued discursive strategies to condition subjects to understand nature primarily as natural resource, and to understand conservation as valuable only if it ensures long-term economic development. This also involved sovereign tactics to roll back protections on lands and waterways (Bill C38), to develop projects that may affect the navigability of waterways without taking into account First Nations’ rights or title (Bill C45), and to gut the environmental assessment process to streamline the approval of resource and tourism development projects (Assembly of First Nations, 2012; Kirchoff and Tsuji, 2014). These changes were pushed through in Omnibus budget bills. Examples of this government’s disciplinary tactics include pouring resources into advertising campaigns to promote their ‘Responsible Resources Development’ programme and suggesting that the climate consensus was ‘exaggerated’ (Curry, 2014; Peyton and Franks, 2015); brazenly labelling environmentalists as radical ideologues working against the national interest (De Souza, 2013; Oliver, 2012); and listing ‘eco-terrorists’ as threats in their anti-terrorism strategy (McCarthy, 2012). Positioning the commodification of nature as crucial (and indeed the only available option) for building the Canadian economy and demonizing environmental dissidents is part of this ‘totalizing strategy’ to produce subjects who will acquiesce to, that is stop protesting, the approval of resource and tourism development projects.

Neoliberal

Neoliberal governmentality does not act on people’s morals but acts on the environment that either constrains or enables them in order to encourage certain behaviours and outcomes based around cost–benefit analysis. The former liberal government under Jean Chretien turning PC into a special agency headed by a CEO that would henceforth be under pressure to produce its own revenues created an environment where the interests of private developers and Parks Canada would align. Austerity politics themselves, when applied to environmental management, can be understood as a neoliberal form of environmentality. Cutting conservation budgets creates an environment where private revenues are ever more necessary for the functioning of the Parks Canada Agency. Parks Canada, weighing the costs and benefits and pursuing their own best interest as a ‘rational economic actor’, seeks out or at least welcomes these kinds of partnerships to try to meet their mandate. In this regulatory environment, responsibility for funding environmental management becomes relegated to the private sector, whose own ecological impact can not be easily ‘decoupled’ from business growth (Fletcher and Rammelt, 2017). The lack of federal funding then itself contributes to the post-political discourse that there is no alternative to privatization, or certainly that alternatives are not open for public debate.

Sovereign

As mentioned, the Harper government that was in power during the height of both controversies pursued economic growth through environmental deregulation and extractivism, and welcomed privatization and development in national parks. Bills C38 and C45, pushed through in Omnibus budget bills, made sweeping changes to protections on lands and waterways, disrespecting Indigenous sovereignty and land rights, in order to expedite development projects. This government also gutted the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in 2012 for the same purpose (Gibson, 2012).

The clearest example of heavy-handed sovereign environmentality at the federal level was the gag order against all federal scientists. Called the ‘muzzling’ of scientists in the media (CBC News, 2018), or Harper’s ‘war on science’ (Turner, 2013), no federal scientist could respond to any questions from the media, or even from any researcher or concerned citizen asking questions (such as myself, during my dissertation research) without first having their responses approved in Ottawa. Lawrence Martin (2010: 58) writes that the Prime Minister put in place ‘a message-control system, a vetting operation unlike anything ever seen in the capital. No other [Canadian] government had even come close to such a system of oversight’. Environment Canada and Parks Canada were among the most tightly controlled departments. Staff had to pass all queries to media relations or risk job termination. The International Polar Year conference in 2012 serves as a flagrant example of this top-down control. Media handlers accompanied each and every Environment Canada scientist who spoke at the conference, supervising their presentations and ensuring all queries were redirected to themselves. No other country’s scientists had to speak through surveillants or risk repercussions. ‘An Environment Canada researcher, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, called it a “crude, heavy-handed approach to muzzle Canadian scientists”’(Turner, 2013: 24).

This heavy-handed approach very clearly removed important points of debate from the public sphere and ensured that the federal government held firm control over what was allowed and disallowed in environmental discourse. Threatened by job termination, public servants were frightened into complicity. This approach purged potential sites of political contention from the public sphere and politics was oriented to the management of the economy, to which the environment was subordinated (Mitchell, 2008; Swyngedouw, 2010).

Local park governance

Disciplinary

Disciplinary tactics in this case served to condition citizens to a post-political discourse of conservation governance in order to dispirit resistance. Contrary to tactics used in development interventions to encourage participation in governmental programmes (Agrawal, 2005; Li, 2007), disciplinary environmentality in Jasper aimed to discourage protest and engagement through ‘there is no alternative’ thinking. This included the discursive elevation of the concept of ‘visitor experience’ to the same (if not higher) importance than conservation in Jasper’s mandate. Visitor experience was front and centre in park planning documents and press releases since 2005, and notably during the height of both controversies. This was of course coupled with an increase in funding for visitor experience while funding for ecological integrity fell over the 2010–2016 time period. In town, people came to recognize the importance of private actors to fund the continuation of the park after the 2012 budget cuts (i.e. ‘there is no alternative’).

The Jasper Management Plan of 2010 lists seven top priorities, the first three of which reference visitor experience. Ecological integrity was priority number four, and managing growth and development number seven. Greg Fenton, the Superintendent of the park at the time, said that at the field level:

It is extremely difficult to get increases in appropriations. If you look at the governments, irrespective if its Conservative or Liberal or anybody else, there are always deficits to manage. When you’re in a deficit situation there isn’t money to go out to departments and agencies. That’s why it becomes so important for us to increase visitation and revenues.

Nicole Veerman, editor of Jasper’s local Fitzhugh paper and vocal opponent of the project, said: ‘I understand the situation we're in. I'm more than well aware that we have no money, and that really we need money to continue running this park, but I don't think this is the answer’. The discourse around the inadequacy of federal funding was so prevalent that even opponents of the project felt that a viable alternative to private development would be hard to imagine.

Feeling that private development was inevitable, opponents lost heart assuming that the deals were already made prior to public consultation. The effect was to discourage certain people from continuing to participate in consultation with the park or with protest against development. ‘We just exhaust ourselves caring about processes that are fixed in advance’, said former park naturalist Ben Gadd.

If you’re really going to oppose this stuff, you have a lot of work to do. You have to read the briefs, you have to get up on the issues, and then you have to be willing to take the kind of punishment that comes from it. In the end it wears you out, because the system is too hard to fight.

Many respondents felt that parks actually hopes for this, that opponents will exhaust themselves, become jaded, and stop showing up to fight. Indeed, Swyngedouw (2011) explains that in a post-political regime, ‘the growing apathy of ordinary people with respect to the democratic political process is noted but banalized as not central to the “proper” functioning of democratic institutions’ (372). Discursive post-political tactics thus serve to diminish debate and dissensus in the public sphere and produce subjects who acquiesce to conservation-as-business through inaction.

Framing parks as facilitators of privately run visitor experiences resonates with broader neoliberal discourses that position private companies as far more ‘efficient’ in managing public services. Parks Canada framed the private sector as being better equipped to offer exciting tourism services that will help the park to ‘modernize’ and reach new audiences. Parks Canada recognizes that demographics in Canada are changing, and is thus pushing to attract (predominantly non-white) new Canadians and urban youth⁴ in an effort to increase overall visitation by 2% per year. Jasper authorities thus framed their willingness to consider these private proposals, despite contravening policy, as coming from a desire to make the parks both more inclusive and relevant/profitable. On this point, both proponents and opponents agree – parks should be more inclusive and accessible. The divergence is around how exactly to increase inclusivity, through tax-funded programmes or private attractions? This underlying point of agreement lent inadvertent assent to Parks Canada’s claims to be addressing these problems through private offerings.

Sovereign

Sovereign environmentality defines the relationship between Jasper National Park and Indigenous nations whose traditional territories overlap with park boundaries. Jasper’s establishment, like all of the early southern parks, was an exercise in colonial territorialization, declaring sovereignty over territory that was already being managed by various Indigenous nations. Authorities evicted those nations in order to actualize a colonial–capitalist environmental ethic, foreclosing Indigenous environmentalities based on ‘truth’⁵ (Youdelis, 2016; MacLaren, 2007, 2011). This unjustified assertion of colonial sovereignty continues today. The park continues to alienate First Nations from their land bases for the benefit of private industry and settlers/tourists. Further, the park refuses to acknowledge Indigenous laws or territorial sovereignty and requires First Nations to participate in decision-making on park terms, disrespecting nation-to-nation or government-to-government relationships (Youdelis, 2016; ICE, 2018). This continues to impose a particular understanding and practice of ‘wilderness’ (Cronon, 1996) conservation that structures human–nature relationships primarily through for-profit tourism and vilifies traditional economies.

Jasper authorities also employ sovereign environmentality at the local park level through enforcement of the federal gag order. Two incidents in Jasper exemplify the sovereign enforcement of a post-political environmentality. The first is the serious reprisal of Terry Winkler, a Jasper warden who was laid off in the 2012 budget cuts. Because Parks Canada laid him off close to retirement age, he had the option of taking an educational leave for two years to minimize the number of years he would be penalized. Although he had been laid off, Jasper still considered him to be an employee while he was on educational leave, and thus he was bound by the employee code of conduct. During the Maligne hotel controversy, he attended a town meeting about the proposal and asked a question about the OCA guidelines that the proposed project would contravene:

I was asking a question about a policy that they had on file that is part of their management plan. I wasn’t criticising, I wasn’t doing anything! I just said ‘Do you have this policy?’ Yes, you do. ‘Okay, how does that affect what we’re discussing today?’

The question caught the Parks Canada staff members leading the meeting off guard. It appears that up until that point, park authorities had not been aware of the conflict with existing policy. Unsure of what to say, the meeting leader said that perhaps Parks Canada would change the guidelines, which was met with outrage from citizens upset that the agency would nonchalantly suggest changing policies derived from years of public consultation at the behest of industry. For asking this question, Terry was issued a disciplinary letter and was told that if he did not cease and desist attending public meetings or posing questions immediately, that further action could be taken including being fired outright. ‘It’s not something they should be pretending doesn’t exist’, he said. ‘It’s in a public document’.

The second incident was the unexpected dismissal without cause of the former senior scientist, John Wilmshurst. John was extremely well-respected within the agency during his 15 years as senior scientist and was well-loved by the townspeople of Jasper. Over 100 former Parks Canada employees and scientists signed an open letter against his firing, arguing that this was another politically motivated dismissal of an esteemed scientist who would not give the agency his endorsement on various tourism development plans, and accusing the government of terminating him to instil fear among those still working for the agency (Pratt, 2015). These sovereign tactics similarly serve to control environmental discourse and practice, constructing and upholding a post-political environmentality where political challenges to the neoliberal conservation doctrine are contained, disciplined, and ultimately disavowed.

Private companies

Disciplinary

The private sector attempted to recognize all that is problematic about ‘wilderness’-thinking and leverage it to further their business interests. Dave Mckenna, former president of Brewster Travel, used the idea that First Nations had always been a part of nature in the Banff–Jasper area to argue that the commercial Skywalk attraction was appropriate and sustainable – a comparable example of dissolving the human–nature dualism. ‘Out at one of the Banff Lake Cruise Tours there’s an old archaeological site that First Nations have been using for well over 10,000 years’, he said. ‘So human beings have always been part of this environment, we can’t separate that. It’s really about how we interact with our environment to make sure we don’t over-stress it’.

Opponents have pointed out the irony of Brewster developing an attraction based around diesel bus trips (which increase the company’s carbon emissions) when the bulk of their revenue comes from taking tourists out onto the rapidly retreating Athabasca Glacier, questioning what ‘sustainability’ means to business proponents. McKenna himself said the impetus for the Skywalk was to create a ‘zero impact’ attraction, but was taken aback when I asked if he planned to make his bus fleet run on renewable energy. Nonetheless, private actors have been employing the discourse to strategically align themselves as progressives trying to move beyond ‘wilderness’-thinking, and consequently to discredit opponents as extremists who are against progress of any kind. This was coupled with statements reinforcing the ‘there is no alternative’ discourse, framing private partnerships as necessary for conservation. In Maligne Tours’ conceptual proposal, for example, they state:

If [Maligne Tours Ltd.] is going to continue in its role as Parks Canada’s partner and the caretaker of Maligne Lake - together with all of the responsibilities the company has assumed or inherited over the years due to changes in Parks Canada’s priorities or budget cutbacks at Parks Canada - then there will need to be incremental sources of revenue by way of more customers purchasing more products or fewer customers spending more for higher quality experiences. (32)

Private disciplinary tactics thus encourage subjects to internalize the idea that business interests represent an integral and indeed progressive force in conservation practice in order to diminish dissent and promote acquiescence.

Neoliberal

In terms of neoliberal environmentality, both companies attempted to incentivize Indigenous approval of the projects through gifts or employment opportunities. Maligne Tours offered the opportunity for Indigenous nations to sell crafts by the lake, and potentially to lead fireside chats for overnight guests. Brewster Travel offered the possibility of employment opportunities for Indigenous community members to potentially act as guides and Indigenous story-tellers at the attraction. These offers never did come to fruition. Instead, visitors at the Skywalk take self-guided tours with audio guides, which (at the time of my visits in 2014) did not detail the complex history of Indigenous occupation or the relationships that various Indigenous nations have with the Athabasca glacier. The former president of Brewster Travel said that the company did not feel comfortable telling Indigenous stories, which is reasonable, however as Indigenous guides are not present, these stories are not being told.

An alternative environmentality from below

This was all fervently contested by networks of activists mobilizing a countervailing environmentality. This environmentality contains aspects of what might be considered a liberation environmentality (Fletcher, 2010), but combined with a fairly problematic Romantic ‘wilderness’ ethic (Cronon, 1996) that maligns Indigenous livelihoods or economies. Opponents employed several disciplinary strategies at various scales. Local citizens and environmental groups held protests, organized meetings, issued press releases, articles and blog posts, organized letter-writing campaigns, and passed out pamphlets to townspeople and tourists. Nationally, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) ran several campaigns such as the ‘Fight for Your Parks’ campaign asking Canadians to save the parks (particularly Banff and Jasper) from privatization. Former Parks Canada bosses from across the country came together to write open letters to the former Minister of the Environment and to speak out on the issues on national media (CBC News, 2014; Derworiz, 2015). Opponents also attempted to use the sovereign legal system to their advantage, with the Jasper Environmental Organization (JEA) and CPAWS suing Parks Canada in court over the approval of the Maligne tent cabins which contravene the park management plan. The judge ruled that it was not illegal for park managers to consider projects that contravene the management plan, but that no project could indeed go forward without amending that plan.

The ‘liberatory’ aspects of this particular environmentality include an explicit rejection of neoliberal logics in conservation, which was stressed to me in interviews with opponents of private interests in parks. Ben Gadd, former Parks Canada interpreter, said:

The net effect of the cut in funding is that more funding has to come from the private sector, which then produces another cut in funding. We’re chasing the system to the bottom of the barrel. The basic right wing philosophy is if you don’t pay for services, they won’t happen unless the private sector does it. Rich people can always afford those services, and they don’t care about the poor.

The JEA organized several Avaaz.org petitions against private development in the mountain parks, and austerity politics were front and centre in the text:

Since 1969, Parks Canada has refused overnight accommodation at this iconic wilderness lake. But the government has slashed funding for our parks and is slowly re-shaping the places we love. Two years ago, they approved a monstrous “Skywalk” alongside the Icefields Parkway. Now they’re considering approval of this hotel on the lovely Maligne Lake even though it would go against Jasper National Park’s policies and guidelines. … (Avaaz.org, 2014, bold in original)

Opponents frame P3 partnerships as ideologically driven decisions not to invest in the national parks and feel strongly that Canada needs to take an alternative approach. Opponents’ disciplinary discourse, which continues to be mobilized today, advances a Keynesian or social democratic political economy of conservation, where parks should be fully tax funded and independent bodies could prevent park policy from changing at the whim of different politicians (Gadd, 2013).

The opposition also includes pushback against the park and private sector’s vision of inclusion being only for those families who can afford additional expenses in an already expensive park, particularly with respect to the luxury hotel at Maligne Lake. Opponents thus attempt to incorporate class into the discussions around inclusivity and argue for more free government-run education and tourism programmes in lieu of the private for-profit model. However, the underlying point of agreement that parks need to diversify lends legitimacy to Parks Canada’s supposed reason for welcoming these private projects. Unfortunately, opponents also largely advance a conservation narrative that replicates ‘wilderness’-thinking as critiqued by Cronon (1996). They deservedly critique neoliberal logics in conservation, but do not fundamentally challenge the capitalist leisure-based relationship with nature that underscores the ‘wilderness’ ethic. Rather than mobilizing against colonial–capitalist conservation itself, opponents largely argue that the scale of tourism within parks should be reduced. Tourism that threatens ecological integrity should happen outside of park boundaries.

As this particular environmentality does not fundamentally challenge the colonial–capitalist vision of conservation, opponents at times unfortunately demonize traditional land-based livelihoods simply because of the immediate visibility of the ‘damage’ to wilderness. Killing an animal or harvesting forest products has immediate visible effects, as opposed to the invisible impacts of our consumptive activities in capitalist townsites where ecological footprints are largely out of sight and out of mind. This led many residents and environmental activists in Jasper to oppose a recent park-led reconciliation effort where the Simpcw First Nation was allowed to do a traditional hunt, harvesting six animals in the park (Matthews, 2017).

In the following section, I will discuss why and how conservation governance was rendered post-political despite this animated and passionate opposition, and conclude with how a detailed understanding of multiple environmentalities in post-politics can help us in our attempts to actualize a liberation environmentality.

Discussion

Post-political literature draws connections between neoliberalization and a post-political socio-spatial order where political dissensus and debate is evacuated from the public sphere and governance is reduced to techno-managerial policy-making based around cost–benefit analysis (Ranciere, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2011). In Jasper National Park, austerity politics created the structural conditions for the post-politicization of conservation governance as the interests of private operators and park authorities were brought into alignment. Under fiscal pressure, park authorities employed a series of post-political strategies to suture the space for political debate and orchestrate the appearance of consensus around the neoliberalization of conservation (Youdelis, 2018). This paper exposed the centrality of multiple environmentalities in enacting post-politics, and how post-politics acts as an art of government in itself, mobilizing a variety of governmentalizing strategies across multiple, overlapping scales. The post-political art of government works to evacuate dissensus and debate from the public sphere through neoliberal and sovereign governmentalizing strategies across various scales while making people acquiesce to ‘there is no alternative’ thinking through similarly multi-scalar disciplinary tactics. In the case presented, actors within consecutive federal governments employed neoliberal tactics to create the structural conditions for privatization of park services; disciplinary tactics to produce particular kinds of environmental subjects who self-direct approval for resource or nature-based development projects; and sovereign tactics to create a legal framework that expedites development projects, punishes dissidents, and creates an environment of fear around speaking out. In Jasper, Parks Canada and the private sector similarly employed sovereign, disciplinary, and neoliberal strategies to condition subjects to a post-political discourse, discipline dissent, and orchestrate the appearance of consent for development. Understanding exactly how these multiple environmentalities were mobilized by various actors across scales is key to demystifying how conservation can be rendered post-political despite opposition from citizen-activists.

This paper also demonstrated that post-politicization is not absolutely top-down, inevitable, or uncontested, but is rather enacted through struggle and the relational agency of a multitude of stakeholders across scales. Opponents resisted using disciplinary and sovereign tactics, attempting to mobilize a countervailing environmentality from below. Despite their dedication and success in agitating citizens across the country, there were several underlying points of ‘agreement’ (Forsyth and Walker, 2014) that gave assent to the post-political environmental discourse. These points of agreement (such as the idea that humans should relate to wilderness mainly through ‘non-consumptive’ tourism, that parks should be inclusive and accessible, that parks need funding, etc.), along with structural pressures and unequal power relations between proponents and opponents, contributed to the ultimate stabilization of the post-political narrative and its expression in park policy.

I would argue that the most deleterious point of ‘agreement’ is that a colonial–capitalist relationship with nature is appropriate, and that we merely need to regulate the scale of development within parks. This shared understanding of human/non-human relationships works to uphold Parks Canada’s management structure and authority, and ultimately contributes to rendering conservation post-political. If the problem is only a matter of scale of development, park technocrats can assert that new development projects are indeed justified, as disturbance can be kept to a minimum or offset through mitigation measures. The debate revolves around how much use is responsible use, or whether it is possible to poke holes in the environmental assessment, rather than a struggle to redefine ‘use’ itself, and the political economic relations that structure our relationships with non-human natures. This is arguably why, despite broad scale buy-in from Canadians, this ‘alternative’ environmentality has not been actualized in conservation policy, and it has not brought us closer to Fletcher’s (2010) conception of a liberation environmentality.

Austerity politics or the mobilization of neoliberal environmentality similarly hinders opponents’ abilities to mobilize and actualize a social democratic environmentality. If opponents are not fundamentally challenging the colonial–capitalist political economy of conservation, and austerity is enacted to keep that political economy afloat, then opponents and proponents end up ‘agreeing’ that additional funding is urgently necessary and that private partnerships are rational (though perhaps undesirable) in such a context. As parks are pushed to become more and more self-funding, citizens’ roles in decision-making shrink as technocrats must increasingly base decisions around cost–benefit analysis. As I’ve demonstrated, neoliberal tactics coalesce with disciplinary strategies to condition people to a post-political narrative while sovereign tactics penalize dissidence and disavow challenges to the status quo. Absent a coherent challenge to this post-political environmentality, the space for the practice of politics in conservation governance is sutured by the ‘police’, and alternative political economies of conservation are effectively foreclosed.

Conclusion

Understanding and untangling the governmentalizing machinery of post-politicization is crucial both theoretically and practically, in terms of both heightening our understanding of the mechanisms that render conservation post-political as well as for mobilizing and stabilizing an alternative liberation environmentality (Fletcher, 2010). While opponents’ ‘alternative’ environmentality was easily co-opted into the post-political narrative and disavowed as a legitimate political challenge, a liberation environmentality that challenges the very bedrock of colonial–capitalist conservation, mobilized from below and asserted through disruption in the public sphere, would not be so easily contained. This liberation environmentality would need to attack austerity itself, the disciplinary narratives that accompany it and sovereign tactics that limit free expression of dissent, but also our colonial–capitalist ‘wilderness’-based engagement with the ecosystems in which we form part. The quest for mobilizing such a liberation environmentality can thus benefit from solidarity with other social movements, including Indigenous sovereignty movements, concerned with imagining and enacting alternatives to the disempowering post-politics of late stage capitalism through a truly liberatory art of government. It is beyond the scope of this paper to theorize what a liberation environmentality would look like in Canada, but having a comprehensive understanding of the post-political art of government offers fertile ground for developing resistance. Future research is needed to explore how and to what extent movements are working to re-politicize conservation governance and what kinds of environmentalities mobilized at which scales can support alternative and emancipatory political economies of conservation.

Highlights

Austerity politics in Canada have contributed to the post-politicization of conservation governance in Jasper National Park.

Post-politicization relies on the mobilization of multiple environmentalities (sovereign, disciplinary, neoliberal, etc.) constructed at multiple scales by multiple actors.

Opponents mobilized an alternative environmentality, but underlying points of ‘agreement’ inadvertently legitimated authoritative knowledge and restricted democratic debate about conservation policy.

Understanding how multiple environmentalities contribute to post-politicization is crucial to mobilizing alternative liberation environmentalities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank all of the research participants in the Jasper area.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I would like to acknowledge that this research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Conservation in Global Context project.

Notes

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