Non-Governmental Organizations and Governmentality: ‘Consuming’ Biodiversity and Indigenous People in the Philippines
| Author | Raymond L. Bryant |
| Published date | 01 June 2002 |
| Date | 01 June 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00370 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
Non-governmental Organizations and
Governmentality: ‘Consuming’
Biodiversity and Indigenous People
in the Philippines
Raymond L. Bryant
Kings College London
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing an increasingly important role in the process
Foucault called ‘governmentality’. Drawing on the Foucauldian literature, this paper uses a
case study of biodiversity conservation as well as indigenous people’s ancestral domain in the
Philippines to show how two quite different NGO-led conservation agendas nonetheless share a
common underlying purpose: persuading indigenous people to internalize state control through
self-regulation. Ironically, it is this sort of NGO contribution to the elaboration of government (in
the Foucauldian sense) that may turn out be the most significant and lasting contribution that
NGOs make to social change.
Government is the conduct of conduct ... it is the right disposition of things.
Michel Foucault (1982, 1991)
Government ... is an undertaking conducted in the plural. There is a plurality of
governing agencies and authorities, of aspects of behavior to be governed, of norms
invoked, of purposes sought, and of effects, outcomes and consequences.
Mitchell Dean (1999)
During two days in late October 1996, a group of nearly 100 people met on Coron
Island in the Philippine province of Palawan to discuss how to protect the island’s
rich terrestrial and aquatic biological diversity. The stakes were high. As visitors
travelled to and from the meeting, they were treated to the spectacle of adjoining
islands, once covered in forest, stripped bare of trees. They knew that such a fate
was likely to be in store for Coron’s forests, too, unless urgent action was taken to
halt economic intrusions in and around the island.
Yet the meeting produced a tense stand-off as rival proposals were fiercely debated.
On the one side, there was a skilfully crafted proposal to create a protected area
put forward under the rubric of the National Integrated Protected Areas Program
(NIPAP). This European Union (EU) programme was a key element in a wider ini-
tiative begun in 1989 by which donors, NGOs, and the Philippine state sought to
protect biodiversity ‘hotspots’. On the other side, there was a proposal by the
Tagbanua people to designate the area as ancestral domain under the government’s
Certificate of Ancestral Domain Claim (CADC) programme. This proposal reflected
the views of a local people’s organization, the Tagbanua Foundation of Coron Island
(TFCI). Nonetheless, it was a national NGO known for its work with indigenous
© Political Studies Association, 2002.
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
N G O S A N D G O V E R N M E N TA L I T Y
269
people, the Philippine Association for Intercultural Development (PAFID) that was
pivotal in its preparation.
Elsewhere, I explore the significance of a situation, as at Coron Island, where rival
proposals to protect endangered socio-nature are traceable to conflicting notions
of appropriate conduct emanating from within the state (Bryant, 2000b). What is
of interest here is the relationship between the NGO sector and processes of gov-
ernmentality. My aim in doing so is not to show how ‘non-governmental’ organi-
zations are often anything but detached from states in practice (Farrington and
Bebbington, 1993; Heyzer et al., 1995; Hulme and Edwards, 1997). Nor do I seek
to document the political impact of the ‘associational revolution’ that is said to be
transforming state-society relations today (Salamon, 1994; Clarke, 1998b; Fisher,
1998). Rather, my concern is to reflect on the meaning and significance of the NGO
phenomenon when it is related to an understanding of governmentality. I argue
that a key outcome of NGO activity in the Philippines has been the facilitation
of government in Foucault’s sense of the term. This outcome is not necessarily
compatible with the core objectives of many NGOs.
As such, this study contributes to a critical literature that challenges conventional
‘truths’ about NGOs – in particular, their role in grassroots empowerment and gov-
ernance. Thus, Williams and Young (1994) and Clarke (1998a) argue in this journal
that an unintended outcome of NGO activity can be the strengthening of ostensi-
ble opponents such as state agencies and the World Bank. In a similar fashion, con-
tributors to Cooke and Kothari (2001a) assess truisms surrounding participatory
development. This discourse – widely used by NGOs – has a ‘tyrannical potential’
that is ‘systemic’ insofar as it facilitates ‘the illegitimate and/or unjust exercise of
power’ (Cooke and Kothari, 2001b, p. 4). With reference to joint forest manage-
ment in India, for example, Hildyard et al. (2001, p. 69) note that NGOs are per-
suaded by a discourse that ‘neither they nor the communities with whom they
work’ have shaped because NGOs conceive of power ‘as something that a small
minority (the “powerful”) “have” and that others (the “powerless”) “lack” ’. The
result is that projects formally committed to public participation and empowerment
end up instead ‘strengthening elites and local power relationships’ (Hildyard et al.,
2001, p. 70).
Much of this literature points to tensions associated with the NGO role in the
process of ‘government’. Indeed, government is, as Foucault (1982, pp. 220–1) sug-
gests, the art of defining appropriate ‘conduct of conduct’. It is a means by which
an individual becomes a ‘subject’ who partly governs him or her self – someone
who is both ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his
[or her] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 212).
Government is also about the ‘right disposition of things’ where ‘things’ are ‘men
in their relations ... [with] wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory
with its specific qualities ... customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking ... [as well
as] accidents and misfortunes’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 93). Questions need to be raised,
though, about how this process of government involving both state and non-state
groups (such as NGOs) takes place, as well as with what effects in terms of gov-
ernmentality. That government ‘implies a plurality of specific aims’ and practices
are potentially of immense importance to the task of regulating social and envi-
270
R AY M O N D L . B RYA N T
ronmental relations (Foucault, 1991, p. 95). This is so in matters of biodiversity
conservation and ancestral domain just as in other realms in which state-
sanctioned surveillance is the norm. In the process government – as I suggest –
often comes to be assisted by NGOs.
NGOs and Governmentality
With the concept of governmentality, Foucault emphasized changes occurring in
Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that transformed state-
craft. Initially, statecraft was a relatively simple and coercive affair of princely rule
over individuals that Foucault calls sovereignty. Here, the end is circular in as much
as ‘the end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 95).
Yet statecraft turns into a more complex question of finding ways in which ‘sub-
jects’ could be brought to internalize state control through self-regulation – that is,
governmentality. Here, the end is that ‘which is “convenient” for each of the things
that are to be governed ... a whole series of specific finalities’ (Foucault, 1991, p.
95). These include ‘the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condi-
tion, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 100). As
such, governmentality involves a process whereby the modern state and the
modern autonomous individual ‘co-determine each other’s emergence’ (Lemke,
2001, p. 191).
This transformation of statecraft coincided with a shift in the purpose of the state.
Thus, it was reconceived as ‘a problem of economy rather than one of running a
family’ (Simons, 1995, p. 37). Coercive techniques were not abandoned. Indeed,
they were expressed through multifaceted ‘methods of punishment, supervision
and constraint’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 29). Still, these methods involved more subtle,
systematic and sustained forms of control exercised over and through individuals
and populations than was hitherto the case. Foucault (1993, p. 203) writes, for
example, of technologies of the self permitting ‘individuals to effect, by their own
means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their souls, on their
own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform them-
selves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness,
of purity, of supernatural power, and so on’.
Power relations were also thereby transformed. Traditional forms of power liter-
ally ‘to take life’ gave way to ‘more effective and complex technologies of power
which are ... seeking to foster life’ (Smart, 1986, p. 161).1 This implicated the state
in an ‘anatomo-politics’ of the human body (discipline) and a ‘biopolitics’ of the
entire population (biopower) (Foucault, 1978, 1979). Officials sought to optimize
relations between people and things with an eye to the interrelated problems of
wealth creation, security and promoting a healthy and economically productive
population.2
Vital to this process was the recognition that power and knowledge were...
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