Studying sustainable development at the intersection of conduct and counter-conduct

Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘counter-conduct’, it has been argued that it does not make sense to speak about governmental strategies without speaking about resistance (cf. e.g. Bröckling et al., 2011). The argument is that the relationship between governmental strategies and resistance is specifically contradictory, resistance marking both a boundary and a constitutive moment of government. However, until now studies of governmentality have not paid sufficient attention to the phenomenon of resistance and to the ruptures and disruptions it entails when government continuously readapt and reinvent itself according to the inevitable and unforeseen crises of governability. Drawing on ethnomethodological discourse analysis and on Prior’s (2004; 2008; 2011) repositioning of documents in social research, this paper suggests an approach to international governmentality studies (cf. Walters 2012) that is sensitive to the subtle effects of counter-conduct.

The paper reports on an empirical study that tracks the connections between the UN’s Agenda 21 and a ‘local’ Agenda 21 initiative in a rural Danish municipality aiming at ‘greening’ citizens’ everyday transportation practices, and, secondly, the paper analyses how these documents are participating in the continuous negotiations of the governmental rationalities of global citizenship that are an inevitable part of the dispersed governing of sustainable development. In more detail, the paper analyses how the Danish transportation initiative is co-constituted between, on the one hand, the municipal attempt to govern the citizens through the appropriation of their freedom to act differently and, on the other hand, the citizens’ subtle ways of rejecting and negotiating this attempt to having their conduct conducted.