Studying the government of global climate change at the intersection of governmentality and proto-governmentality

According to Chapter 28 of the UN’s Agenda 21, the participation and cooperation of local authorities are of paramount importance for the successful fulfilment of the goals of this non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan with regard to sustainable development. In this way, the agenda explicates the common rationale that it calls for local action to respond to global environmental challenges. The agenda has motivated numerous so-called local, more and less binding policy documents, enterprises, partnerships and activities, but this paper focuses on one such initiative, namely a local Agenda 21 initiative in a rural Danish municipality that aims at ‘greening’ citizens’ everyday transportation practices.
Whereas most approaches to governance share the dichotomising conceptualisation of the ‘supranational’ and the ‘local’ invoked in the Agenda 21 document, this paper follows Latour-inspired scholars of international governmentality studies (Walters, 2012) and suggests not only that governance is co-constituted by continuously negotiated ‘governmental rationalities’ (cf. e.g. Dean, 1999), but also, and relatedly, that governance comes from multiple sites that may be defined as neither local nor global and, moreover, views those sites as negotiated in various, contingent and continuously accomplished longer and shorter connections (cf. e.g. Kendall, 2004). Considering this, the paper suggests an approach for studying the accomplishment of governmental rationalities of global citizenship that are an inevitable part of the dispersed governing of sustainable development. Firstly, inspired by Prior’s (2004; 2008; 2011) repositioning of documents in social research, the paper tracks the dispersion of different documents that “function as props, allies, rule-makers, calculators, decision-makers, experts, and illustrators” (2008, p. 828) in connections between the Agenda 21 document and a flyer informing about greener transportation practices in the Danish municipality. Secondly, drawing on ethnomethodological discourse analysis, the paper demonstrates how the category ‘global citizenship’ is invoked and negotiated not only in the different documents connecting the UN and the Danish municipality, but also, and on a more detailed level, in citizens’ talk about the municipal transportation flyer. The paper argues that by demonstrating, on the one hand, how the different documents utilise other documents and, on the other hand, how the citizens utilise documents in continuous assignments of and resistance to rights and responsibilities that invoke the category ‘global citizenship’ in relation to sustainability, it is demonstrating how governmental rationalities of global citizenship are continuously accomplished and contested in the governing of sustainable development.