Let me make it clear right from the beginning: I am not concerned here with environ-mentality, the mentality of people, leaders, rulers, countries or institutions towards the environment. Neither am I concerned with govern-mentality, the mentality of governors (individual or collective) in governance.

It is, however, important that in governing the environment or a country, we understand the mentality of those whose environment we are governing, or of those who are governing the environment. We must also understand the collective mentality of those being governed and of those governing them.

If the minds don’t meet, it is unlikely that much will be achieved. There might even be trouble and resistance, with government spending a lot of time, energy and money abusing the people’s rights of resistance. When this happens, development, transformation and progress become just dreams.

So, what environmentality and governmentality am I concerned with here if not environ-mentality and govern-mentality?

Let me address myself to governmentality first.

The term governmentality was innovated by influential 20^th century philosopher, thinker and writer Michael Foucault, who first used it to mean the conduct of conduct, or the art of government where government includes a wide range of control techniques.

 One writer has said that governmentality represents the tactics of government that allow it to define and redefine what its own competences are. Or else it refers to a complex set of processes through which human behaviour is systematically controlled, individually or in groups, to enhance the capacity of the political regime to govern.

Therefore, although a government may derive its legitimacy from the people, usually through elections, it ends up controlling the people, individually and as groups.

According to Wikipedia governmentality refers to societies where power is de-centered and its members play an important role in their own self-government.

Academically speaking, governmentality is an approach to the study of power that emphasises the governing of people’s conduct through positive means rather than the sovereign power, to formulate laws and policies.  Otherwise, generally it is associated with the willing participation of the governed.

Let me now introduce you to the term environmentality.

I first came across the term environmentality in 2005, when I was reading an article by political scientist Arun Agrawal in a journal called Current Anthropology. He wrote about a deep and durable relationship between the people of Kumaon, India, and the government of India – which relationship generated people at the bottom and at the top of society who could effectively conserve the environment.

Therefore, the term environmentality has to do with the community working intimately together with government to make environmental subjects that can participate fully in the conservation of the environment. It is about deep and durable relationship between government and community and/or subjectivity of and how regulatory strategies associated with and resulting from community decision-making, help from bottom-up to transform those who participate in government.

According to Arun Agrawal, it is how and for what reason rural people can care about the environment. Varying levels of involvement in institutional resources of environmental regulation innovate new ways of understanding and stewarding the environment from bottom up. This way, new kinds of political subjects and actors emerge that put environment, nature and people first and infrastructural development last. Such politicians can be agents of new ecologies that are geared towards environmental sanity.

Arun Agrawal’s book Environmentality, Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects published by Duke University Press in 2005 is a furtherance of the idea of environmentality and how it does help produce the right people with the right state of mind at the bottom and the top who have the necessary social capital to manage and conserve the environment wisely.

According to Arun Agrawal, environmentality offers a democratic alternative to the usual coercive forms of conservation. These take the people at the bottom, where environmental resources are found, as the enemies of conservation, and do everything possible legally and policy-wise to exclude them from the resources.

At least in Uganda, the environmental politics preferred by government for the last 30 or so years is pro-infrastructure development and puts environment, nature and people as subordinate to infrastructure. Yet culturally, socially and historically they are the ones that have conserved the nature, environment and the environmental resources we see today in intimacy with them for millennia.

Arun Agrawal says that what environmentality does is to promote environmental consciousness through community-based conservation in unity with environmentally conscious government. This is a new environmental politics, which breaks down the usual rigid dichotomy between the people and the state. The state grows closer to the people and values them as essential partners in the conservation enterprise. This way government subserving the state is no longer arrogant, and does not regard the people as enemies, but sees them as partners in conservation.

We can say that environmentality is what a country needs to pursue a path of environmental democracy and environmental justice. When these are pursued in unity with governmentality, the results of conservation are great. Human-environment governance becomes a joint people-government effort to strike the right human-environment interactions for sustainability and integrity of the environment. 

Indeed, environmental management should not be the work of centralised institutions such as Uganda’s National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA), which can be consummated by power or International Financial Institutions (IFI) and used to give green light to environmentally destructive projects and programmes whose purpose is to sow seeds of the money economy.  

I am saying environmentality and governmentality can be tuned together as a joint tool for environmental management and conservation from bottom to top. Therefore, decentralisation, whereby power and authority for environmental management and conservation are given up to the bottom, can serve the interests of both environmentality and governmentality in achieving the sustainability and integrity of the environment and stable, secure and effective government.

The greatest threat to environmentally-conscious governmentality in Africa where rulers tend to overstay in power and begin feeling they are irremovable, is dual: Presidentialism and Bigmanity (or Big Man Syndrome). These two separately and jointly are anti-decentralisation of power and authority for anything, including conservation. Indeed, in Uganda, they have combined to make decentralization fail.

I have recently written about the two in two separate articles: one on The Perils of Presidentialism in Uganda and another one on Bigmanity, the Sterile Culture of Money and Violence in Africa: the case of Uganda. Presidentialism and Bigmanity reflect constitutional concentration of power in the President, and his tendency to free himself from the people and become sovereign. However, two other negative influences, of increasing severity, that are likely to violate the unity between environmentality and governmentality in the effective management of the environment and its resources from bottom to top are: Apartheid-like governance, which tends to segregate the poor and needy in the rural areas that have lived in proximity and in intimacy with environmental resources and conserved them; and land grabbing mostly by refugees and former refugees, whereby whole ecosystems and habitats are being unfairly appropriated by a few people in power or connected to power.

One may say without hesitation that under these conditions no meaningful and effective conservation is taking place in Uganda. Exploitative practices dominate, guided by the clarion call ‘Conquer Nature’. Anything conservation oriented is mostly symbolic.

For God and my country – Uganda!                                                

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Science of the Makerere University, Uganda