THE GEOGRAPHIES OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Abstract

Globally, the importance of civil society to environmental governance has been growing, prompting a commensurate growth in literature on these increasingly prominent actors. Extant literature on Singapore’s environmental governance, however, leaves much to be desired—disproportionately focused on the state’s actions, the consensus is that Singapore’s developmentalist ethos and semi-authoritarianism have curtailed civil society in Singapore, resulting in a lacuna of investigation into civil society actions. More critically, ‘civil society’ generally continues to be considered a prerogative of political science, and theorisations of civil society receive limited geographical interrogation. Thus, my thesis dovetails both concerns to examine how geography can illuminate environmental civil society processes in Singapore. Drawing on salient themes in the literature within the geography-civil society nexus, I use scale, relationalities, and place, focusing on the manner in which environmental civil society in Singapore is continually reproduced and negotiated in and through space to justify and elicit deeper geographical interrogation into ‘civil society’. I analyse 20 semi-structured, emplaced interviews with foremost environmental civil society actors and regular volunteers in Singapore and the secondary documents they produce, as key constituents of their everyday practices making and remaking environmental governance. Prolonged engagement in the field through participant observation enhanced my analyses by deepening my perceptions of everyday practices. Through everyday spaces, actors’ rescaling strategies, entangled and co-constitutive relationalities and the various ways physical space is contentious for environmental civil society, I demonstrate diverse and rich entry points for greater geographical interrogation into the concept. Simultaneously, geographical understandings of civil society processes enable more dynamic, nuanced, and representative accounts of Singapore’s environmental civil society and their relations with state actors than existing literature suggests. The civil society literature exposes a problem of decontextualized, ahistorical epistemologies, and my thesis thus contextualises the practice of civil society in Singapore.