GREEN GOVERNMENTALITY AND ECOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP: INTERROGATING POLITICS CONSTITUTING ANIMAL-BASED FOOD CONSUMPTION IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

The severity of our environmental crisis has pushed forth far-reaching interrogations of everyday life aspects, including the mundane and inevitable spheres of food consumption. Societal norms of animal-based food consumption have perpetuated food insecurity and climate change, with possibly enormous ecological consequences going forward. Ecological citizenship, a normative green political theory of change coined by Dobson (2003), suggests that collective engagement with – and destabilizations of – existing unecological societal norms (and practices) is required, to forge new forms of politics towards ecological transformations. As such, this thesis – situated in the Singapore context – examines the possibilities of fostering ecological citizenship through the reduction of animal-based food consumption, by foregrounding institutional and individual dynamics and agencies constituting the politics of animal-based food consumption. Particularly, this thesis moves away from an individualistic conception of citizenship, to view consumers not as selfish, irresponsible and the cause of environmental problems, but as reflexive consumers who possess agency to effect broader processes. The lens of green governmentality, interrogating technologies of power and resistance, is mobilized to foreground not only the underlying norms and mentalities – within everyday contexts – that hinder institutional efforts at advancing reduced animal-based food consumption, but also the possibilities of mapping and rendering intelligible consumers’ practices and responses to institutional strategies – as ways to chart new pathways and politics of ecological citizenship. While particular discourses and institutional practices are circulated by non-governmental groups to produce an ecological citizenry, the implications of consumers’ responses, ecological imaginations and practices provide significant clues towards potential pathways. Through recognizing diverse contexts of societal embeddedness, this thesis portrays that there exists multiple identities, meanings and political spaces that can facilitate the ecological project targeted at reducing animal-based food consumption, and that meanings of ecological citizenship are arguably fluid, diverse and continually in question.