Encouraging people to become environmentally responsible actors has become a key goal of environmental policy. Following a ‘governing at a distance’ logic, a protected environment is cast as both a right and a duty that the individual is expected to fulfil for “the benefit of present and future generations” (Aarhus Convention 2001). This research sought to study this process of ‘becoming’ an environmentally responsible and dutiful actor in the case of members of the public participating in environmental decision-making. Rather than accepting the environmentally responsible actor as a neutral and benign goal of environmental policy, this research sought to examine the power relationships involved in these processes and how individuals were shaped by the expectancies placed on them by others and the expectancies they placed on themselves. In order to undertake this investigation, the research drew on the concept of governmentality which seeks to examine the making up of subjects who possess particular mentalities and concomitant capacities for action. The case-study of environmental impact assessment (EIA) was selected as it encapsulates the governing-at-a-distance logic– bringing together actors to share environmental knowledge and work towards an outcome without the state intervening to mandate goals from the centre. This research subjected EIAs and associated forms of public participation performed for fracking cases in the Fylde region of England to a two-stage governmentality analysis which sought to draw out the technologies of power employed to ‘conduct conduct’ in both an ‘imagined’ sense (in policy) and ‘real’ sense (in action). The first stage; a discourse analysis of core environmental and consultation policy and guidance; revealed that while the environment is discursively produced as an object requiring protection for the continued welfare of human populations, the ‘imagined’ subject of this discourse is encouraged to visualise and problematize the environment according to their autonomously defined individual well-being. In an attempt to shape the individual in this autonomy, governmental discourse introduces the concept of a sustainable community, attempting to inculcate the public participant with moral responsibilities and obligations to protect not only themselves but future generations. However, this technology of self-government produces two central antagonisms which inform the critical aspects of this research. Firstly, it relies on a moral bond between the current generation and an imagined future generation being strong enough to compel the current generation to act to minimise future risks to sustainability. Secondly, sustainability relies on technical expertise to establish environmental norms, thus limiting members of the public’s capacity in forming subjectivities based around moral environmental values. It is contended that in order to overcome this, the environment must be produced as a subject of government rather than an object, with associated rights and access to citizenship. This hypothesis is currently being tested through the ‘real’ stage of analysis– participant observation of a fracking public inquiry. This will be used to ascertain what type of environmental subjectivity members of the public have formed and the potential to produce an ‘environment’ with rights and access to justice that can be represented within a participatory space.
