Contribution short abstract

I present eco-biopolitics as a more-than-human framework that uses document analysis of environmental governance to trace how nonhuman life is rendered governable and to reflect on the possibilities and limits of such methods.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation develops eco-biopolitics as an analytical framework for studying how political power manages life beyond the human. Building on Foucault and Latour’s political ecology, I conceptualise eco-biopolitics as a mode of governing in which forests, species and ecosystems become populations to be known, protected and optimised alongside human societies.

Empirically, I use qualitative document analysis of environmental governance texts, including biodiversity strategies, restoration laws and “rights of nature” provisions. I employ a coding scheme that traces three dimensions: (1) rationalities that justify why life should be governed (for example through crisis, resilience or optimisation logics); (2) techniques and indicators through which nonhuman beings and ecosystems are made calculable; and (3) the populations of life that emerge as protectable, optimisable or disposable.

I argue that such text-based eco-biopolitical analysis can make visible how environmental governance distributes value and vulnerability across human and nonhuman lives, and how specific forms of life are stabilised as worthy of protection or exposed to sacrifice. At the same time, this approach risks remaining blind to lived relations, material ecologies and practices of resistance if it is not combined with other methods. This raises a set of methodological questions: how might document-centred analysis be linked to ethnographic, ecological or collaborative approaches? What kinds of more-than-human politics become thinkable through these combinations, and how can they expand the possibilities for environmental and multispecies justice?