Paper short abstract:

This paper examines institutional networks promoting sustainable development in Utah as the creation of new ‘strategic action fields’ in which government, NGO and for-profit actors collaborate to craft solutions to environmental challenges congruent with neoliberal strategies of economic development.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on research on the Wasatch Front metropolitan area of Utah, this paper explores the creation of institutional networks promoting sustainable development in the region as the creation of new 'strategic action fields' (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012) in which government, NGO and for-profit actors collaborate to craft solutions to environmental challenges congruent with neoliberal strategies of economic development. Through a critical engagement with field theory, the role of cooperative agency is explored in emergent fields marked by contradictory paradigms of sustainable growth in the region, problematizing their interlinkages and undermining the emergence of a 'post-political' consensus. Shared organizational features of these fields center on the creation of metaphoric sustainability 'communities' in which social entrepreneurship, policy innovation and networked capacity-building shape consensual solutions to challenges posed by a projected population doubling by 2050. By discursively eliding processes of climate change per se, these emergent fields are intended to create ideologically 'neutral' spaces to address environmental challenges such as clean air, water sufficiency and land use through neoliberal strategies of 'stakeholder' engagement and deployment of techniques of governmentality (dissemination of expertise, credentialing, informational mobilization). This paper argues that the purposive linkage of disparate sectors into new strategic action fields hinges on the mobilization of individual actors' 'social skill' (professional habitus, moral-ethical dispositions) to create regimes of affect and coalitional identities which can inadvertently exceed the structural constraints of these fields, leading to their 'failure to thrive,' highlighting competitive rifts and/or generating a politics of contention regarding the meanings of sustainability.