The Work of Rights at the Limits of Governmentality

New environmental regimes, such as those put into place to meet state obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity, afford new subject positions for those positioned to embrace the positions of environmental stewardship they offer. They also attract new investments in communities that adopt the disciplines of ecosystem management while cultivating 'traditional environmental knowledge' as a new source of development expertise. These activities may originally have been designed to incorporate so-called local communities embodying traditional lifestyles more completely into regimes of market citizenship ([Harvey, Neil] 2001). However, to the extent that these subject-positions have been encoded as 'indigenous' and 'traditional' they also invite local communities thus subjected to reflect upon their historical practices and to express their appeals in the moral discourses of right that global indigenous movements afford them. If 'the effects of governmental interventions, and their reception by target populations' need to be 'situated in relation to the multiple forces configuring the sets of relations in which government is engaged' ([Tania Li] this volume) . then it is necessary to recognize that all forms of government are engaged with discourses, practices and institutions of rights. Rights practices engage 'one of the few moral injunctions the legitimacy of which is still acknowledged internationally' (Hristov 2005:89), to justify practices of 'everyday resistance or outright refusal' (Li this volume). They are used to target state governments, international economic institutions, and transnational corporations (and to a lesser degree NGOs and communities) as subjects bearing obligations that must be continually reinterpreted and reiterated. A focus upon governmentality's limits also helps to counteract some difficulties that attend many neo-Foucaultian endeavours especially the tendency toward a 'topdown' analytic optic in governmentality studies. Despite the animating premise that power circulates rather than being held or imposed, the study of governmentality nonetheless tends to ally itself with the omniscient viewpoint of the administrator rather than with the position of those who are subjected. Consideration of governmentality's limits may both invite the subaltern to speak and urge us to attend to the conditions under which those voices are heard and the tactics characteristic of the politics of the governed. One way in which this can