Non-Governmental Organizations and Governmentality: ‘Consuming’ Biodiversity and Indigenous People in the Philippines

Abstract

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing an increasingly important role in the process Foucault called ‘governmentality’. Drawing on the Foucauldian literature, this paper uses a case study of biodiversity conservation as well as indigenous people's ancestral domain in the Philippines to show how two quite different NGO-led conservation agendas nonetheless share a common underlying purpose: persuading indigenous people to internalize state control through self-regulation. Ironically, it is this sort of NGO contribution to the elaboration of government (in the Foucauldian sense) that may turn out be the most significant and lasting contribution that NGOs make to social change.