Governmentality and Environmental Rights: Regulatory Failure and the Volkswagen Emissions Fraud Case

With the widespread recognition of anthropogenic climate change resulting, in part, from an overreliance on fossil fuels, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions has become a central problem of government in most Western states. At the level of the individual citizen, the micromanagement of conduct has been established through complex procedures aimed at the rational administration of environmental regulation that intersects with techniques for the administration of ourselves. That is, such an ethopolitics (see Rose 2001) locates questions of government at the level of individual environmental rights, everyday morality, and the ethics of “going green,” as well as at the level of administration, through regulations aimed at reducing car emissions. Concomitantly, the “conduct of conduct” is aimed at corporate citizens that is administered at the level of emission regulatory regimes, as well as through an ethopolitical imaginary of corporate environmental rights and citizenship that is based on, inter alia, fostering environmentally-friendly corporate identities. Drawing on a governmentality analytic, green criminology, and the automobility literatures, we examine how emissions are governed in relation to automobile users and producers. Using the Volkswagen diesel emissions fraud case (also known as “Dieselgate” and “Emissionsgate”), which began in September 2015, as an entry point, this article examines the failure of the Canadian government to monitor and adequately punish emissions violators. This failure takes place against the backdrop of a parliamentary committee proposal to enshrine the right to a healthy environment in Canadian law. Therefore, the article also evaluates the extent to which environmental rights as human rights can refigure existing approaches to environmental violence and challenge the individualization of environmental responsibility and citizenship under neoliberal forms of government.