Sustainability Leadership and the Governmentality of Hope: Retheorising Hope in the Context of Environmental Crisis

Abstract

This paper employs an affective governmentality approach – one that sees regimes of governmentality as working through affective as well as rational milieus – to explore how sustainability leaders experience, navigate and enact hope. These subjects operate in a highly-charged affective milieu at the intersection of hope for a better world and the confronting realities of environmental crisis. Our study shows how official texts associated with organisations who shape this milieu construct hope as normative for sustainability work. Drawing on interviews with 35 sustainability leaders, it then documents the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways in which these subjects respond to and deploy an imperative to hope in their practices of governing self and others. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, our explicit attention to affect allows us to extend the existing literature by tracing the complexities, tensions and transgressions in the experience and the practices of subjects who are simultaneously governed and governors. Secondly, our critical understanding of hope as governmentality opens up new possibilities for subjects working in contexts that render hope precarious and even problematic.