Governmentality, counter-conduct, and modes of governing: Accounting and the pursuit of municipal sustainable waste management

Abstract

Recent research into the uses of accounting as a technology of government has used Foucault's notion of “counter-conduct” to shed light on various ways in which the governed can seek to alter the regimes to which they are subjected. This paper unpacks the notion of counter-conduct further in order to develop a clearer conceptualization of how regimes of government can change over time, with or without clearly identifiable attempts by the governed to influence such changes. We develop our argument based on a longitudinal field study of sustainable waste management practices in a municipality in the English East Midlands. We track the municipality's attempts to become more sustainable in the context of an evolving central government performance management regime that went through a series of legislative and administrative iterations—namely, Best Value, Comprehensive Performance Assessment, and Comprehensive Area Assessment. We conceptualize these iterations of central performance management and the related changes in local government practices and technologies of governing as a series of overlapping “modes of governing” (Bulkeley et al., 2007, Environment and Planning A, 39(11), 2733–2753). We suggest that accounting research can benefit from the notion of modes of governing because it sheds light on the theoretically expected, but empirically underresearched, copresence of multiple rationales, programs, and technologies of governing, all operating at the same time.