Consensus-building legitimacy has to do not just with reason but also, of course, emotion – what feels right. We think something is right and good based on what ‘feels’ that way, appealing to normative ideas and sentiments behind rationales (to paraphrase one of my interviewees, in combining the prose of policy with the poetry of politics). Whether this book speaks to students or scholars of populist movements, technocratic managerialism, policy elites, or Indian politics, it contributes to a growing corpus of knowledge on strategies of the powerful. Studying the politicisation of expertise provides invaluable understanding of how the right wing is able to construct effective narratives and be convincing of its multiple, potentially contradictory, formations.

From the 1980s, globalization produced conditions that demanded tough decisions in a complex set of fluctuating economic circumstances. This required more decision-makers, who discarded almost all virtue but success. Chapter 8 shows that to this new managerial elite, the moral character of the professionals was at best an old-fashioned affectation, at worst the sanctimonious preaching of the old establishment, bleating over their loss of prestige. Managers began to treat those merely applying their expertise as plug-and-play professionals, able to be manoeuvred in and out of place according to flexible strategies. These were applied under a new cliché: ‘work smarter, not harder’, where the ‘smarter’ referred mainly to managerial innovation. Under this managerial regime, success was the only virtue that mattered, while traditional aspects of professional virtue, still needed for professional work to succeed, were embedded into systems for quality and risk management, launching a process of moral deskilling. In this context, professionals turned to a more generic ‘effectiveness’ into which they could pour their personal professional values. This kept them investing relentlessly in their own human capital, reducing the kind of virtue that sought a better world into a category of virtuous consumption.

The US Army and Marine Corps’ (2006) Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency is the famous known and controversial military doctrinal document in recent memory. While it replicates many aspects of the Cold 1960s “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency of Galula and others, it differs in its form, style, tone, and ambitious detail. I show how a large writing team from a wide range of overlapping backgrounds, working rapidly in a distinct institutional context, produced it. The mostly uniformed authors and their civilian peers drew on past manuals, history, social science (particularly organizational theory), and their own professional experience. The result is an assemblage of overlapping but distinct ideas, deeply imbued with the organizational and managerial discourses. While often described as politically pragmatic or expedient, I show the manual internalizes a patchwork of ideological material. Its ideological orientation, while in large part liberal and managerial, is ultimately complex and opaque. It’s influence and contentious status were nonetheless exceptional.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of recent corporate crises and their relationship with the dominant model of boards of directors. I also present a brief historical review of boards of directors and explore why the current generation of boards that was born in the 1990s has fallen short of its expectations. Understanding why the current model has not been effective is relevant. In parallel, a close-up view of the inner workings of some boards sheds additional light on a conundrum overlooked by large-sample statistical studies. A board should understand the company’s business and the industry in which it operates, make sure its long-term orientation is sound and expand their scope beyond simple shareholder value maximization.

This introduction lays out the context, scope, theoretical framework, core arguments and structure of the study. It problematises the focus on synergies between environmental protection and human rights in existing literature, and emphasises the importance of retrieving, exploring and critically unpacking the conflicts that underpin this relationship. The analysis introduces the central interrogation of the book: how environmental protection laws can collide with human rights concerns, and how regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide. Several sub-questions unfold from this main interrogation. How do regional human rights courts address, conceive of and frame conflicts with environmental laws, many of which include considerations that are part and parcel of existing human rights? Which conflict-management techniques and argumentative strategies do they employ to settle such trade-offs? And what does this tell us about how the environment is represented, and how its protection is legally justified in relation to human concerns? The summary of the main findings of the book lay bare the importance of the project, the gaps it aims to fill, and how these novel insights reconfigure the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

This chapter turns to the second ‘universalisation strategy’ developed by courts to conceal legal indeterminacy when environmental protection and human rights collide. It shows how courts rely on the authority and supposed objectivity of experts when interpreting conflicts and justifying their decisions. The argument unfolds in two parts. The first part analyses the role played by scientific experts in cases decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union. It critically assesses this expert-based managerial approach to conflict adjudication and highlights the risk of obstructing the protection of certain rights that do not fit a particular epistemic framework. The second part analyses the role played by specialised human rights experts in regional human rights courts in cases concerning Indigenous peoples and cultural minorities. A network of experts with particular institutional ties gets involved in such cases. These experts share a specific (legal) vocabulary and imaginary when speaking on behalf of the applicants, which courts replicate through cross-jurisdictional and cross-cultural referencing. This essentialises certain ways of living determined by artificial binaries of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’. What emerges is an empirically rich understanding of regional human rights courts’ reliance on specialised expertise with both bright and dark sides.

This concluding chapter summarises the main arguments and findings of the book. It reflects on the multiple rationales and ideals that were mobilised over time to protect the environment, and translates this protection into an actionable legal framework. It examines the motivations and aims invoked to this end and explores what implications the gradual association of environmental protection with human rights in regional human rights jurisprudence had for the representation of the environment and its relation to human concerns. How are environmental concerns conceptualised, consolidated and contested by human rights courts? Which representations of human and non-human relations lie encoded in the ‘universalisation strategies’ that the book reveals? And what are the political effects of the adoption of environmental concerns in the lexicon of human rights? The conclusion interrogates the world-making effects that the articulation of environmental protection in a human rights register generates and questions the latter’s suitability for radical environmental politics in the Anthropocene. Overall, the book informs us about the management of legal conflicts by courts, the strategies they develop to justify their outcomes and the performative role they play in shaping our understanding of the environment–human rights interface.

This second part delves into concrete cases of conflicts between environmental protection and human rights decided by regional human rights courts. Instead of focusing on the outcomes of each case, the analysis attends to the legal reasoning and justifications articulated by judges when decisions are reached, and courts come to a resolution of adversarial argumentations. How do regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide? What emerges is a process where parties counter legal indeterminacy by granting weight to specific legal, political and normative goals in an idiom of universality – namely through justifications in the name of ‘universal interests’ or ‘universal truth claims’. Two strategies of ‘universal justification’ are induced from the cases. First, conflicts between environmental protection and human rights tend to be solved though a ‘universalisation strategy’ that rests on an invocation of the ‘general interest’. Second, a ‘universalisation strategy’ is visible when courts settle disputes by relying on the ‘objectivity’ and ‘authority’ provided by scientific or human rights experts. New argumentative dynamics are induced from a critical case-law analysis that reveals particular understandings of the human–environment relation, which engenders specific world-making effects.

Distinguishing between kinds of anthropocentrism and of biocentrism helps to disclose that White’s critique of theistic religions as anthropocentric and despotic miscarries, as does the different critique on the part of Passmore of ‘Greco-Christian arrogance’. The longstanding stewardship tradition of Christianity, Judaism and Islam facilitates an eco-friendly approach to the environment, particularly in its biocentric versions, and can be defended against criticisms from Palmer and Lovelock. Southgate, who misunderstands biocentrism as synonymous with Deep Ecology, favours both co-creation and stewardship; these approaches can be combined with each other and with Bauckham’s theme of the community of God’s creatures. Northcott does well to trace back modern ecological problems to seventeenth-century anti-communal and possessive individualism and the attitudes and practices emerging therefrom, but his communitarian and nature-friendly approach, while rightly understanding humanity as ‘dependent rational animals’ (MacIntyre), needs to become more cosmopolitan if these global problems are to be solved.

This chapter brings together the neglected pre-1980 “behavioral theory of the firm” and the Marshallian resource-based or capabilities-based evolutionary approach to the firm to analyze the drivers of efficiency and productivity in organizations. It begins with Leibenstein’s X-efficiency view of why firms differ in their costs and then adds a dynamic perspective by considering the growth of knowledge view of the firm offered by Marshal and Penrose, which emphasizes the role of managerial learning, before introducing the learning curve concept. The focus then moves to the consequences of employment contracts being loosely specified and managers having to earn their authority by how they operate. This leads in turn to the behavioral view of organizations as shifting coalitions of stakeholders who are trying to pursue diverse subgoals, which may result in firms earning smaller profits that would have been possible and in the accumulation of “organizational slack.” Finally, the chapter discusses the impact of (sometimes highly dysfunctional) corporate cultures – i.e., the operating systems of formal and informal rules that firms use – in shaping their productivity and ability to change.

[B]ig corporations do not lose money. John Kenneth Galbraith, 1967 Publicly held companies do not lose money. Stanley Goldblum, President of Equity Funding Corporation of America, 1969 Between the end of World War II and the start of the 1970s, regulators did not view securities fraud as a significant risk for large public companies. Major corporations often had market power in their industries and could be counted on to generate profits. They reinvested these profits in research and development and managerial training to perpetuate their advantage. They could acquire competitors or companies in unrelated industries to create new revenue streams. Investors trusted the competence of professional managers who would make wise decisions that avoided major disaster.1 Under this paradigm of managerialism, corporate managers were not as pressured by stock markets. There was thus little reason for an established public corporation to misstate its financial results. Even if it did, such a misrepresentation would be unlikely to hide serious problems that threatened a company’s solvency.

The democratic values discussed in the two preceding chapters are represented in four basic governance structures in contemporary public administration.The democratic influencegovernance structures, such as the rules and hierarchies of bureaucracy, or the mechanisms for consensus in participatory structures are considered.A framework for understanding the trade-offs between accountability and process values is provided.

Three key drivers that introduced the new managerialism into mental health services were funding constraints, the drive to measure health care quality and the move to deinstitutionalisation. A new cadre of managers, some of which were clinicians but many of whom were not, often rode roughshod over traditional clinical administration and many psychiatrists and nurses felt ignored and undervalued. New managers pushed ahead regardless, driven by a vision that was often alien to existing service providers. New services proved to be considerably more expensive than old ones. The tribal cultures of psychiatrists, nurses, other professions and managers have always been a major influence on the way services are run, and the change towards a managerial emphasis did not assist mutual understanding. Managerialism brought a new understanding of budgets, human resources and objectives into mental health services that was largely positive but mental health services are still fashioned around systems that were established for the acute hospital sector and not readily adapted to mental health service provision.