Washing Their Hands of It? Auckland Cities’ Risk Management of Formerly Horticultural Land as Neoliberal Responsibilisation

Abstract

The scale of contemporary environmental risks suggests that they should be managed at the societal level, but neoliberal planning transfers some responsibility for their management to individuals. Devolution of these responsibilities ignores disparities in individual capacity to address or contest risk scenarios. Abandoning risk management to market forces disregards discrimination in planning processes, thereby ignoring the needs of socio-economic groups which are unable to participate equally within an increasingly marketised and scientised debate. Through an examination of a contaminated land crisis in the cities of Auckland, New Zealand, we illustrate how newly responsibilised individuals do not possess the financial resources to influence both their exposure to risk and risk management decisions. Obliging individuals to undertake risk avoidance measures in the absence of such resources has been employed by local authorities to evade responsibility and to reduce the cost of research and remediation. This not only responsibilises those who are least able to respond to problems which are not of their own making, it also fails to address the underlying causes of risk exposure.