Locations of cattle ranching, cooperative, and conserved lands in the Monteverde, Costa Rica, region. The spatial interposition of the cooperative between ranch and reserve has consequences for landscape and governance. Copyright Rutgers Cartography (2007). 

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... Santa Elena Multiple Service Cooperative, or CoopeSantaElena, is caught between regions dominated by export-oriented cattle ranching and conservation- based ecotourism. The co-op serves a highland area just south of Guanacaste, Costa Rica’s Northwestern Pacific cattle ranching province, and borders the 27,500-hectare (ha) Monteverde private biological reserves, the largest complex of such reserves in Central America ( Figure 1). CoopeSantaElena found a concrete expression of its philosophy in Finca La Bella, a community farm and sustainable development initiative. La Bella serves 100 people, or one-quarter of the citizens of the town of San Luis, an hour’s hike south and 300 sudden meters downslope of the co-op offices. CoopeSantaElena and La Bella fall between the large ranches ( latifundios ) and reserves, both spatially and as a model of development. This generates tensions in material and governance terms. The co-op project attempts to turn inside out the regional structures of power, creating a community governed and disciplined from within, instead of one governed by hierarchical structures of control from above (Foucault 1980; 1991). Costa Rica’s 1948 populist constitution ‘‘represents one of the few successful challenges to the longstanding dominance of the large agriculturalists, within a fully capitalist framework’’ (Winson 1989, 6). The government generated popular support for interventionist programs, among them the 1968 Law of Cooperative Associations, which promoted producer cooperatives as an effective way to channel scattered rural smallholder production to the service of liberal democratic state formation. State-backed co-ops organized smallholder participation in the export economy formerly dominated by large estate owners, converting peasants into productive citizens, or productores , of the reconstituted nation. In the 1980s, supra- national agencies and the United States, Costa Rica’s primary trading partner, increased pressure for trade liberalization and privatization in the country (Davis and Coleman 2001). Costa Rica’s social welfare-driven state experienced economic crisis (Edelman 1991), and governmental supports for cooperatives gradually weakened. In 1989, the International Coffee Organization (ICO) failed to reach a new agreement, sending world coffee prices into a series of increasingly volatile downward swings (International Coffee Organization 2003). Diversified smallholder production of the kind supported by the Santa Elena Cooperative allowed smallholder highland Costa Rican farmers to survive, but required continuing supports from the state (Sick 1997; 1998) or alternative institutions. The volatility of the glo- balized economy and the forced retreat of the welfare state render the services of strong rural institutions ever more necessary for smallholders, and an understanding of their failures and shortcomings ever more critical. This article examines the decline of one such institution, the multiservice CoopeSantaElena, in terms of an incomplete transition to Foucauldian governmentality. While Foucault’s governmentality refers to the historically particular form of the modern European state and associated institutions, this article seeks to shift and stretch the concept to a Latin American local-regional context. In particular, we focus here on the Foucauldian power = knowledge regimes surrounding the governance of CoopeSantaElena within a ‘‘nexus of objects [of inquiry], criteria, practices, procedures, apparatuses, and operations’’ (Fraser 1989, 20; Foucault 1980). This nexus includes environmental conditions, productivity, and questions of accounting and accountability. In his 1978 essay on governmentality, Michel Foucault (1991) traces the roots and disjunctures of present forms of governance, constructing a historically specific analysis of the changing loci and forms of power in the development of the modern European state. The concept of governmentality integrates Foucault’s earlier genealogical explorations of discipline through surveillance and regulation (Foucault 1979) into an investigation of state and institutional formation and maintenance (Foucault 1980; Hannah 2000). Foucault first examines pastoral power, the model of the good shepherd oversee- ing his flock, so effectively incorporated into Christian dogma as the care of souls (Gordon 1991). In Renaissance Europe, pastoral power gave way to the idea of an external and transcendent Machiavellian prince, who mastered the art of government, manipulating relations of force to protect his subjects and territory and to enrich himself. Sixteenth- and 17th-century critics of Machiavelli’s bare-knuckled treatise defined the ideal sovereign as a moral individual who governs the state based on the household model of the good pater familias (Foucault 1991). This prince and his agents transmit well-ordered governance down to his subjects through a program of self-sustaining government rationality (Foucault 1984, 241). The sovereign ‘‘governs a complex of men and things’’ and has as his aim ‘‘the common welfare and salvation of all’’ (Foucault 1991, 94). Next, Foucault traces the intensification of agricultural production and the attendant shift in enumeration techniques (but see Curtis 2002). Statistics, once used to track the accumulation of wealth in the sovereign’s treasuries, became a technique to monitor, direct, and ...