Addressing environmental harms in the health sector: environmentality as a lens to expose (neglected) sites of knowledge/power

In an era of increasing calls for responsible environmental stewardship within health research and care, the concept of environmentality is a productive vehicle to theorise, analyse and critique the changing trends of environmental governance. Despite the usefulness of this approach, little to no literature has explored how this concept could apply to the health sector. In this paper, we examine three examples of emerging environmental governance in the health sector to illustrate and consider the usefulness of the environmentality lens. We show how environmentality provides a framework to interrogate different forms of governance and, in particular, how specific modes of environmental governance gain traction such that different types of knowledge/power (relations) are produced. We argue that using this analytical framework can draw attention to the regimes, techniques and technologies that are beginning to shape the forms of knowledge that are gaining power in health sector environmental management and can contribute to a better understanding of fields of environmental knowledge/power (in)visibility.