ransactions

of the Institute of British Geographers

Biosecure citizenship: politicising

symbiotic associations and the
construction of biological threat
Kezia Barker
Biosecurity politics in New Zealand is implicated in the constitution of a new dimen-
sion of citizenship, a biosecure citizenship. This form is distinct in that the political
determinants of citizenship do not fully rest on the individual body, but on the body’s
connections to other entities, the inter- and intra-active symbiotic condition of human-
non-human ‘living together’. Through its constitutive role in enabling the ‘dangerous’
mobility of pathogens, viruses and invasive species, symbiotic individuality has become
politicised as a matter for state determination and control. Contemporary articulations
of biosecure citizenship emphasise a variety of contractual and non-contractual respon-
sibilities, which augment the national coordinates of citizenship, reconstitute symbiotic
individuality, and justify the state penetration of the private sphere. Drawing on bio-
security legislation, public education campaigns and research with community weed
removal projects, I chart the reinforcement and practice of this biosecure citizenship.
I argue that there is an urgent need to democratise decisionmaking about the construc-
tion of biological threat, about where and how to make cuts in our symbiotic associa-
tions with different species, and between species and spaces. By articulating biosecure
citizenship not only as a discourse of ecological responsibility but of rights, biosecurity
could be reinvigorated as ‘bios-security’, the inclusive politics of continually question-
ing the ecological good life.

key words New Zealand biosecurity citizenship symbiosis environmental

politics

Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Birkbeck College University of London,
London WC1B 5DQ
email: k.barker@bbk.ac.uk.

revised manuscript received 14 February 2010

clearing of native forest smothered in the climbing

Introduction
In the opening decade of the 20th century, a
farmer-settler called Guthrie Smith ponders the ori-
gin of a grove of wild peach trees in Hawke’s Bay,
New Zealand. He later speculates in the environ-
mental history classic, Tutira: The Story of a New
Zealand Sheep Station, that the peach stones had
been planted by travellers, as ‘acts of good citizen-
ship’ (Guthrie-Smith 1921 [1999], 76). In the open-
ing decade of the 21st century, on a hillside outside
the ‘English Garden City’ of Christchurch, a group
of weed control volunteers with bottles of pesticide
and loppers lying by their sides, rest for lunch in a
pest plant Clematis vitalba. The introduction of non-
native fruit trees at the beginning of one century
and the removal of non-native vines at the begin-
ning of the next in some ways represent opposing
environmental values. Their construction and rele-
vance as ‘acts of good citizenship’, however, is
shared.
These volunteers perform one set of practices
within New Zealand’s contemporary biosecurity
regime, which stretches from international policy-
setting to sophisticated border control; from incur-
sion investigations to routine pest management;
and from expert interventions to the activities of

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Biosecure citizenship
individuals in their domestic gardens and local
environment. With entire system oversight by MAF
Biosecurity New Zealand (MAFBNZ), these tech-
nologies, activities, knowledges, policies, public
institutions and private agencies, humans and
non-humans, integrate to produce a particularly
heterogeneous and extensive biosecurity regime
(McKenna 1999 ⁄ 2000; Fascham and Trumper 2001;
Jay and Morad 2003; Jay et al. 2003). The term ‘bio-
security’ itself was coined and first used in legisla-
tion in New Zealand in the early 1990s, and is
currently defined as ‘the exclusion, eradication or
effective management of risks posed by pests and
diseases to the economy, environment and human
health’ (Biosecurity Council 2003, 5). These three
areas of concern – the protection of indigenous
biota, agricultural assemblages and human health –
to a greater or lesser extent mark other national
biosecurity regimes (see Hinchliffe 2001; Collier
et al. 2004; Donaldson and Wood 2004; Law 2006;
Braun 2007; Ali and Keil 2008; Barker 2008; Buller
2008; Donaldson 2008; Enticott 2008; Hinchliffe and
Bingham 2008; Lakoff and Collier 2008). What
draws these different practices and concerns
together is a shared construction of threat, posed
by the ‘dangerous’ biological mobility of pests,
viruses and other pathogens (Stasiulis 2004).
Due to the capacity our symbiotic associations
with other species have for enabling the dangerous
mobility of biological life, these associations have
been politicised as matters of state concern and
made subject to biosecurity control. ‘Symbiosis’, a
familiar ecological concept that has come to refer to
mutually supporting species, is derived from the
Ancient Greek rtlbixriV (sumbiosis), meaning ‘with
life’, ‘living with’ or ‘living together’ (Liddell et al.
1983 [1968]). Research within geography, sociology
and philosophy is increasingly giving recognition
to our interconnections ‘with life’ in the construc-
tion and understanding of self and other, human
and nonhuman, by exploring and challenging these
boundaries (Latour 1993; Whatmore 2002; Castree
and Nash 2004; Bennett 2004; Bingham 2006; Braun
2007; Davies 2010). Donna Haraway (1991 2008) in
particular calls human exceptionalism into question
through the intimate shaping and integral biologi-
cal co-productions that are both inter-bodily (such
as multispecies ‘living together’, such as human
and dog) and intra-bodily (theorising the human
‘individual’, with human genomes to be found in
only 10% of the cells that occupy the body, as a
‘knot of species coshaping one another in layers of
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351
reciprocating complexity all the way down’; Har-
away 2008, 42).1 The recognition by the biosecurity
regime that the traditionally bounded and individ-
ual citizen body is both ‘living with’ and enabling
the dangerous mobility of unwanted biological life,
however, is radically politicising ecological rela-
tions and augmenting citizenship formations.
Drawing this relational ontology into conversa-
tion with the biosecurity governance of nonhuman
mobility and what I characterise as material-rela-
tional formations of citizenship, I demonstrate how
the production and politicisation of ‘symbiotic indi-
viduality’ induces biosecure citizens to work upon
these associations, nurturing some and terminating
others, through governance practices of promotion,
persuasion and enforcement (Rose 2007). The
oxymoron ‘symbiotic individuality’ is purposeful,
utilised to hold on to the inherent instability
produced through this meeting of the ‘subject-
making’ processes of citizenship, and the ‘becom-
ing with’ processes of multispecies mixing. I argue
that the symbiotic co-shaping of multispecies
entanglements is therefore as political as it is
biological.
As a starting point to explore the connection
between biosecure citizenship and symbiotic indi-
viduality, I introduce current discussions of citizen-
ship, focusing on formations that encompass an
ecological or biological component. Drawing on an
analysis of legislation and public education mate-
rial, interviews with biosecurity practitioners and
participant observation within community groups
undertaken in 2005 and 2009, I then discuss the
central tenets of biosecure citizenship as it is
emerging and being negotiated in New Zealand.
I argue that biosecure citizenship constitutes a
reframing of political space, through the symbolic
recentring of national native nature with the simul-
taneous embodiment and deterritorialisation of the
national border; through an extension of state polit-
ical powers from acting on the body-surface of the
bounded human citizen to our symbiotic associa-
tions with co-constitutive nonhumans; and through
the state penetration of the private sphere of the
home and body. Next, despite the institutional
emphasis on public participation as a method to
promote a prescribed version of biosecure citizen-
ship, I consider the fractures enabled by the crea-
tive potential of practice, through which biosecure
citizenship is contested and reworked in the dis-
courses and practices of engaged biosecure citizens.
Finally, I argue that the active, bodily citizenship
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promoted through state policy is insufficient on its
own; what is needed is greater democratic partici-
pation in the ongoing construction of the ecological
ends that the biosecurity regime will maintain.
Material-relational citizenships: redefining
political space
Viewed traditionally, citizenship entails the inser-
tion of the body into a political realm, the inclusion
of being within a legally bounded space, the con-
nection between body, territory and a sovereign
power (Agamben 1998). Distinct approaches to citi-
zenship have emerged, including liberal, republi-
can, contractualist and, more recently, feminist,
post-colonial, cosmopolitan and post-cosmopolitan
citizenships. These approaches accord different
importance to citizen rights or responsibilities, to
the public or private sphere as the site of citizen
activity, and to the nation state or the global
community as the signifier of citizenship identity
(Dobson 2003; Delanty 1997; Valencia Saiz 2005;
Gabrielson 2008). Viewed through a geographical
lens, citizenship is the unstable outcome of ongoing
struggles over how constructed categories of
people come to be politically defined in space. This
geographical sensibility draws attention to the
potentially transformative effects of spatialised
security practices on different facets of citizenship
(Stasiulis 2004). Crucially, however, citizenship is
not produced solely through the top-down imposi-
tion of political will, but is forged relationally
between individuals, states and territories, and
between public and private realms, through con-
tested processes of inclusion (the reallocation of
resources) and exclusion (building identities
according to imagined solidarity) (Turner 2001;
Stasiulis 2004).
Two key precedents extend traditional notions of
citizenship in ways significant for thinking through
the connections made by biosecure citizenship
between nation states, citizens, bodies, environ-
ments and symbiotic entities. First, biological citizen-
ship, as proposed by Nicholas Rose,2 conceptually
builds on Foucault’s work on biopolitics and
empirically refers to genetic medicine and the
molecularisation of somatic identity. Biological
citizenship entails the ways in which
the biological make-up of each and all can become an
issue for political contestation, for recognition and
exclusion, and for demands for rights and the imposi-
tion of obligations. (Rose 2007, 137)
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Kezia Barker
In this formulation, citizenship, rather than starting
from the surface of the body to act upon that body
in space, both penetrates and is shaped by concep-
tions of the ‘‘‘vital characteristics’’ of human
beings’ (Rose 2007, 24). Rose elucidates how the
molecular body has become a matter of self-main-
tenance and self-formation, the basis for individual
and collective citizenship identities, the focus for
ethical conduct, and the subject of expert guidance
and financial speculation.
Second, ecological citizenship externalises these
relational ties to make visible the intersection
between the citizen and the environment. A growth
of recent scholarship in this area includes the most
widely used ‘environmental citizenship’ (Jelin 2000;
Bell 2005), ‘sustainable citizenship’ (Barry 2003;
Bullen and Whitehead 2005), ‘ecological citizenship’
(van Steenbergen 1994; Light 2002; Dobson 2003;
Hayward 2006; Latta 2007) and ‘green citizenship’
(Dean 2001; Gabrielson 2008). Ecological citizen-
ship, as it is proposed by Andrew Dobson (2003),
is driven by a concern for sustainability and is
materially focused on the metabolic relationship
between people and their environment, expressed
through the metaphor of the ecological footprint
(Dobson 2003). While other productions of citizen-
ship can be regarded as relationally conceived, the
material basis of ecological citizenship requires ‘a
much broader consciousness of the relational impli-
cations of various socio-ecological practices’ (Bullen
and Whitehead 2005, 504), such as consumption
and travel. Ecological citizenship redevelops the
political space of citizenship beyond the nation
state and the public sphere, considers the material
nature of responsibilities and virtues, and emphas-
ises ecological citizenship as formed in practice.
The significance of these theoretical formations
for biosecure citizenship is in their extension of the
citizenship contract beyond traditional understand-
ings of the relationship between the citizen, state
and a bounded unit of territory. Crucially, they
highlight relational material associations, between citi-
zens, somatic experts and the molecularised body,
or between citizens, their metabolic environment
and distant others. Biological citizenship emphas-
ises the way ‘we are increasingly coming to relate
to ourselves as ‘‘somatic’’ individuals . . . as beings
whose individuality is, in part at least, grounded
within our fleshy, corporeal existence’ (Rose 2007,
25–6). In this formation, citizenship is refracted
through our intimate corporeal associations with
our own fleshy human body, and increasingly, our
Biosecure citizenship
molecular individuality made known to us by bio-
medical science (Rose 2007). For ecological citizen-
ship, the citizen is connected through the
conditions of their own material reproduction to
distant others, whose possibilities for sustaining life
are affected by the greater or lesser use of shared
resources that this entails (Dobson 2003). While
ecological and biological citizenship are very differ-
ent models of material-relationality, working either
internally or externally to the traditional body-sur-
face of the bounded citizen, both conceive of these
extended relations as crucial to the formation of cit-
izenship identity, rights and responsibilities.
These material-relational citizenships establish
the terrain for biosecure citizenship by departing in
crucial ways from conventional citizenship. In the
following I mark the coordinates of biosecure citi-
zenship in order to specify the contemporary logics
of biosecurity control. I then turn to the context in
which biosecure citizenship is produced and per-
formed to exemplify how it is utilised, negotiated
and reworked through biosecurity practices.
The coordinates of biosecure citizenship
Biosecure citizenship emerges through three key
augmentations to the conventional ‘architecture’ of
citizenship (Dobson 2003): the reconstruction of
symbiotic individualism, the realignment of the
national within citizenship’s political space and
identity, and the blurring of public ⁄ private bound-
aries. Rather than fixed, absolute tenets of an
entrenched form of citizenship, I demonstrate how
unstable and sometimes conflictual these elements
are. In particular, the relational assumption of con-
tinued human–nonhuman mobility and symbiotic
individuality, on which biosecurity policy is based,
undercuts traditional notions of individual human
agency deeply woven into Western understandings
of citizenship. This produces a potential opening
for democratic debate and for alternative eco-
political perspectives, particularly Maori relational
ontologies, to inform environmental governance
practices. Simultaneously, however, and perhaps as
a consequence, individual agency is reinforced
through the centring of a symbolic, static and terri-
torially distinct national nature, with an emphasis
on citizen participation in severing ‘bad’ ecological
associations (which always also involves nurturing
‘good’ ones). This produces active, bodily participa-
tion whilst minimising political debate over the
constitution of the ecological good.
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Symbiotic individualisation and political
responsibility
Biosecure citizenship shifts the subject of gover-
nance from the individual body, our somatic exis-
tence that is the focus of biological citizenship, to
act on our symbiotic existence, the eco-relational
body. It extends beyond a politicising of our meta-
bolic interactions with the environment, those
material exchanges that are the focus of ecological
citizenship, to incorporate non-metabolic environ-
mental associations. Through a variety of technolo-
gies of persuasion and enforcement, the biosecure
citizen is encouraged to relate to themselves as
symbiotic individuals at the same time as they are
asked to act upon this individuality. This new form
of subjectification stretches the conventional mod-
ern citizen’s material focus of being to include non-
humans and various socio-ecological hybrids
(Bullen and Whitehead 2005).
The politicisation of symbiotic individuality has
implications beyond the domain of biosecurity, as
our posthuman condition is increasingly the focus
for identity construction and subject to governance
in diverse arenas such as xenotransplantation,
genetic modification and food consumption, bio-
technology, and domestic animal husbandry. I cha-
racterise biosecure citizenship, however, as acting
on the ‘dangerous’ biological mobility enabled
through symbiotic individuality.3 This political
co-shaping encompasses those viruses that thrive
in the moisture in our throats and lungs, the sub-
ject of biosecurity concerns over SARS, avian- or
swine-flu. It extends to those entangled entities that
cling on outside the epidermis of the human body:
in our hair, the creases of our skin and clothes,
caught up in our material possessions, the corners
of our luggage, the warmth of our gardens, all
those non-humans with which we, knowingly or
unknowingly, have relationships with (Haraway
2008). It includes those entities fleetingly attached
to us in our role as carriers moving through space:
seeds clinging to hastily packed tents, soil micro-
organisms caught in the treads of boots, insects
gorging on the fruit in a traveller’s packed lunch. It
also includes culturally significant food, flowers,
pets and other items brought to New Zealand to
fulfil cultural practices of gifting and exchange, or
to support a multicultural identity. The term
‘inseparable organism’ is used by New Zealand’s
biosecurity regime to refer to those biological enti-
ties, such as gut bacteria in animals, which are
inherently associated with and cannot be physically
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separated from their ‘host’ organism, and so
require combined biosecurity risk analysis and con-
trol (Gerard Clover4 interview 2005). The myriad of
other associations are, therefore, separable.
This represents a profound realignment of the
individual’s association with their symbiotic biota,
and a radical re-ordering of relationships between
humans and nature (Braun 2008). From our first
tentative food-gathering journeys to the imperial
fanfare of the plant hunters, humans have carried,
sent, travelled and moved with non-human entities
in circuits of vitality that now regularly and rap-
idly traverse the globe (Miller and Reill 1996).
Maori oral history records those species first
brought to New Zealand by individual waka
(canoes), and certain introduced species, including
the invasive kiore rat, are regarded by some Maori
as taonga (highly prized possession) (Roberts 2009).
The success of European settlement in New Zea-
land was crucially supported by an assortment of
European co-adapted micro and macro flora and
fauna, pests and diseases (Clark 1949; Crosby 1995;
Clark 2002), the foot-soldiers of colonisation
(Guthrie-Smith 1921 [1999]), which swept through
the new country, preparing the way for European
peoples and agriculture, and ultimately supporting
the establishment of European political systems
and historical concepts of citizenship.
It is these symbiotic relationships which now
give rise to the obligations of biosecure citizenship,
rather than pre-determined citizen virtues.
Attempts by the biosecurity regime to ‘recode the
duties, rights and expectations’ (Rose 2007, 6) of
biosecure citizens flow from our differing associa-
tions with Unwanted Organisms: ‘any organism
that a chief technical officer believes is capable or
potentially capable of causing unwanted harm to
any natural and physical resources or human
health’ (New Zealand Government 1993, no 95 s. 2
(1)). These contractual obligations are articulated
and codified in a number of different legislative
formats, including the Biosecurity Act (1993) and
the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms
Act (HSNO Act) (1996), which together play a key
role in formalising biosecure citizenship (New
Zealand Government 1993, 1996). These obligations
have implications in many aspects of daily life – in
the traditionally private sphere, through different
forms of movement and through participation in
certain work and leisure activities.
The biosecure citizen also has contractual obliga-
tions to participate in the surveillance and report-
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ing of these new, unwanted and notifiable
organisms:
Section 44: General duty to inform5
Every person is under a duty to inform the Ministry, as
soon as practicable in the circumstances, of the presence
of what appears to be an organism not normally seen
or otherwise detected in New Zealand.
Section 46: Duty to report notifiable organisms
(1) Every person who—
(a) At any time suspects the presence of an organism in
any place in New Zealand; and
(b) Suspects that it is for the time being declared to be a
notifiable organism under subsection (2) of section 45 of
this Act; and
(c) Believes that it is not at the time established in that
place; and
(d) Has no reasonable grounds for believing that the
chief technical officer is aware of its presence or possi-
ble presence in that place at that time,—
shall without unreasonable delay report to the chief
technical officer its presence or possible presence in that
place at that time. (New Zealand Government 1993, no
95 s. 44, 46)
These in turn place obligations on biosecurity insti-
tutions to both inform biosecure citizens of their
responsibilities and to provide the infrastructural
conditions to enable their fulfilment. A free hotline
provides a direct route of communication to rap-
idly alert the appropriate biosecurity personnel to
possible sightings of new pests:
Your obligations under section 44 are fulfilled by phon-
ing the MAF 0800 80 99 66 hotline. (Froud 2006, 4)
All calls are initially routed to a call centre, and
those that are classified as a potential risk
through a standardised decision-tree methodology
are directed to the relevant Incursion Investiga-
tion Team for further analysis (Animal and
Marine, Plants and Environment). By creating
‘a subjectivity that is ever watchful, alert, aware
– in order to ward off diverse and mobile risks’
(Stasiulis 2004, 297), future risk is made tangible
within the present, justifying further biosecurity
actions, and generating support for biosecurity
institutions.
Biosecure citizenship
National borders, national ecology and national
citizenship identity?
While national elements in some citizenship forma-
tions have come into question in the face of globali-
sation, cosmopolitanism and the transnational
character of environmental degradation (Dean
2001; Ong 2006; Gabrielson 2008), biosecurity is a
state-forming activity and profoundly national in
highly significant, though fractured ways. This is
despite biosecurity requirements enshrined in glo-
bal legislation, including the World Trade Organi-
sation’s ‘Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Agreement’,
and the Convention on Biological Diversity.6 Inva-
sive species as ‘life out of bounds’ (Bright 1999) are
non-territorial and ‘constitutively international in
the sense that they do not, cannot, and will never
respect national borders’ (Dobson 2003, 2). Non-
native yet valued agricultural species disrupt the
singular attribution of value to native species, and
attention to correct local ecotypes breaks down the
monolithic category of the national, natural native.
However, at key junctures biosecurity is fundamen-
tally defined by the bio-ecological transgression of
the political borders of nation states. The nation
state underpins the scientific classification of native
from alien species (Kendle and Rose 2000; Warren
2007), and native nature is utilised as a fixed eco-
logical metaphor around which to delimit natural
heritage and national citizenship identity (Dunlap
1999). The classification for biological entities of
being ‘new to New Zealand’ (not known to be in
New Zealand prior to July 1997, when the Hazard-
ous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 came
into force) restricts their importation through the
requirement of an environmental impact assess-
ment with zero-tolerance to biological risk.
National borders are utilised to control biological
mobility enabled through symbiotic individuality.
When crossing into New Zealand at airports or
seaports, the biosecure citizen passes through bio-
security control areas, crucial ‘detachment zones’,7
where they are contractually obliged to:
(a) Obey any reasonable direction of an inspector in
relation to risk goods; and
(b) Answer all questions asked by an inspector that are
necessary for the inspector to ascertain the presence,
nature, origin, or itinerary of any risk goods; and
(c) Make available for examination by an inspector any
goods in his or her possession or under his or her
immediate control so that the inspector may ascertain
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the presence of risk goods. (‘Duties of people in biose-
curity control areas’, New Zealand Government 1993,
no 95 s. 35)
Just as biometric passports seek to make the fixed
biological characteristics of an individual transpar-
ent, an arsenal of technologies including x-ray,
visual and olfactoral inspections by human eyes
and dogs’ noses, risk profiling and signed New
Zealand Passenger Arrival Card declaration forms
(which constitute legal documents) seek to make
transparent the relational biological characteristics
of individuals and unwanted organisms. Any bio-
security transgression, including erroneous failures
to declare risk goods, receives an infringement
notice and instant fine of NZ$200, with intention-
ally false declarations facing a fine of up to
NZ$100 000 and ⁄ or 5 years’ imprisonment (MAF
Biosecurity 2007).8
A parallel form of national bordering utilises
aligned inclusionary and exclusionary discourses,
rather than powerful legislation and border tech-
nologies, to generate a homogeneous New Zealand
identity tied to a particular vision of a national eco-
logical resource (Anderson 1991 [1983]; Ginn 2008).
The outsider to this national natural identity is pro-
duced and vilified through the explicit use of coun-
try names within common names for invasive
species (Mexican daisy; Chilean flame-creeper;
Argentinean pampas grass) (Mike Harré9 interview
2005), and through the dramatised metaphors of
terror, security and war within biosecurity public
education messages to generate concern and fear
(Barker 2009). In contrast:
Our native species – including our national icons (the
kiwi, silver fern, and koru) – and their supporting habi-
tats and ecosystems help define us as a nation. (Biose-
curity Council 2002, 15)
Invasive species that threaten native nature, threa-
ten the image of the nation, and so controlling or
preventing them is a patriotic act. This can be seen
in MAFBNZ’s original mission statement, which
urged New Zealanders to: ‘Be vigilant and protect
those things which quintessentially define us as a
nation – which make our country and our spirit
unique and special in the world.’ The strap-line for
an editorial in the policy magazine, Biosecurity,
reads: ‘Biosecurity is an issue at the heart of many
‘‘home proud’’ citizens of Aotearoa. This statement
is certainly true of Maori’ (Clark 2006, 310). By con-
structing biosecure citizen identity around a native
(spatially and temporally fixed) natural heritage in
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need of biosecurity protection, the nation state
emerges as the symbolic space of biosecure citizen-
ship (Desforges et al. 2005; Gabrielson 2008). The
imagined solidarity of ‘one nation New Zealand’
veils internal differentiation in citizenship status, a
key site of political contestation in New Zealand,
where debates over Maori self-determination, envi-
ronmental, cultural and property rights, linked to
differing readings and extensive breaches of the
1840 Treaty of Waitangi, have defined relationships
between Maori and the State (Lunt et al. 2002; Mac-
Donald and Muldoon 2006; Humpage 2008). The
negotiation of biosecure citizenship in New Zea-
land is marked by the country’s bi-cultural and
multi-cultural context, where different socio-cul-
tural groups have unequal access to the construc-
tion and enactment of the ecological common good
(McKenna 1999 ⁄ 2000).
The significance of the national in biosecure citi-
zenship does not tread the established paths of tra-
ditional citizenship formations, however, where the
nation state once acted as the unproblematic refer-
ent for the allocation of citizenship status. Through
biosecurity practices, a dual process of embodiment
and deterritorialisation constitutes the production
of national borders, as the landscape of citizenship
that demarcates the territorial limits of biosecure
citizenship is fractured (Walters 2004; Desforges
et al. 2005). Firstly, the national border is corpore-
ally produced and marked out in the relationships
between different legal and illegal human and non-
human bodies. This bordering is drawn not simply
between ‘native good, alien bad’, as economically
valuable and iconic alien ecological assemblages
such as sheep farming, pine forestry and kiwifruit
orchards can gain ‘citizenship’ status, despite
emerging problems of invasiveness and negative
environmental impacts (Sullivan et al. 2007).11
Instead, illegality is determined through a complex
assessment of economic benefit weighed against
the costs and capacity of biosecurity interventions
to affect change, and actual or potential harm (Bar-
ker 2008). This national bordering between differ-
ent territorially new and existing species is
produced and negotiated across diverse sites: in
scientific journals debating the spatial origins of
species, within the offices of the Environmental
Risk Management Authority (ERMA) in Auckland
where the importation application process is man-
aged, and within the negotiating rooms of the
World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva. This
heterogeneous process of assigning spatial legality
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contributes to the shifting nature of biosecurity pol-
icy, as individual species are moved on and off
banned lists and importation requirements for risky
entities are continually updated. The corporeal pro-
duction of the national border is therefore both
dynamic and flexible, and reliant on continually
traversing bodies.
Secondly, a fracturing of the national border
occurs in the dislocation between territorial borders
and the definition of being ‘in’ New Zealand for
biosecurity purposes. The contents of shipping con-
tainers are only legally classified as being in New
Zealand when their doors are opened in highly
controlled circumstances on specially designated
concrete zones (Mark Bullians12 interview 2009);
containment and quarantine facilities for risky
plants and animals distributed across New Zealand
are legally classified as ‘transitional facilities’ and
so ‘located’ at the national border; and living
rooms, campsites, warehouses and other places
where bags are first unpacked and imported goods
are first opened, are classified as immediately
‘post-border’ sites (Karyn Froud13 interview 2009).
This spatial fracturing also occurs through increas-
ing efforts to shift biosecurity risk ‘off-shore’,
which allows the biosecuring of the national border
through interventions in the symbiotic lives of dis-
tant others (see Braun 2007).
Simultaneously, once the image of a unified
national biosecure citizenry is peeled away, it is
apparent that this is masking existing policy differ-
entiation. Biosecurity legislation and practices inter-
act with the particular rights and responsibilities of
Maori as tangata whenua (people of the land),
reflecting the special relationship of Maori to the
New Zealand environment. Examples include
MAF’s ‘Maori Responsiveness Strategy’ and the
activities of the Maori Strategy Unit, the necessity
to demonstrate sufficient consultation of Maori
within any application to import new species to
New Zealand, and through an increasing number
of agreements that instigate co-management of bio-
security objectives with Maori landowning bodies
(Erica Gregory14 interview 2009). However, there
persists an assumption of a ‘single Maori view’ on
biosecurity, despite the fact that no specific concept
of biological security exists in Maori (Roberts 2009,
4).15 This brings with it the risk of co-opting Maori,
either as an additional justification for biosecurity
measures, or for a critique of biosecurity (MacDon-
ald and Muldoon 2006). Biosecure citizenship in
New Zealand therefore reproduces the paradoxical
Biosecure citizenship
processes of Maori differentiation as tangata whenua
and homogenisation as ‘New Zealanders’ within a
postcolonial New Zealand identity (Ginn 2008;
Humpage 2008).16
These fractures, exceptions, differentiations and
fluid productions do not equate to a declining sov-
ereignty, but add to the strength of the biosecurity
governance network (Stasiulis 2004; Thacker 2005;
Hinchliffe and Bingham 2008). They are, however,
masked through the projection of a valorised native
ecology coextensive with a national territory and
supported by a harmonious postcolonial society, as
evidenced within environmental public education
and policy discourses.
The blurring of public ⁄ private boundaries
A crucial object of biosecurity concern is the repli-
cation of private landscapes in public ecological
sites. For invasive plant species, to whom the pri-
vate property boundary of the home is an arbitrary
physical structure, the private sphere becomes part
of a continuum of biological invasion, stretching
from the garden centre, to the home, to peri-urban
areas, to native forest (Peter Williams17 interview
2005; Williams 1997). The penetration of the private
sphere by state powers is justified by its signifi-
cance on this conveyor belt producing and dissemi-
nating pests. The landowner or occupier has
contractual obligations to adhere to all national and
regional legislation related to the control of
unwanted organisms. For the domestic gardener,
this applies to the removal of certain high-risk
plants from their gardens, including the popular
garden staples jasmine (Jasminum polyanthum), Afri-
can feather grass (Pennisetum macrourum), Japanese
honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and Mexican daisy
(Erigeron karvinskianus). These cannot be knowingly
propagated, distributed, spread, released, sold,
offered for sale or displayed, in accordance with
section 52 and 53 of the Biosecurity Act (1993). If
landowners do not keep other listed pests at speci-
fied distances from their property boundaries, the
Regional Council completes the work with pre-
mium costs charged to the landowner.18 Biosecurity
legislation in New Zealand confers significant
powers of access to private property for ‘Author-
ised Persons’ that they may, ‘at any reasonable
time or times, enter and inspect any place for the
purpose of’:
(i) Confirming the presence, former presence, or absence,
of any pest, pest agent, or unwanted organism; or
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2010
357
(ii) Managing or eradicating any pest, pest agent, or
unwanted organism. (New Zealand Government 1993,
no 95 s. 109(1))
This new site of state intervention radically politi-
cises the relationship between citizens and their
symbiotic biota in the private sphere. This redefini-
tion of private property rights over the home and
the body has met with little contestation in New
Zealand about which interventions are ‘desirable,
legitimate and efficacious’ (Rose 2007, 54). The
exception to this right of access is the Maori ‘dwell-
inghouse, marae [sacred open meeting place], or
any building associated with a marae’, for which
the consent of an occupier or a warrant issued
under section 110 of the Biosecurity Act (1993) is
required (New Zealand Government 1993, no 95 s.
109 (2)). In this instance, the cultural rights of par-
ticular New Zealand citizens outweigh the biosecu-
rity regime’s right of access to private space.
In practice, it is politically difficult for the state
to implement their powers of access to the private
sphere in all but the most serious of cases. Regional
Councils prefer to pursue more collaborative rela-
tionship with home owners, extending the role of
biosecurity officers from identifying and removing
pests to wider roles of advising, guiding and facili-
tating biosecure citizens (Carolyn Lewis19 interview
2005). This extension of citizen obligations to the
private sphere is, therefore, reliant on the willing-
ness of the public to participate. Biosecurity and
the accompanying stringent legislation do not oper-
ate in an ideal scenario of perfect public compli-
ance, however, and generating public concern is
not easy. It is in this context that non-contractual
citizenship obligations and the utility of the citizen-
ship discourse in the attempted normalisation of
pro-biosecurity behaviour are significant.
Cultivating biosecure citizenship: from
eco-nationalism to local activism
The biosecurity regime in New Zealand undertakes
extensive public communication activities, which
stress more than the fulfilment of these existing
contractual responsibilities. Public participation is
crucial to achieving biosecurity aims, and the ethos
of participation is embedded within biosecurity
policy as an end in itself: the Biosecurity 2008 Stra-
tegic Plan lists ‘prevent harm, reduce damage,
everyone participates’ as its strategic aims (see
Froud et al. 2008, 97). This is due to the necessity
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 350–363 2010
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358
for biosecure citizens to be self-governing in the
private sphere, the real need for volunteers to con-
tribute to the control of pests in the wider land-
scape, and through the connection between public
participation and strengthened personal commit-
ment to biosecurity ideals (Peter Williams inter-
view 2005; Agrawal 2005). The non-contractual
obligations of participation are encouraged through
public education campaigns that constitute an
ideal-type biosecure citizen identity in an attempt
to establish a ‘norm’ of positive biosecure behav-
iour, and make biosecurity an object of civic con-
cern. This does not so much entail discursive
participation in politically producing the ecological
good, but crucially bodily participation in actualis-
ing that ecological good.
This is apparent in the activities of ‘Weedbust-
ers’, the national campaign for invasive plant issues
launched in 2003, which emerges as a project for
creating biosecure citizens (Rose 2007):
The key task of Weedbusters is to change attitudes and
behaviours permanently for the greater good of individ-
uals, their communities and ultimately the wider New
Zealand environment. (Department of Conservation
2004, 4)
Weedbusters operates as a traditional education
campaign – producing resources, educational mate-
rial and disseminating key messages – but also pro-
motes and supports community ‘Weedbuster
Teams’ who take responsibility for controlling inva-
sive weeds and promoting native biodiversity in
their local environment. These activities form part
of what Rose terms ‘the ethic of active citizenship
that has taken shape in advanced liberal democra-
cies’ (2007, 25), and this ethic is, according to Lunt
et al., a strong feature of New Zealand citizenship
more broadly: ‘There has been a groundswell of
belief that voluntary associations can offer a further
route to entitlement and to contribute to the social
glue of society’ (2002, 355; see also Humpage 2008).
Active participation in eco-social groupings pro-
duces collective identities linked to local biotic
communities, from wetlands to upland areas, from
restored bush to beaches. This complicates the
assumption that biosecure citizenship is only
aligned to the symbolic representation of bonds of
national ecological community. However, while
biosecure citizenship emerges through connections
of responsibility between ‘local citizens and their
local environments’ (Light 2003, 60), the issue of
which local environments are to be privileged with
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Kezia Barker
biosecurity protection or ‘restored’ and which local
citizens determine these priorities and bring into
being their version of nature remains, compound-
ing the linking of public space with the logic of
exclusion (Gabrielson 2008).
Lesley is an example of an active biosecure citi-
zen whose experience of dealing with weeds in her
garden on the North Shore, Auckland, prompted
her involvement in community weed control activi-
ties. Lesley received a Weedbuster Award nomina-
tion for her work on Norfolk Island hibiscus
(Lagunaria patersonia), a non-native pine she cam-
paigned to be classified as a pest plant and removed
from her local nature reserve due to its invasive ten-
dencies and negative health effects. Rather than
operate within the prescribed boundaries of institu-
tional concern, Lesley extended the ecopolitical
focus of biosecurity, in a small way redefining bio-
secure citizenship by expanding the classification of
harmful species and the role of the biosecure citizen
as the conduit through which institutional concerns
are actualised.20 Lesley valorises taking personal
action to achieve ecological objectives: ‘I’m someone
who if I see something that needs fixing, I like to fix
it’ (interview 2005). Whilst agitating to have the
self-seeded saplings removed, she eventually threa-
tened to do the difficult work herself: ‘I said . . .
‘‘I’m chopping these out whether you like it or
not!’’‘ (Lesley interview 2005). In an attempt to
prove the irritant effects of the trees’ seed-pods, she
rubbed the pods on her forearms and recorded the
results. Here bodily participation has become both
an experimental and negotiating tool. While in
many respects a model biosecure citizen, this is a
citizenship Lesley discursively and physically aug-
ments through the very act of performing it.
A further example was quietly acted out on
Motuihe Island, a small island off the coast of
Auckland. Once a place of Maori settlement, its
numerous roles over the history of European settle-
ment revolve around containment and separation,
include a quarantine island for scarlet fever, an
internment camp during the Second World War, a
naval training base and, more recently, a secluded
recreation spot for boaters (Motuihe Trust 2007).
Now controlled by the Department of Conservation
(DoC), the Motuihe Island Trust has been leading
the island’s restoration as a native habitat through
extensive pest control and renaturalisation projects.
Initiated by a small group of individuals, at the
start it proved difficult to garner DoC’s interest
and support. As a tactic to enforce their visibility,
Biosecure citizenship
they moved their native tree nursery directly across
the path to DoC’s office (interview 2005). While for
Gilbert and Phillips (2003) these ‘performative’
enactments of citizenship offer a mode of articulat-
ing alternative aspirations for governance, it is sig-
nificant that these biosecure citizens are agitating
for greater biosecurity control. I visited Motuihe
Island, and the Trust’s native plant nursery, during
a tree planting and weed clearance day in 2005. Sit-
ting separately from the native plants was a care-
fully potted specimen of the invasive banana
passionfruit vine (Passiflora tripartita). Its presence
raised more than just a few eyebrows. A once ico-
nic introduced plant, it had been uprooted during
the day’s weed clearing events, but was now wait-
ing patiently to be nurtured illicitly in a hidden
corner of an unknown volunteer’s garden, someone
who perhaps could not resist the lure of the pretty
flowers, the tasty fruit, or the memory of a child-
hood garden that it evoked. As Haraway reminds
us, ‘[c]itizenship across species ties many knots,
none of them innocent’ (2008, 118).
Biosecure citizenship: a safe state for
ecological politics?
I have considered New Zealand’s biosecurity tech-
nologies and rationalities as an opening for think-
ing about a current mode of politicising symbiotic
individuality, which incorporates nonhumans into
the domains of citizenship by recognising and act-
ing on human–nonhuman relationality. I have char-
acterised biosecure citizenship as concerned with
the enhanced mobility afforded to unwanted
organisms through fleeting or enduring symbiotic
associations with mobilised humans, and argued
that, through the contractual and non-contractual
obligations that flow from these associations, sym-
biotic co-shaping is as much political as it is biolog-
ical. Biosecurity in New Zealand in many ways
constitutes an ‘ideal type’ regime due to the level
of establishment of the biosecurity apparatus and
its public articulation, and is therefore the key site
for the development of biosecure citizenship. Dur-
ing moments of biosecurity ‘crisis’, however, such
as outbreaks of FMD, SARS, avian- and swine-flu,
the tenets of biosecure citizenship traced here argu-
ably emerge onto the political field of other
national regimes.
What are the implications of this augmentation
of citizenship, and how should we, academically
and politically, respond? Should we dismiss biose-
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359
cure citizenship as an over-extension of sovereign
power? Or can we engage with this political con-
stellation as an emerging form of being political,
containing both the danger of becoming a violent
form of ecological interventionism, but also the
possibility of democratising decisionmaking about
our personal, local and national ecologies of associ-
ations (Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006)? It is crucial
that we initiate the second of these options. The
laboratories and boardrooms where biosecurity is
imagined and produced must be unveiled to the
public sphere, to generate the conditions for recon-
structing biosecure citizenship around a temporally
and spatially flexible democratic culture of nature.
There is a pressing need to democratise biosecurity
decisionmaking over both where the cuts are made
in our symbiotic associations and the related con-
struction of biological threat.
There is a degree of existing participation in
decisionmaking over biosecurity matters at both
the national and regional scale in New Zealand,
although the level of wider public involvement in
these processes questions the legitimacy of refer-
ring to this as consultation. Sections 72 and 77 of
the Biosecurity Act (1993) stipulate a review
process for the development of Regional Pest
Management Strategies (RPMS), involving public
submissions and structured consultation (see Auck-
land Regional Council 2001; Environment Bay of
Plenty Regional Council 2003). However, the values
against which submissions are judged are not
themselves negotiable, and the majority come from
stakeholder groups and other biosecurity agencies.
Permission to import a new species to New Zea-
land is negotiated through an application process
that involves advertising the application, receiving
submissions and holding a hearing. The party sup-
porting the application is responsible for demon-
strating sufficient consultation of Maori, often
through organising hui or writing to all Iwi, Hapu,
Whanau21 and other organisations within the Maori
National Network, to gather any objections and to
assess the potential impact the new species may
have on Maori values (see ERMA 2005). This cur-
rent level of consultation needs to be expanded to
encompass greater public legitimacy in biosecurity
decisionmaking, operating beyond narrowly con-
ceived stakeholder groups. This should begin with
a wider public debate about biosecurity ideals,
greater transparency about processes of biosecurity
decisionmaking, and an unveiling of the manner
through which definitions of biological harm
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360
acquire scientific and political status. This must be
driven by the rearticulation of biosecure citizenship
within a language of rights, and not only the right
to determine greater biosecurity protection (for par-
ticular species and spaces), but also the right to
explore satisfactory ways of retaining those valued
symbiotic associations that have been brought into
question through biosecurity ideals.
Incorporating democratic participation in con-
texts where an essentialist concept of the ecological
common good predominates is an ongoing issue in
environmental politics (Bell 2003 2005; Dobson
2007; Gabrielson 2008). If, as Rose argues,
the question of the good life – bios – has become intrin-
sically a matter of the vital processes of our animal life
– zoë. Since the form of bios is constituently subject to
contestation, life itself . . . is now at stake in our politics
(Rose 2007, 83)
biosecurity must be re-theorised as bios security, the
securing of the question of the ecological good life.
Re-orientating biosecurity practice around multiple
conceptions of the ecological good life will be diffi-
cult, as these cannot at present be fully practised
even in the private sphere. However, the current
flexibility in control responses for pests that have
achieved significant incursions into New Zealand
suggests that the ‘letting live’ of certain species will
not undermine the bios-security regime. A further
example can be found within the public fury that
erupted over the health and environmental risks of
an aerial pesticide spraying campaign undertaken
during MAF’s eradication of the Painted Apple
Moth (Teia anartoides) in Auckland in 2004 (see
Gregory 2007). This generated public calls for
greater border controls and community participa-
tion in targeted ground-level spraying, supporting
the assertion that democratising bios-security deci-
sionmaking will not in itself entail a loss of biose-
curity. Democratic decisionmaking over how
incisions are made between species, not just where
they are drawn, will also be crucial to a rights-
based discourse driven by biosecure citizens.
We must not confine the political potential of
biosecure citizenship to the spaces of bordering
and ecological rejection, but cultivate positive polit-
ical framings of symbiotic association, and allow
for the creative spaces of new citizenship participa-
tion and community action. ‘[I]ntroducing species
. . . is often a world-destroying cut, as well as
sometimes an opening to healing or even to new
kinds of flourishing’ (Haraway 2008, 288). These
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Kezia Barker
flourishings, practices of ‘living with’ new organ-
isms, may include the carefully tested yet inher-
ently experimental biological control organisms,
reared as classroom science projects by primary
school children, and released to mediate our ‘living
with’ their previously unchecked food sources.
They could also include personal forms of biosecur-
ing, such as those performed by many of the bio-
security-conscientious yet passionate gardeners
I interviewed, who diligently trimmed the seed
heads from those ‘illegal’ invasive flowering plants
they could not help but enjoy living with. In these
and other spaces, differing boundaries of ecological
concern, ways of performing citizenship, and con-
cepts of the ecological common good continuously
augment and challenge the boundaries of biosecure
citizenship. This potential can not only be seen in
those active biosecure citizens that hold the regime
to account through demands for greater protection
for certain species and spaces. It is also apparent in
the actions of those fighting for greater community
consultation over aerial-spraying campaigns, quietly
harbouring unwanted organisms in the private
sphere, and taking on and adapting ancestral envi-
ronmental responsibilities to a new biosecurity ethic.
Through these practices, biosecure citizens are con-
stantly redefining what it means to be a symbiotic
individual intervening in the ecology of a country,
through the ongoing messy business of ‘living with’.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Leandro Minuchin and Rosie Cox
for their insightful comments on an earlier draft,
and to Gail Davies, Andrew Dobson and Steve
Hinchliffe for discussions that contributed to the
ideas developed in this paper. I also greatly appre-
ciate the thoughtful comments of three anonymous
referees. The research was funded by an ESRC
postgraduate studentship and a Birkbeck, Univer-
sity of London staff research award.
Notes
1 The ‘individual’ emerges from this as a historically
constituted and geographically specific material-semi-
otic assemblage of entangled species, yet Haraway
(2008, 41) never displaces the ‘quasi-individuated
beings’ that co-shape and exchange in the contact
zones of multispecies mixing.
2 Originally in an article with Carlos Novas (Rose and
Novas 2004). Biological citizenship draws on earlier
Biosecure citizenship
conceptions such as genetic citizenship (see Haraway
2008, 355).
3 The connection between citizenship and the manage-
ment of human mobility is long standing, assigning
freedom of movement within state territory as a key
right of citizenship, and controlling movement
between states (Desforges et al. 2005). Our intra-bodily
relationships with other species have also been a his-
toric factor in this connection, through practices of
health testing and quarantining immigrants with
known infectious diseases (King 2002; Bashford 2002).
4 Virology and Post-Entry Quarantine Team Manager,
MAF.
5 While the ‘general duty to inform’ applies to all New
Zealanders, it is particularly emphasised at confer-
ences and in publications relevant to the scientific
community, who may have certain motivations for
actively withholding knowledge about the presence of
a new species in New Zealand in the interest of career
advancement and new publications (Karyn Froud
interview 2009).
6 See World Trade Organisation (1994), article number
5.1. Article 8(h) of the Convention on Biological Diver-
sity states that: ‘Each contracting party shall, as far as
possible and as appropriate: (h) Prevent the introduc-
tion of, control or eradicate those alien species which
threaten ecosystems, habitats or species’ (United
Nations 1993).
7 Donna Haraway reworks Mary Pratt’s (1992) and later
Clifford’s (1997) concept of ‘contact zones’ to refer to
multispecies meetings. In contrast, these biosecurity
areas could be thought of as ‘detachment zones’ –
where certain symbiotic associations are severed and
potential multispecies becomings prevented.
8 Between June 2006 and June 2007, 4880 infringement
notices were issued (MAF Biosecurity 2007).
9 Mike Harré, Senior Advisor, Pest Management, Biose-
curity New Zealand, previously Community Liaison
Plant Biosecurity Officer, Auckland Regional Council.
10 Senior Policy Analyst for the Maori Strategy Unit.
11 See Bullen and Whitehead (2005) for a justification of
the extension of citizenship to nonhumans.
12 MAF Biosecurity Incursion Investigation Plants and
Environment Team Manager.
13 MAF Biosecurity Incursion Investigation Group Man-
ager.
14 Senior Advisor, Maori Strategy Unit, MAF.
15 The concept of a singular Maori perspective has also
been undermined through research under taken by
MAFBNZ, which demonstrates that Maori values
towards native plants are multiple, fluid, and are both
spatially and temporally situated (Newfield 2009).
16 While the legislation is in some ways progressive in
that it recognises the unique environmental relation-
ship and alternative knowledges and ontologies of
Maori, it could be argued that this is in a context
where a Pakeha (non- Maori; originally used to refer
Journal compilation  Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2010
361
to New Zealanders of European descent) New Zea-
land is ‘normal’, whereas a Maori New Zealand is
‘special’ (Other). This is ironic in that the meaning of
the term Maori is ‘normal’, or ‘ordinary.’
17 Department of Conservation Plant Ecologist.
18 See Sagoff (2009) for a discussion of similar legislation
in the US.
19 Weedbuster’s National Coordinator, Chairperson of
the Biosecurity Institute, and Waikato Regional Coun-
cil Plant Biosecurity Officer (until 2007).
20 This challenges Sagoff’s (2009) assertion that people
cannot know when non-native species cause envi-
ronmental harm. As concepts of harm are con-
structed, engaged individuals can contribute to this
process.
21 Different scales of social and kinship groups within
Maori society.
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