Mobilizing theory - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 31

in multiple, non-contiguous spaces. In this approach governance occurs within
and beyond the formal negotiations that occur between fixed groups such as
stakeholder groups, government agencies, and business groups (Zimmer and
Sakdapolrak, 2012).
The distinction between government and governance matters because the
chapters in this topic are concerned both with the processes used to make decisions
about water, as well as the relationships between Indigenous communities, govern-
mental and extra-governmental actors in the decision-making processes. In earlier
work, I explored the ways in which subnational and extra-governmental actors are
increasing involved in decision-making processes with respect to transboundary
waters - a domain over which national governments have had almost exclusive
control since the colonial imposition of the boundary itself (Norman and Bakker,
2009). Moreover, the tensions between water as a fluid, boundary-crossing
substance, and the fixed jurisdictional scale for management, necessitates close
attention to the politics of scale (see Norman et al. , 2015). Thus, decisions about
water are necessarily (if often implicitly) decisions about what actions are to be taken
at what scale.
Governance models that follow State regimes tend to treat nation-state systems
unproblematically, or naturalized and abstracted as a bounded demarcation of
political power (Brenner et al. , 2003). For example, as explored in Chapter 9, when
Luna/ Tsu-xiit “the lost whale” transgressed from U.S. waters to Canadian waters,
a slew of agencies and personnel were required to handle this “international/
multijurisdictional incident”. In this complex case, I suggest that questioning how
managers are able to transcend b/ordered spaces when they are fixed to national
standards, protocols, and rules - let alone transcend boundaries of human-animal
transmogrification - provides an impetus to re-evaluate the fixity of these systems.
Transcending these nested boundaries relates to postsovereign framing of border
studies and posthumanist thinking for animal geography. In both cases, the need
remains to (re)locate power dynamics within the “naturalized system”.
Governance systems and worldviews
As the chapters in this topic will demonstrate, governance systems, themselves, are
not politically neutral. Rather, belief systems are embedded within the production
of science, and carried out within governance practices. The notion that Western
science and policy is based on fundamentally different ideas of nature and science
than those outside a Western European tradition is well documented (Berkes,
1999; La Duke, 1999; Cajete, 2000; Little Bear, 2000; Wildcat, 2004). The idea
that these systems are “dependent on the culture/worldview/paradigm of the
definer” (Little Bear 2000, p. ix) is also explored in science studies, more generally
(e.g. Latour, 1999; Whatmore, 1999, 2002).
Some scholars engaging in topics of Indigenous studies articulate the components
of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as a combination of knowledge systems,
systems of practice, and belief systems (Gadgil et al. , 1993; Berkes, 1999). Reo