Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
realist stance would favour delving into method and assumptions and would also
be more useful in constructing a critique that resonates within policy and scientifi c
circles (audience). In this way, the degree of engagement with scientifi c practice by
those studying social and environmental change depends in part on how they posi-
tion themselves with respect to resource management science.
Ecology and environmental politics
Those studying environmental politics have increasingly treated these as a 'politics
of knowledge' with a major arena of confl ict and competition over the question
of what counts as valid ecology. In one way, this emphasis is linked to the move-
ment away from political ecology's structural roots and the post-structural embrace
of discourse, difference, and identity politics. Early political ecology may have
tended to conceptualise environmental politics as straightforward exercises of
power in response to material interests. Today, these interests are not seen to be
less important but mediated discursively and materially through the practices of
knowledge production and circulation. Since such mediation is incomplete, con-
tested, and indeterminate, it is important to understand the knowledge politics of
ecology.
A major theme in political ecology's treatment of environmental politics has been
the social justice implications of the exercise of power by governments, multina-
tional corporations, and powerful individuals to claim/manage natural resources
from less powerful social groups. This politics is infused with a knowledge politics
as the knowledge claims of the less powerful, schooled, and wealthy are discounted
by those with more power. Scholars that share political ecology's critical engage-
ment with ecological science have, by questioning the neutrality and generalisability
of ecological science, contributed to a revisionist 'indigenous knowledge' literature
to that which had been dominated by treatments that sought to translate lay people's
knowledge into western scientifi c frameworks. Instead, these scholars have argued
that it is actually highly problematic to reify 'western scientifi c knowledge' from all
other knowledge forms. All knowledge bears the imprint of the context in which it
is produced. Different knowledge systems have strengths and weaknesses and one
should not rush to incorporate one into another but to treat each with respect
looking for areas of overlap and divergence (Nadasdy, 1999; Goldman, 2007). Such
treatments resonate strongly with efforts to democratise science and development
practice.
A number of trends have changed how power is exercised within conservation
and development contexts and in so doing have exposed the importance of how
ecological knowledge is produced, invoked, and circulated. As part of the neoliberal
turn in natural resource governance away from government towards civil society
and the market, a whole set of code words describing conservation and development
programmes have been invoked such as participatory, community-based, devolu-
tion, decentralisation...etc. These programmes have arguably increased the reli-
ance on scientifi c management as a means by which control by the powerful is
maintained. The most common check on devolved authority to communities and
citizen groups is the scientifi c oversight provided by international NGOs and gov-
ernment (Nadasdy, 1999). In this way, the politics of ecological knowledge has
become an important locus through which confl ict over access to resources
occurs.
