This essay offers a critical engagement with the ideal of policy relevant environmental knowledge. Using examples in environmental governance and conservation, it argues that by packaging knowledge ...in terms and categories that are considered politically salient, scientists do not just inform policy-making by providing information about presumed pre-existing objects in nature and environment; rather, science is constitutive of those objects and renders them amenable for policy and governance. These political implications of scientific knowledge imply a need for critical scrutiny of the interests that science serves and fails to serve as well as mechanisms to ensure the accountability of science. This essay is a modified and expanded version of the inaugural lecture with the same title that was delivered on June 2, 2016 at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
After decades of inadequate responses to scientists' warnings about global environmental threats, leading analysts of the science-policy interface are seeking an important shift of research focus. ...This switch is from continued modeling and diagnoses of biogeochemical conditions in favor of enhanced efforts to understand the many socio-political obstacles to achieving just transformations towards sustainability, and how to overcome them. We discuss why this shift continues to prove elusive. We argue that rarely analyzed mutually reinforcing power structures, interests, needs, and norms within the institutions of global environmental change science obstruct rethinking and reform. The blockage created by these countervailing forces are shielded from scrutiny and change through retreats behind shields of neutrality and objectivity, stoked and legitimated by fears of losing scientific authority. These responses are maladaptive, however, since transparency and reflexivity are essential for rethinking and reform, even in contexts marked by anti-environmentalism. We therefore urge greater openness, self-critique, and power-sharing across research communities, to create spaces and support for conversations, diverse knowledges, and decisions conducive to sustainability transformations.
Literature on co-production is booming. Yet, most literature is aspirational and methodological in nature, focusing on why co-production is important for environmental governance and knowledge ...production and how it should be done, and does not address the question why these processes often fail to achieve stated objectives of empowerment and societal transformation. In this review, we address this gap by reviewing literature on the political and power dimensions of co-production. Our review shows how depoliticization dynamics in co-production reinforce rather than mitigate existing unequal power relations and how they prevent wider societal transformation from taking place. Drawing on literature about participation, deliberative governance, and democracy, the review concludes by emphasizing the importance of (re)politicizing co-production by allowing for pluralism and for the contestation of knowledge.
Current policies and practices in biodiversity conservation have been increasingly influenced by neoliberal approaches since the 1990s. The authors focus on the principle of transparency as a ...self-proclaimed basis of neoliberal environmental governance, and on the role of standardized science-based measurements which it purportedly affords. The authors introduce the term ‘measurementality’ to signify the governance logic that emerges when transparency comes to stand next to effectiveness and efficiency as neoliberal principles and to highlight the connections that are forged between economic, managerial, and technocratic discourses. The example of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is used to discuss the role of measurementality in global biodiversity governance. The analysis suggests that IPBES aims to coordinate the science–policy interface in order to optimize the generation of user-friendly knowledge of those elements of biodiversity that are considered politically and economically relevant: At the current economic juncture, these being in essence ecosystem services. Based on these findings, the authors proceed by critically reflecting on the ways in which the measurementality logic of IPBES may not only result in an impoverishment of the biodiversity research agenda, but also in an impoverished understanding of biodiversity itself. To conclude, the authors argue that measurementality is part and parcel of the neoliberal paradigm in which science produces the raw materials for subsequent control and exchange and that, as a result, the intersection of science, discourse, policy, and economics within these governance systems requires sustained critical scrutiny.
After the launch of the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in May 2019, the message that 1 million species are threatened with ...extinction made headlines in news and social media across the world. These headlines also resulted in critical responses that questioned the credibility of this number and - by extension - the Global Assessment report and the institution of IPBES. In this article, we - as two authors of the Global Assessment - draw lessons from the GA about how to represent biodiversity in assessments and how biodiversity knowledge can inform effective and legitimate actions that contribute to conservation as well as equity, justice, and human well-being. Specifically, we highlight the inherent multiplicity of meanings and definitions of biodiversity to reflect on the limitations of using species richness and extinction as proxies for biodiversity and biodiversity loss. It is crucial to communicate clearly and in a balanced way that biodiversity loss is broader than species extinction, and how this broader loss of biodiversity jeopardises human wellbeing irrespective of whether species die out. Consequently, the post-2020 biodiversity framework will require multiple targets around not only species extinction but also broader biodiversity loss and human well-being.
How Participation Creates Citizens Turnhout, Esther; Van Bommel, Severine; Aarts, Noelle
Ecology and society,
01/2010, Letnik:
15, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Participation is a prominent feature of many decision-making and planning processes. Among its proclaimed benefits is its potential to strengthen public support and involvement. However, ...participation is also known for having unintended consequences which lead to failures in meeting its objectives. This article takes a critical perspective on participation by discussing how participation may influence the ways in which citizens can become involved. Participation unavoidably involves (1) restrictions about who should be involved and about the space for negotiation, (2) assumptions about what the issue at stake is, and (3) expectations about what the outcome of participation should be and how the participants are expected to behave. This is illustrated by a case study about the Dutch nature area, the Drentsche Aa. The case study demonstrates how the participatory process that took place and the restrictions, assumptions, and expectations that were involved resulted in six forms of citizen involvement, both intended and unintended, which ranged between creativity, passivity, and entrenchment. Based on these findings, the article argues that participation does not merely serve as a neutral place in which citizens are represented, but instead creates different categories of citizens. Recognizing this means reconceiving participation as performative practice. Such a perspective goes beyond overly optimistic views of participation as a technique whose application can be perfected, as well as pessimistic views of participation as repression or domination. Instead, it appreciates both intended and unintended forms of citizen involvement as meaningful and legitimate, and recognizes citizenship as being constituted in interaction in the context of participation.
Abstract
Formulating adequate responses to pressing socio-ecological challenges requires effective and legitimate knowledge production and use. The academic debate has gradually shifted from a linear ...model of science–policy relations towards co-productive alternatives. Yet, in practice, the linear model remains lingering. This paper uses a case study of a collaboration between a Dutch research institute and a ministerial department to examine how and why this linear model is so persistent. Our analysis shows the dominance of the linear model in this collaboration, while openings for a more co-productive relationship remain largely unexplored. Our findings illustrate that an important reason for this persistence of the linear model is the lack of a convincing and attractive alternative imaginary of science–policy practices, which defines clear roles and competencies for researchers as well as policy actors involved. We argue this is symptomatic of a wider tendency among both researchers and policy actors to construct science as an obligatory passage point towards policy. However, this tendency not only enables policy actors to offload their responsibility but also fails to capitalise on the opportunities offered by these practices to explicate the politics embedded in and foregrounded by knowledge production. Such an engagement with the politics of knowledge by experts as well as policymakers can encourage more effective and legitimate knowledge production and use.
This article offers a critical analysis of environmental science that develops the argument that science has itself become an obstacle for the transformations that are needed to ensure ...human-ecological well-being. Due to dominant norms and conceptualizations of what science is, how it should relate to policy and society, and what it is that science should contribute to, environmental science is set to continue to serve vested interests and seems unable to break free from this pattern. This deadlock situation is related to persistent patterns of inequality and marginalization in science that keep these dominant norms and conceptualizations in place and that marginalize alternative forms of knowledge, including critical social sciences and humanities, that are better equipped to support transformation. Inspired by feminist and anti-colonial scholarship, I suggest that transforming environmental science will require explicit refusal of dominant norms of science and conceptualizations of the environment, and a commitment to justice and pluralism.
•Environmental science has become an obstacle for transformative change for people and nature.•Its underlying worldview that separates humans and nature enables exploitation and environmental destruction.•Norms of neutrality and relevance result in environmental science serving vested interests and marginalizing alternatives.•A better knowledge is possible if environmental science’s priorities and practices put justice and pluralism center stage.
Community based approaches are becoming the norm in environmental governance initiatives. One prominent example of this is Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+), a ...climate change mitigation strategy that aims at reducing carbon emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries. REDD+ policies generally evoke communities as both potential beneficiaries of REDD+ and as agents for its implementation. However, it is unclear what REDD+ policies are really referring to when they talk about communities. Drawing on critical social science literature about the idea of community, this article advances a performative perspective to analyze how communities are articulated in international and national REDD+ policy, and reflects on the potential implications of these articulations. Results reveal that international policy documents, including those of the major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in REDD+, tend to present an interpretation that corresponds to Agrawal and Gibson’s myth of communities as small, localized, and homogenous social units that share social norms. On the other hand, national policy documents reveal enormous variety in the communities that are actually targeted in national REDD+ policies in terms of resources, governance structure, and social cohesion. One conclusion that could be drawn from this is that the dominant uniform interpretation of communities in REDD+ policy, and in much academic and NGO literature, is clearly unrealistic. However, this does not mean that it is inconsequential. We conclude our article by discussing the performative effects of the identified articulations of community.
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