留学生dissertationProposal：环境管理的理论挑战

留学生dissertationProposal：环境管理的理论挑战

The Theoretical Challenge Of Managed Environments

 

一般发展研究或环境管理领域的工作通常模仿结构，制度和政治经济学分析。但本文是关注于面向行动者，基于过程和社会构建学分析为理论和方法基础。它还旨在表明这种方法的实用性，它为实证调查的关键领域提供了新的见解。

 

第一章我提出现在面临的改革困境：管理者和公民对环境治理改革的现行惯例表现得不一致。我的出发点是基于环境管理实践的决策经验还没有反映到目标上，即还未影响实践更平稳的过渡和更好的合法性上，这将把整个实践转化到之前所承诺的更好群众参与性的方法上。更民主的方法并不是始终产生更多的民主结果，至少从实践警告报告上来看是这样。相反，治理改革在执行者运用合作实践理念后经历了令人沮丧的斗争，这个理论不断在应用中使人失望。

 

1.1简介:环境管理的理论挑战-1.1 Introduction: The theoretical challenge of managed environments

 

General works in the field of development studies or environmental management typically imitate structural, institutional and political economy analyses. This dissertation however focuses on the theoretical and methodological foundations of an actor-oriented, process-based and social constructionist form of analysis. It also aims to show the usefulness of such an approach for providing new insights into critical areas of empirical enquiry. 

 

In the introductory chapter I posed the dilemma confronting change managers and citizens with existing practices of environmental governance reform that are performing inconsistently. My starting point is the premise that experiences of decision-making over environmental management practices have not reflected the intent of smoother transitions and greater legitimacy that a turn to more participative approaches had promised. More democratic methods are not consistently producing more democratic outcomes, at least so are reports from practice warning. Instead, governance reform is experienced as frustrating struggles by actors brought together using ideals of collaborative practice that are frequently proving disappointing in application.

 

The stories that this report recounts are indicative of the type of struggles and indeterminacies more and more encountered by policy actors in addressing issues of society-nature relations. It will be shown that the day-to-day tensions are not well expressed in the languages of social science or practitioners. Are there better ways to conceptualize these problems? Do we have language for this? To answer this, I will have to look for alternative ways to enter the subject and pose questions in different ways.#p#分页标题#e#

 

A search for models of practice and theoretical foundations that may prove relevant to the rapidly changing contexts of managed environments encounters a rich literature that has engaged with the problems posed by the environmental pressures of population increase and technological development. However, as will be seen, existing conceptualisations encounter limits of abstraction. The implicit recognition of that has seen practitioners develop a wide range of approaches that are nearer to a recognition of actor perspectives in the field of environmental governance reform that more anthropological perspectives will highlight. A closer examination shows that abandoning abstraction in order to acknowledge the natural complexity of modern contexts in a post-modern time does not resolve the problem of constructively navigating changing knowledge systems. I therefore turn to post-structuralist thinking which allows me to give more attention to the social constructivist view and, in particular, to the co-constructed nature of knowledge, framing and subjectivities. The method that proves most promising to demonstrate - and resolve - the ambiguous nature of social knowledge is a dialectical approach to mapping the deliberative spaces of 21st century environmental governance reform.

 

To do this work, perspectives from different disciplinary areas are brought together, including environmental sociology, environmental policy, anthropology, development studies, conservation management, political ecology and public policy. The discussion will seek to ‘ambiguate' key notions in the society-nature literatures, that is, work with the ambiguity that becomes exposed when different scholarly worldviews are applied to core concepts of environmental governance. Working dialectically with the framings of theorists and practitioners means moving at different levels of extension, probing generalisation and rethinking subjects. This will show how ideas of nature, knowledge, community, and identity are central.

 

The journey I will pursue in this chapter - and effectively continue in the following - transects key themes in the literature on environmental and development issues that I will not attempt to treat comprehensively - a futile task even with the best of intentions - but instead I want to trace insightful tensions and contours in the landscapes of academic, practitioner's and subjective knowledges that shape the individual and institutional behaviour of social actors. By focussing on boundaries, and the conceptual or physical movement across these, I claim that I can show useful insights into the processes through which actors engage in participative, democratic spaces.

 

By evoking a journey through the literature, I shadow the journey that I myself followed when I entered into and pursued this research, coming from a career as aid worker and encounter with the Great Barrier Island setting. Entering into academic reflection on social and political situations from that background opened perspectives that are not easily available to a researcher arriving from the outside or evaluating social processes with less reference to practical experience. At the same time, a positioning on the boundaries of the settings studied that my own background with the frequent geographic and career changes allowed, can be said to have greatly elevated my ‘hermeneutical' horizon, opening up better appreciation of multiple, overlapping contexts. #p#分页标题#e#

 

The aim of this chapter is to reveal a range of features and entry points into a number of settings that I gained access to, even if not comprehensively but certainly illustrative. I want to show that abstraction needs to adopt not only an actor-grounded and situated methodology but equally a more subjective theorisation, in order to give new meaning to abstraction. The literature I will bring into the discussion will help me elaborate how simultaneously seeking out top-down, bottom-up and reflective positions can give complementary insights into processes of actor engagement over environmental governance. The reason is that the political, social and cultural complexities that determine human-nature, and particularly society-nature, relations impose a need for multiple perspectives.

 

In the following sections I will construct several positions located on metaphoric boundaries that offer perspective on subject areas and cultures of practice. To do that, I will open three views, or categories of view: one as a top-down view, which uses analytical thinking looking at overviews, comparisons and indicators to form structural explanations that underlie theory and practice. A second position approaches actors within a situation and is interested in narratives that convey the struggles and explanations present in a given situation, as they are seen from the bottom up. And with a view that is neither top-down, nor bottom-up, I want to emphasize a self-conscious, reflective treatment of knowledge and the co-construction of world views that deliberative practices can entail.

 

1.1.1 Case study or research intervention? The scholarly practitioner as participant in knowledge production

 

Before I enter the subject area however, I must first clarify my point of entry into and positionality within the subject. In particular, the performative character of social science research needs to be acknowledged.

 

Scientific inquiry is recognized as a social practice mediated contextually through symbolic means {Foucault, 2002; Pryke, Rose, & Whatmore, 2003}. Sociological research has documented the extent to which science is as much a socio-cultural activity as a technical enterprise. The post-positivist challenge to the social sciences that was evoked by Fischer and quoted introductory chapter, derives from evidence that the elements of empirical inquiry - from observation and hypothesis formation through data collection and explanation - are grounded in often limited theoretical assumptions of the socio-cultural practices through which they are developed {Root, 1993}. 

 

Scientific explanations therefore have to be understood as explanations offered by specific communities of inquirers situated in particular places and times, so Fischer emphasizes (1998). These are discursive communities that are located alongside and intermeshed with other political communities in the social landscape. This draws attention to positioning researcher and science within the political communities that are present. Attention must be paid throughout the approach, engagement and interpretation of social situations to be reflective about the relation of the researcher to the subject.#p#分页标题#e#

 

In my engagement with the actors within the settings I investigated, my approach and interest was shaped by all of my curriculum vitae but especially by my background as former aid worker. At least three specific aspects of this career were particularly significant in forming my approach to this study and, in particular, the lines of questioning that I adopted. 

 

For many years while working on behalf of large non-governmental aid organisations like Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), when I was often assigned as project planner in collaboration with medical or logistics experts with the task to research the humanitarian, political and security context in a particular setting to identify priority needs an organisation was able to address and to design the detailed aid interventions. I led needs assessment missions lasting 2 to 4 weeks to Georgia, Tajikistan, Congo, Burundi, Syria, Iraq, and Nepal among others,. The output would consist of reports documenting findings of data collection and interviews, verbal and written interpretation of implications for launching aid operations, and proposals to governmental donor agencies that complied to institutional requirements and priorities in order to maximise chances of gaining funding support. Essentially this was a research role with an action orientation.

 

My primary role while working for these international aid organisations was project manager and/or country representative, positions that I held in Russia. Chechnya, Congo, Kenya, Lebanon, and Mauritania among others. Aid projects would be managed by a team of expatriates and local staff, often growing into large, well-resourced and formalised organisations with up to 50 staff. This required me to manage teams and situations with a view to producing outcomes, conforming to organisational policies. As head of usually one of the larger NGOs in a sector, I would frequently also act on behalf of a wider community of aid agencies that shared similar values and objectives in collaborating and representing interests to government counterparts. The emphasis on advocating for universal rights and principles on behalf of vulnerable and victims under threat was an important advocacy priority for organisations like Oxfam and MSF, and thus was a critical rationale for situating, maintaining, and promoting many aid activities. At the same time I would be representing associations that had explicitly defined visions and principles in an organisational environment and so I had to be very self-conscious about the philosophical distinctions between advocacy, religious, purely charitable, bilateral or inter-governmental agencies. In other words, through this work I had been sensitized to the subtleties of organisational culture and its relationship to operational policies. In general, as a project manager I shared an outcome orientation that allowed me to identify with the role of other project managers in comparable organisational settings, even outside the domain international aid.#p#分页标题#e#

 

The reason I found myself in a ten-year career as aid worker was in part due to a long-standing interest in foreign settings and the extensive time I had already spent living abroad. The familiarity with different cultures from growing up in the Middle East, emigrating during school years to New Zealand and working in several European countries not only opened my appreciation of how cultures and societies are distinguished but also permitted me to acquire conversational fluency in eight languages. Overhearing the words our interpreter used to translate my speech into Arabic for a group of village elders in a Sahel village, or joking with Russian militia officers to be able to enter an ethnic enclave in the Caucasus, added diverse points of view that only first-hand knowledge can make relevant to other situations. The value of knowing how language and cultural upbringing can shape world views, understanding and humour is invaluable when attempting to reflect on other situations from a position that is neither entirely inside nor outside but on the boundary between cultures and places that are in (dialectical) relation.

 

1.1.1.1 Adopting an inside-out view: focus on protagonist, on the relationship between identity and subject.

 

While it is tempting to examine a situation from the point of view of those with the power to affect it - the change makers and potential audience for the research findings - it can be critical to also adopt the point of view of less influential actors. An inside out view seeks to show how outside forces influence the nature of polity, rather than using the people in the area of interest to provide a background against which to set the actions of outsiders {see also Routledge, Pacific History as seen from the Pacific Islands, Pacific Studies Spring 1985}. This study, in other words, seeks to be not merely island-centred but islander-oriented. 

 

The perspective thus adopted is that of a scholarly practitioner. Bentz and Shapiro {, 1998 #1684} use this term to recognise that in the enterprise of knowledge generation and critical reflection, there is a two-way relationship. The role of the scholarly practitioner involves “using professional practice and knowledge as a resource for the formulation and production of scholarly knowledge as well as for evaluating, testing, applying, extending, or modifying existing knowledge” (p. 66). Bentz and Shapiro stress that this requires also an awareness of the limits of knowledge, and, I would add, the contested nature of knowledge. This recognition brings attention to the production of knowledge in environmental politics.

 

1.1.1.2 Social science must be conscious of its performative character: Reconnecting the researcher with the researched

 

There are a number of research traditions that address the ontological gap between researcher and the researched. Action research for one, is a participatory methodology that seeks to produce knowledge that emerges from context of action as a collaborative project between researcher and the researched. It typically sees the researcher performing functional roles within groups working together on real world projects and tasks (Wadsworth, 1998). Participatory research finds many other outlets and emphasizes a philosophy of co-production or research, from the formulation of the question, through reflection on outcomes to the communication of findings (Cornwall & Jewkes, 1995). #p#分页标题#e#

 

A methodology that seeks to discard theoretical preconceptions completely is grounded theory. Theories are grounded in the group's observable experiences, but researchers add their own insight into why those experiences exist. It is a method formulated by Strauss and Corbin that categorizes empirically collected data to build a general theory to fit the data (Barney G. Glaser, 2004; B.G. Glaser & Strauss, 1967; A. McCarthy, 1999). The investigator develops conceptual categories from the data and then makes new observations to develop these categories. Hypotheses are derived directly from the data, and may be tested against it. All conclusions must be 'grounded in' and supported by the data. Their seminal work, "The Development of Grounded Theory" (1967), moved researchers past the hypothesis-testing uses of raw data into the hypothesis-generating potential of their observations. The approach has been steadily expanding its reach within academia - through sociology and social anthropology and, more recently into applied disciplines like nursing and educational research.

 

Notwithstanding the uptake of grounded philosophy by researchers motivated to reconnect with the empirical subject, the lack of theorizing underlying this may be criticized by more ‘sophisticated' theorists like Habermas, who I later want to bring into this discussion. For the German, the lack of critical framing that grounded theory represents is a crucial shortcoming that needs to be addressed methodologically. I will begin this by first discussing methodological treatment of settings and context.

 

1.1.2 Accounting for context with mental models and ethnographic methods

 

The cognitive patterns that underlie social behavior are not easily accessible to the researcher. Conceptualizing mental models that can account for communicative behavior in a way that relates to settings and context must represent basic notions of cognition such as ideology, knowledge and values. 

 

Ideologies in the sense used here, are general and abstract, principle based, axiomatic beliefs, while knowledge are the actual facts and beliefs held as true. Attitudes are taken to comprise opinion, beliefs, feelings, and intentions about specific issues, typically socially shared (see also Leiserowitz, Kates, & Parris, 2006). A mental model then, is the categorical understanding constructed from ideologies, knowledge, and attitudes of specific contexts and situations.

 

An accompanying notion is that of group knowledge as those social beliefs that which a group, or imagined community, holds to be true according to its own evaluation or verification (truth) criteria (eg science) and which can be doubted by outsiders. But such cultural, common ground knowledge is not challenged within groups, and is presupposed in public discourse, even when they are shifting as are the notions of conservation, environment and sustainability did that were discussed.#p#分页标题#e#

 

1.1.2.1 Context models as subjective representation

 

To study context and its relation to subjective meanings, ethnographic approaches hold most promise as they work with subjective representation and group knowledge processes (e.g. Descola, 1996; Wolfe & Yang, 1996). Such a view is also interested in how context structures social relations (communicative and interactional), social dynamics (group membership and interaction). But it also brings another interest relevant to the study of participation, of how cognition has a role in terms of framing goals, knowledge and other beliefs of participants in deliberation.

 

The notion of context is used in scholarship as ambiguously as ‘environment' is in wider discourses. To be able to treat it as an analytical object needs a basic model. By defining contexts and contextualization in terms of mental models and their role in discourse production and comprehension, this can account not only for the role of social representations such as attitudes and ideologies in discourse, but also allows a more subjective explanation of discourse and its variation in terms of personal mental models. The empirical studies will demonstrate this.

 

Van Dijk (2001) sees context as a model of relevance that shapes actors opinions and actions. He recognizes that context is subjective and individual and with that is ideologically based and has coherence within group discourse.

 

Thus, context models are subjective representations of social situation, including communicative events - they define what is relevant. This makes an account of context critical for understanding participation. And subjective context framing may be ideologically biased.

 

1.1.2.2 Frames of referenceand the ‘black box' of mental models

 

The concept of frame of reference is also used commonly used to refer to the cognitive effect of contextual models (Swaffield, 1998). It describes and categorizes the attitudes displayed by individuals when discussing a management issue. The framing concepts in this study were defined as follows: - A frame of reference is an analytical model of attitudes concerning a resource policy or management issue. - A personal frame of reference refers to the attitudes expressed by an individual. - A common frame of reference refers to the distinctive pattern of attitudes that is common to a number of individuals. 

 

However, there is no claim that the frame of reference as defined here represents cognitive processes. Rather, it is a model of the attitudes openly expressed by individuals when discussing an issue. 

 

A basic problem that remains, is that context, subjectivities and cognition remain inaccessible to a researcher. A ‘black box' model of subjective context therefore lacks explanatory relevance. But as the subject of deliberation, context circumscribes the cognitive boundaries of actors ‘mentalities'.#p#分页标题#e#

 

For van Dijk (2001), the advantage of such an approach is that it accounts not only for the role of social representations, such as attitudes and ideologies in discourse, but also allows a more subjective explanation of discourse and its variation in terms of personal mental models. And since contexts are by definition unique and personal, context models of framings precisely allow an individual approach to contextualization to be combined with a more social one, in which shared representations, groups, and other societal aspects play a prominent role. 

 

1.1.3 Boundaries: Locating and moving across - by following, pushing or re-imagining phenomena ##

 

I will begin with the premise that the totality of relations in a socio-ecological geography are meaningful, that is the relations between people, places and things. And that the inverse of relationships are distinctions that coalesce to form boundaries between categories and instances. This is worth emphasizing since the recognition that boundaries constrain meaning can draw attention to the contrived and therefore limiting nature of abstraction. How this premise will permit established abstraction and meanings to be questioned, fragmented and reassembled is the work that this chapter will begin and will be completed in the methodological chapter that follows.

 

The first boundary to highlight and that can show what is meant by transgressing distinctions consists of the separation of human from non-human nature. Imagining environmental governance reform as regulating the entry of humans into nature and the export of non-human resources out of nature is counter-intuitive to any gardener. Fence lines, compost bins and patio seating all blur the boundaries. Self-identity for many derives from emotional attachments to home and garden, nurturing roles that a vegetable plot reinforces and status that manicured lawns or urban bio-diversity islands respectively can demonstrate.

 

Thus the domain of interest should not be a non-human nature as an object of human intervention but instead a nature as a geography of human relations that are linked to an environment through diverse interests. This is a geography that is physically located in both the commons and in private property - another paired abstraction that will prove to be divided by a blurred boundary. But this is also a geography that exists in the social imagination as social, cultural or political objects. The environment so seen can be conceived as the total of society-nature relations which relate to all material, subjective, cognitive, political, and other interests or dimensions. The challenge then becomes not in naming these complex relations but in thinking about them, in framing them.

 

1.1.4 Environmental governance as an adjustable lens 

 

[## develop] The first conceptual tool to prepare will thus be the notion of environmental governance as an adjustable lens. Rather than using the literature in an inevitably selective manner to stabilize the meaning of this concept at least for the duration of this discussion, I will adopt a counter-strategy of reinforcing the ambiguity of the notion and employing it with shifting meanings to approach the research problem from different scales, extension and perspectives. #p#分页标题#e#

 

Environmental governance is a category of practices and ideas that are of interest to several perspectives. As a domain of practice it is the concern of academic text books (Durant, Fiorino, & O'Leary, 2004; Hempel, 1996; Kettl, 2002; Levy & Newell, 2005) as much as ministerial policy statements {Ministry of the Environment 2000, 2003}, international donor policy, and publications of environmental agencies. 

 

In practice, actually relating good governance to ecological outcomes is near impossible. Choosing one arbitrary example from international experience, an in-depth evaluation of different forest management governance regimes in Madagascar showed how there were enormous difficulties in explaining the dynamics and assessing measures of sustainability and equity (McConnell & Sweeney).

 

The term of environmental governance can be encountered in a range of contexts. In a recent survey of issues in environmental policy and management Durant et al (ibid.) identify key topics in environmental governance as sustainability, the precautionary principle, common-pool resource theory, deliberative democracy, civic environmentalism, environmental justice, property rights, environmental conflict resolution, devolution, among others. This has introduced a range of perspectives from environmental economics, democratic theory, public policy, law, political science, and public administration. In effect, environmental governance does not so much represent a theoretical field or a professional discipline, but a theme of shared concerns in scholarship and applied practice. This chapter will consider how environmental governance can be re-approached by detaching it from the portfolio of resource managers and relocating it within a wider arena of development and democratic practices.

 

In the development field the notion that the public, stakeholders or local people have an important role in environmental governance is emphasized. "Environmental governance includes the structures (e.g. management regimes), organizational forms (e.g. farmer research teams, water user associations), processes (e.g. multi-stakeholder dialogue), actors and rules (e.g. negotiated access rights and boundaries) that determine how resources are managed at international, national and local levels." (International Development Research Centre)

 

Aside from government agencies and development practitioners, scholars will also characterize contemporary environmental governanceas a “collaborative approach to policy formulation and implementation”(Durant et al., 2004, pp. 22-23). Environmental governance therefore is relevant to several different fields of interest to scholars and can be framed in several ways. In the first instance, environmental governance is political and so a subject of political inquiry. This opens up a diverse body of literature to employ in developing an approach to environmental governance. Another dimension that arises out of the political, and that the following discussion shows to be explicitly present, is deliberative democracy. But the most promising approach to begin to problematize environmental governance lies with the notion of development and its contemporary manifestation as sustainable development, particularly its application by foreign agents in local settings. Each of these dimensions embodies unresolved tensions - tensions that can also be encountered in many sites of social theory and practice - which centre on epistemological concerns.#p#分页标题#e#

 

It may also be useful to think in terms of environmental governance as a body of political theory, as Humphrey has done (2007), that has a central focus upon environmental concerns as these relate to democracy, justice, globalization, political economy, freedom, the welfare state, and other aspects of political life. This body of work is no longer as closely related to the environmental ethics and values of nature of a deep ecology, but is more integrated into 'mainstream' political theory.

 

For the purpose of this discussion, I will develop the notion of environmental governance as a conceptual tool to approach the research problem from different scales, extension and perspectives. The complementary notions of environmental governance offer entry points into related literatures and cultures of practice: Environmental Democracy, Environmental Reform, Environmental Collaboration, and Environmental Sustainability.

 

Environmental governance can thus best be treated as both as assembly of practice and as a body of theory that is doing political work. To reconnect theory and practice will be the task of this chapter. 

 

1.1.5 We are being ‘participated' again: An incomplete typology of participative approaches

 

There is an emerging consensus that the public need to be more involved in the processes of environmental decision making. From the international arena - exemplified in documents such as Agenda 21 and the initiatives of the World Bank - to national government policy initiatives, local policy and planning systems such as the New Zealand Resource Management Act, and in the discourses of actors including scientists and business groups, a role for public participation has been instituted (Davies, 2002). 

 

Implicit in the idea of participation is that the initiative lies with the reformers, the change-makers to approach the public with a project to respond to. From the perspective of an un-associated citizen, the prospect of another round of workshops and discussion groups - events that have become familiar to many villagers in target zones of international aid - the process is passive and invites the expression not surprisingly encountered in developing nations of ‘we are being participated again'. 

 

The notion of taking part in environmental decision-making and in contrast to an authority taking top-down action is taken up by a wide range of terms and practices. Participation in the social science is an umbrella term including different means for the public to directly participate in political, economic, management or other social decisions. Participatory decision making then infers a level of proportionate decision making power and can take place along any realm of human social activity, including economic (e.g. participatory economics), political (e.g. participatory democracy), cultural (e.g. communalism) or familial (e.g. Feminism). #p#分页标题#e#

 

In practice, the term participation applies to processes initiated by an agency seeking to initiate a project or introduce reform. It thus becomes critical to ask, who is invited to participate, and by whom. What regulatory requirements may apply, is there precedent, and what resources are available are only some of the parameters that the term participation by itself does not convey.

 

In the government sector, at least in New Zealand, the word consultation is frequently used to describe a range of processes to engage with the community - i.e. citizens and citizen associations. These range from the prescribed processes in the Local Government Act (2002) such as the special consultative procedure (section 83) to informal processes such as e-mail chat groups or anecdotal local knowledge. In this report, the term consultation will be used in a broad sense to include any form of government agency engagement with local communities, including activities carried out by an authority to inform itself of community views as well as specific consultation exercises. 

 

Collaboration is another category that carries the notion to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavour. The sense that will be used here, emphasises the absence of authority, a consensual decision making process with respect to an established domain. 

 

Dispute resolution is a related practice that seeks to reduce differences or to seek a solution when a conflict situation exists. When the services of a third party are utilized, this is often referred to as mediation. 

 

These categories denote some of the dimensions that structure relationships in public involvement: consultation as an exercise in information exchange, participation implying a direct input into deliberation over decisions - linked to predefined or agreed rights, and mediation which involves an impasse of some sort. The ambiguities that these terms fail to dispel in practice, lie at the centre of this study.

 

1.1.6 A trans-disciplinary project: Chapter aims

 

Reform processes of environmental institutions are in general experience invariable complex and populated with diverse actors. To enter these settings constructively to reveal new insights requires novel approaches. I will show here that alternate conceptions can be built from an empirically grounded approach to show how citizens on the margins of participatory processes are actively resisting and construing their lifeworlds.

 

This chapter must establish that environmental governance as deliberative practices has responded to many issues, but it still is aimed at reforming the project of the state, while it remains based on top-down, universalising frames of reference. In doing so, the struggles of individuals with the colonising force of administrative systems will become more visible. I will show that the literature treating society-nature topics, sees an important role for public participation but undervalues the actual processes of deliberation - that is dialogue and debate in reflection on process and framings, by treating it as an abstract information exchange exercise. The reforms of the 1st generation of environmental governance that responded to the failures of imposed nature enclosures have only in part responded to problematic issues. According to its critics, new conservation policy, practice, and institutions remain expert-driven, undemocratic and autocratic.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Because reform practices poorly address situational contexts and knowledge framing of participant actors, multiple perspectives are relevant to appreciating factors that influence the outcome of deliberative practices, I will show here. My professional background and social circumstances offer a unique opportunity that contributes to structuring the theoretical and empirical work of this and the next chapter. Drawing on my own background I can select entry points into the relevant literatures with which I can construct multiple positions to respond to the research questions. 

 

1.2从顶端视角:分析政治利益和制度-1.2 Views from the top: Analysing political interests and institutional structures

 

The first view I want to construct stands alongside analysis and policy makers that assess structural factors, determine important indicators and are involved in developing policy that drives change and reform. This perspective will cast a critical eye on the ambiguities carried by notions that have driven environmental management, including sustainable development, civil society and deliberative democracy. 

 

Human-nature relations are and have been the interest of thinkers from a wide range of disciplines, historically treated by thinkers as diverse as ancient religious philosophers and modern conservation managers. A distinction or boundary that is immediately visible in the treatment of contemporary environmental issues is the academic work of authors linking theories of state and social organisation with the environment on the one side and the practitioners involved in formulating or challenging policy formulation on the other.

 

The literature concerned with reflecting and theorising about human-nature relations is extensive. An initial survey of theoretical literature in the domains concerned with environmental governance reveals the essentially contested nature of this key concept. Incommensurable definitions of environmental governance, as well as collective action, civil society, development, and a range of other key terms of reference discussed further on, reflect the irreducibly ideological nature of much contemporary environmental governance research.

 

Scholarly interest is divided between attention to institutional and theoretical issues in political sciences and relatively more practice oriented or ethnographic interest in the applied development literature. In the policy sciences the insistence to separate facts and values has facilitated a technocratic form of policy analysis that emphasizes the efficiency and effectiveness of means to achieve politically established goals. Reflecting a subtle antipathy towards democratic processes, economic and social problems are interpreted as issues in need of improved management and project design {Gormley, 2007}. 

 

To examine the social and political elements of governance reform situations, some basic questions can be asked with the help of political science tools. Questions like How does the environment become politicized? How and why do citizens and social groups organize and mobilize over environmental issues? .. correspond to interest by political scientists in assessing values and interest that motivate political action. 

 

More structural interests asks … How does the environment become a domain for political-economic patterns and processes of large-scale change associated with social development? How is this reflected in policy analysis and policy making? Such questions are founded on relative stable categories and abstraction that often become the focus of diversionary academic debates. [## example?]

 

Perhaps the most interesting questions go deeper still and consider … How and why does the environment come to be regarded as something in need of management and governance? And thus … Why are democratic principles seen as fundamental to this? These are questions that classic political economy and the scholarship that is associated with reducing social action to material interests is poorly equipped to answer.

 

Leaving the latter questions aside for the moment, it is worthwhile to see what structural features appear relevant to this subject area. This will provide a foundation to adapt a top-down analytical perspective for environmental reform situations. In order to ensure that such an approach will be well-grounded, I want to anchor my argument in findings from the exploratory phase of this project. The first part of the research journey echoed the initial review of the literature related to civil society and sustainable development that is briefly entered into in the subsequent section.

 

1.2.1 An exploratory study: Grounding abstraction in actor perspectives

 

It is important to begin here already with details of the methodology adopted for the initial part of the study because it proved critical to developing the theoretical orientation that was adopted. 

 

At the outset of this research project, before the research problem was much developed and so before the study focus was fixed, a series of interviews, a review of media and of institutional documents served to scope the key issues and concepts related to the study interest of deliberative spaces in environmental governance. The purpose of this exploratory part of the study was to orientate and empirically frame this study: 

• To orientate within and gain familiarity of policy processes and practices of public involvement.

• To identify categories of interest (issues, actors, discourses, processes ...) 

• To identify key actors.#p#分页标题#e#

• To situate discourses around problems.

• To locate entry points into actor networks.

• To frame the approach to the literature.

 

The findings from this first part of the study served to develop the methodology but also served as entry into the literature. This meant linking issues present in the practice of environmental governance to bodies of literature that could serve to theorize this study. Rather than setting out to apply abstract concepts used by scholars, such an approach seeks to situate conceptualisation used by actors in the interface of society and nature, which promises to open new ways to work with this subject. Working in this way helped reveal and attend to the limits of analytical abstraction of practitioners and literatures that made up my initial frame of reference.

 

A full treatment of the methodological approach in this study follows in a later chapter. Some key points need to be highlighted here that framed the development of this work.

 

The initial research interest was stimulated by local controversies provoked by the marine reserve proposal for Great Barrier Island. Documentary analysis suggested an initial list of issues around, but not constrained to, marine environmental management issues (biodiversity conservation and resource management). Informants were identified by approaching relevant organizations and by following up key themes through recommended contacts. Participant observation at several public meetings, including a Auckland City Council consultation meeting, a meeting of activist recreational fishers and a hearing on the controversial proposed seabed and foreshore legislation, also proved informative. Central was a series of semi-structured interviews - following a format later adapted for the entire study - that was carried out at the time. On Great Barrier Island I sought out a number of informants as well as organising focus group discussions with residents active in the community to explore related themes and issues. All these activities served the stated objectives and in particular to focus research questions, thematic issues and identify relevant literatures.

 

Overlapping with the initial exploratory phase, and extending into the period of focused data collection, was my participation in a diploma course entitled ‘Iwi Management Planning'. For the duration of an academic year, 18 residents of Great Barrier Island met at a local marae one weekend every month to hold a workshop led by a visiting tutor and with occasional guests from the mainland. The course was free to participants and was organised by Te Wānanga o Aotearoawith government funding, The ‘University of New Zealand' is an accredited tertiary instruction that is aligned with Maori perspectives, who make up the majority of students and staff. Participating as a student not only provided me with access to rich material about Maori perspectives on environmental issues but also engagement with the views of a diverse range of islanders from an island-based point of view. Nearly half of the student group were pakeha, with the remainder locally resident tangata whenua. Ages ranged from 18 to over 60, a good gender balance, and included several people working professionally or voluntarily with environmental management issues on the island.#p#分页标题#e#

 

During a trip to Wellington, I carried out interviews with a number of informants representing government agencies and organisations active in resource issues and governance New Zealand wide. At the Department of Conservation I met with a policy manager with responsibilities in marine conservation policy. An informant at Local Government New Zealand spoke for the interests of territorial authorities. A senior staff member answered questions at the Sea Food Industry Council which works on behalf of the commercial fishing industry, where Ialso met with a policy researcher at an associated organisation - the New Zealand Rock Lobster Industry Council. Meetings took place with directors of two private consulting companies, Conflict Management NZ and The Centre for Research Evaluation and Social Assessment (CRESA) who had carried out research on Great Barrier Island. Lastly, a programme officer at the World Wide Fund for Nature discussed issues in the Pacific and specifically drew attention to the Locally Managed Marine Areas initiative in Fiji that also received funding from New Zealand. That was later developed into a separate research intervention. Parallel to this I also attended an international conference held at Victoria University in Wellington, “Indigenous Knowledges”.

 

A journey through Northland at that time, sought out interviews with informants within organisations that have local perspectives on environmental governance and natural resource management. These included interviews with co-workers from, Te Puni Kokeri and the Far North District Council, the He Iwi Kotahi Tatou Trust which is a community development trust in the town of Moerewa, and private meetings with two Maori activists - both former iwi chairmen and respected advisers in Maori communities. 

 

Subjects and issues were followed up with library, media and internet research as well as through inquiries and information requests to the relevant organisations. The exploratory phase also saw the beginning of systematic media monitoring that continued throughout the study. The central themes refined then formed the basis for periodic media reviews as well as a keyword-based Google news alert.

 

##Add more detail here / focus above ..

 

The general themes and issues that thus emerged during the exploratory phase oriented the approach to the literatures about environmental politics:

• Complex demands and interests for managing, reforming and developing society-nature relations are in tension.

• Government policies, and particularly policy reforms, for conservation and resource management are widely being contested.

• Participative governance is not fulfilling democratic expectations of participants.

 

To what extent did the literature and practice networks respond to these issues? What answers were available? It turned out that much of the literature was addressing unrepresentative situations in which failed or aborted participative processes did not feature. It was much harder to find authors that engaged with experiences that failed expectations, which became so intermeshed with other processes to defy analysis or turned into the protracted stalemates lacking easy explanation as did nearly all the processes accompanied in this study.#p#分页标题#e#

 

To understand why analytical abstraction proves so difficult particularly in the fields of interest, it is useful to examine the origins and application of some key concepts. This will permit top down interpretations to be ambiguated sufficiently to position observations relative to the situations in which they are made. Sustainable development is one such notion that is a practice approach and which has become central to economic development and conservation planning. Considering its trajectory is insightful.

 

1.2.2 The global institutionalization of sustainable development

 

Sustainable development was brought into international language through Agenda 21 and the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), which focused on the pressures that would need to be resolved if the environment, the economy and communities should ‘flourish' in the 21st century. Ten years on, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 made this an explicit goal that also the New Zealand government committed to, releasing The Government's Approach to Sustainable Development in August of that year (MfE 2002). In February of the same year, the government's Growth and Innovation Framework. presented by then Prime Minister Helen Clark said that New Zealand's development path needs to achieve a higher level of economic growth. This tension persisted also in the Sustainable Development Programme of Action issued by then Minister of Economic Development, Marian Hobbs in January 2003 following the Johannesburg conference.

 

The term as used by the Brundtland Commission in 1992 has become the often-quoted definition: “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Conceptually this is a field that can be broken into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and socio-political sustainability. Agenda 21 identified the key concepts of information, integration, and participation as key building blocks to help countries achieve development that recognises these interdependent pillars. These are the themes that have framed a doctrine of sustainable development adopted by development agencies and that were also encountered in this study.

 

At virtually every level of environmental governance, then, the goal of substantive social movement participation in sustainable development has been formally recognized and incorporated into bureaucratic structures. Whether that positive commitment to the principle of participation has yielded measurable improvements against the environmental, democratic and administrative criteria discussed earlier remains an open question subject to much debate. Sustainable development has, for instance, been described as ecological modernization (Buttel, 2003) and by others as a form of ‘managerialism' (Sunderlin, 2003).#p#分页标题#e#

 

In recent years, the focus of biodiversity protection thus has shifted from relatively abstract discussions of how to introduce and enforce environmental standards and conservation measures, to the integration of social aspects. There has been much discussion about the question why and how people should participate in environmental decision making (see e.g. Bulkeley & Mol, 2003; Leeuwis, 2000; McKinney & Harmon, 2002). While there is only limited coherence in this literature, a number of models have been implemented that are built on theoretical principles from these discussions. I will contend that whilst these accounts of participative approaches point to important areas of analysis, key aspects of participation have been largely overlooked. In particular, I find that the empirical evidence raises a number of unanswered questions about the ways in which people experience the process of taking part in redefining their relationship with their environment. This I will pursue further on in the discussion.

 

Beginning with the official decade of sustainable development, the 1990s produced vast quantities of popular, official, and social scientific literature on the relationship between economic development and the environment. This international effort was followed over the years with many national and international projects that raised expectations that development could continue without the risk of environmental exhaustion. Numerous statements of intent were released, most advocating some combination of government decentralization, devolution of responsibility for natural resource management, and community participation in environmental governance as solutions to overcome the manifest inability of states and markets to balance the objectives of generalized economic development and environmental protection (see e.g.Bonfiglioli, 2004; White, 1994). 

 

1 Much of the environmental movement was co-opted into this process and remained profoundly influenced by its continued involvement, marked by the wide dissemination of the sustainability discourse familiar from environmental advocacy (resource management, future generations, our common future ..). Agenda 21 sold a vision of global ecology which defined the major problems of the Earth in Northern elite and scientific terms (global warming, population growth, species extinction) while largely ignoring the key environmental issues as defined by the majority of the people (e.g. livelihoods, water availability, urban services), both in the North and the South. It continued to promote the Enlightenment goals of progress through economic growth and industrialization at all costs. It also advanced the globalization of radical libertarian market systems, along with US style `apolitical' pluralist systems of democracy. This criticism has been well developed (e.g. Doyle 1998) and is a critique that does not need to be repeated here. A key point to take forward, however, is that many green arguments were reframed, largely by business, within a discourse which revolved around the key concept of sustainable development. Thus, the continued currency of sustainable development largely derived from the way it was able to incorporate material interests.#p#分页标题#e#

 

1.2.2.1 Sustainable development blames poverty for environmental degradation

 

This sustainable development view of the more affluent nations of the globe contends that poverty has caused and continues to create environmental degradation. In 2005 the United Nations Human Development Report (Annan & Secretary-General, 2005) argued that poverty is one of the greatest threats to the environment and the 2000 World Bank Environment Strategy used the rationale that “poor people are often impoverished by a declining resource base and in turn often forced by their circumstances to degrade the environment further” (Bucknall, Kraus, & Pillai, 2001). But poverty is not an environmental problem, even if they can occur together. Isolating poverty and environment produces the risk of misplaced priorities. While that need not necessarily follow, the concern here will be to examine how practices are re-framed by this analysis. 

 

The policies of government and non-governmental international aid agencies in New Zealand illustrates the turn to a poverty analysis. During recent decades, development thinking has shifted from modernization and structural adjustment programs to poverty reduction. Under the former system, poor countries were encouraged to undergo social and economical structural transformations as part of their development, creating industrialization and intentional industrial policy. Poverty reduction rejects this notion, consisting instead of direct support for social welfare programs that intends to create macroeconomic stability leading to an increase in economic growth. Thus New Zealand's International Aid & Development Agency (NZAID) declares that Since NZAID's formation in 2002, poverty elimination has been central to the agency's mission.This is echoed by the organisation that represents New Zealand's major Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) working in aid and development which states on the front page of its website that The Council for International Development (CID) works to achieve effective high quality international development programmes which focus on the alleviation and eradication of poverty. 

 

With a focus on poverty elimination, development practice has moved beyond modernisation principles to principles of sustainability with NGOs explicitly stating that development should be sustainable and encompass the social, spiritual, cultural and economic well-being of people; that the poor should make decisions about their own development; that the ultimate test of development policies is their long-term effect on the lives of the poorest sectors of society, especially women and children and that sustainable development involves the use of all resources for the benefit of future as well as present generations; (CID Member's Code of Ethics, ibid.).

 

But progress has been disappointing, as NZAID reports (ibid.): “While much global progress has been made towards eliminating poverty and hunger, there are still about one billion people living in extreme poverty and 800 million undernourished people.”#p#分页标题#e#

 

1.2.2.2 Decolonisation and the return of the development fetish

 

From an African perspective, there is a certain irony attached to the revival of a notion that failed Africa so bitterly, now prefixed with the modifier ‘sustainable'. Decolonisation was accompanied by a promise of modernism that would arrive with the magic wand of development. For the Senegalese scholar Mamadou Diouf, the ‘fetish concept of the 1960s' (Cooper 1997: 292) lost any resonance other than ideological by the time it was revived with the addition of qualifiers of ‘sustainable' or ‘indigenous'. 

 

A sense of disappointment with the unfulfilled promise of the “Development Project” (Esteva 1992:; McMichael 2000; Sachs 2000) has not only accompanied the continued efforts to reform aid strategies, adapt approaches and improve effectiveness, but also contributed to a growing criticism of the underlying approach adapted since development was put on the international agenda following the Second World War. However, this criticism not only stems from an evaluation of failed achievements, but also of a ‘suspicion of the economic mindset that steers a Western-led caravan on the path to modernity' (Pieterse 2000).

 

Until the mid-1980s post-World War II development thinking shared three basic paradigms, i.e. essentialising the Third World and its inhabitants as homogeneous entities, an unconditional belief in progress and in the makeability of society, and the importance of the (nation) state in realising that progress (Schuurmann 2000). Development theories (from modernisation to dependencia) as well as the international development aid industry all shared these paradigms. From the mid-1980s onwards these three paradigms increasingly lost their hegemonic status and are currently, on the threshold of the twenty-first century, being replaced by a loose set of partly descriptive, partly heuristic notions like civil society, social capital, diversity and risk. These are notions that reappear in an examination of environmental governance discourses, but they do not suffice to describe the modern experience of ‘developing nations'. 

 

For Diouf the key to understanding the failure of development strategies lies in a careful study of knowledges and discourses. While he does not offer a categorical explanation, Diouf does position the discourses of the World bank and IMF experts in the neo-liberal context that these stem from. “The neoliberal discourse subordinates social existence to the logic of the market. It affirms, in an imperious manner, the dichotomy economic sphere/non-economic sphere, thus reorganizing social space, economic policies, and political functions” (ibid.: 309). By deconstructing the logic at the heart of the nationalist vision of development, with this discourse of growth masquerading as development, Diouf argues, power was transferred to an administrative elite made up of African technocrats and foreign experts that presided over the effective dissolution of the political and the ascendance of a power without common measure of the elected assemblies.#p#分页标题#e#

 

This retreat by visionary leaders and the surreptitious undermining of critical attributes of political sovereignty was provoked by the claim for an autonomous economic sphere. The intended consequences were increasingly favourable conditions for foreign investment and the unintended result was a dramatically increased dependency on foreign finance that was cemented by stifling the expansion of local finance. 

 

African experience demonstrates how economic factors remain inseparably bound up with political and social aspirations. The weakening of previous doctrines has in fact opened up spaces for the re-emergence of globalised forms of competing ideologies. This ideological struggle has been mediated by what elsewhere is described as the argumentative turn and the growth of the public sphere, a context in which contested ideas drive socio-economic changes. As will be seen, spaces for environmental projects and policy development thus remain contested. 

 

1.2.3 Sustainable development as a practice that reorganizes communities, marshals civil society as its agent, but remains contested

 

1.2.3.1 Civil society as agents of sustainable development

 

Donor agencies acknowledge one constraint to achieving better impacts is the top-down approach of government agencies and that it must be complemented by non-governmental agencies who can substitute for the perspectives of those targeted by the poverty programmes. “NZAID recognises that its development strategies and programmes must be relevant to the local context and incorporate the perceptions of the poor themselves. We therefore engage actively with New Zealand's NGO development community and provide funding to support a wide range of NGO programmes with partners on the ground overseas”. While this confirms the non-governmental distinction, it also implicitly assumes that organisations - be they on the ground partners or foreign development agencies - can achieve that relevancy and contribute perceptions ‘of the poor themselves'. Another problem is that it invites the unqualified use of ‘the poor' as a general category.

 

1.2.3.2 Development contested: practice-based vs theoretical lit

 

There is a division in scholarly interest apparent that, where participation is concerned, much of the same topics will be treated by development studies. With that comes reduced attention to institutional and theoretical issues and relatively more practice oriented or ethnographic interest. This was already noted earlier.

 

In the field of international Development [bibliography], it appears that much of the 'participatory' literature tends to be sector specific, and frequently describes efforts used to solve an immediate community problem (see e.g. Alix-Garcia, Janvry, & Sadoulet, 2005; Brian Craig, Graham Whitelaw, Robinson, & Jongerden, 2003; Karen Brown, 2003; Eder, 2005; Hunt & Smith, 2005; Veitayaki, Aalbersberg, & Tawake, 2003; White, 1994). Participatory projects may involve a number of different stakeholders coming together to work on an immediate and visible community problem, such as improving a water supply. The initiation for such a collaborative action may be reported as emerging from within the community, or be initiated as part of a development programmes by an outside agency, national or international. In terms of science, we most commonly see descriptions of participatory approaches involving researchers and one particular interest group, say farmers, a relationship typically limited to the term of one project. After completion of the planned work, the aid workers and researchers move on to find another group in need of their expertise. Within these situations, community-based process skills in areas such as facilitation and rapid rural appraisal techniques are commonly used.#p#分页标题#e#

 

As participatory rural appraisal (PRA) has passed into the canons of good development practice, among aid agencies awareness of a gap between PRA rhetoric and reality has followed. For example, a paper from the UK Institute of Development Studies (part of the Pathways to Participation initiative) reports on a reflective actor-oriented process undertaken by the British NGO ActionAid in order to improve its use of PRA in Gambia (Holmes & Scoones, 2000). As elsewhere in development settings, PRA (a term coined in 1988) came to Gambia in the early 1990s and has, with the backing of local enthusiasts, donors and international agencies gradually become institutionalised into activities at all tiers of government. The primary function of ActionAid's 45 fieldworkers (known as Community Development Workers - CDWs) is to facilitate a Community Based Management (CBM) approach to build local capacity to identify, implement and manage development initiatives under the rubric of community action plans (CAPs). The report highlights gaps between ActionAid's policy and practice at the time of the research in 1999, noting field workers not following critical guidelines, staff gender imbalances, poor interagency cooperation, minimal transfer of PRA skills to local communities, obstacles of illiteracy, artificial budget-linked programme cycles, inflexible package approach to PRA, and little input from communities into process. 

 

However, as this study describes, when the focus changes towards the more complex issues surrounding environmental governance, a wider range of skills are required to be used and linked. The range of 3-letter acronyms - PRA, CBM, CDW, CAP - proves limited. Questions about inclusiveness, the role of facilitators, and the personal behaviour of elites remain. Such situations frequently not only involve multiple stakeholder perspectives, but also lack emphasis on information, local politics and its subsequent development (Kapoor, 2002). 

 

The inadequacies of the documented thinking on reform practices reveals the need to adopt other perspectives. To what extent can the methodologies developed by practitioners match the complex contexts, subjective experiences and strategic interests of participating actors? In particular, how do theorists and practitioners imagine deliberation and democracy can underlie the effective involvement of the ‘participated'?

 

1.2.4 Theorizing deliberative democracy: Add one helping of Habermas with a sprinkling of Foucault

 

One of the most influential recent trends in theoretical thinking about democratic processes relates to the notion of discursive or deliberative democracy, or the idea that citizens should play a pivotal role in a policy making process that sustains rational argumentation and considered political interaction. Involving citizens is thought as the most direct way that government can meet the interests of its citizens, but this rationale rests on critical assumption that are not usually made explicit.#p#分页标题#e#

 

The critical communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas has been applied to interpret the normative nature of political participation and also in the environmental policy field (e.g. Parkins & Mitchell, 2005; Renn, Wiedemann, & Webler, 1995). His extensive theoretical framework attempts to connect modes of existing political participation to wider processes of rationalisation by arguing that participation should not be considered as a value in itself but related to the conditions in which it occurs.

 

At the heart of Habermas' work is a normative concern with exposing the conditions that disrupt rational and meaningful political debate (T. A. McCarthy, 1978; Sitton, 2003). In short, this represents the ideal of socially coordinated action that is built upon less distorted political arrangements in which the force of an open argument holds sway. This is ultimately seen as the source of rational public debate, and Habermas argues that this democratising tendency needs to take the institutional form of a participatory public sphere. This term refers to a space, or a multiplicity of interconnected spaces, in which citizens are able to discursively interact in order to discuss and shape the development of public policies.

 

A key question that continues to plague those interested in these themes might be put in this way: How are the existing avenues of political participation likely to facilitate the tendencies that Habermas identifies? To what extent do participative practices correspond to the conditions that Habermas assumed? 

 

1.2.4.1 Habermas' failure to resolve the conflict between ideal and reality: Beyond positivism

 

There remains an unresolved conflict between the ideal of public deliberation and the reality of disjointed public action. The problem with Habermas is not that he fails to recognize that communication is often broken or perverted, but rather that he insists, in spite of this recognition, that reason, ethics and democracy can be grounded in an ideal speech-act situation. By so doing Habermas resorts to an ideological masking of the ultimate failure of the social to constitute an all-encompassing space of representation. 

 

For arriving at general explanations of human behaviour, the approach that remains prevalent in academic and public discourse to this day can be referred to as the rational choice theory which gives a rational and instrumental explanation why an agent behaves in a particular way. Habermas, however, is conscious of the social aspects of needs and desires, of the assumptions underlying an interpretation that envisions rational individuals behaving as if they never communicated with each other. For he recognized that one way of differentiating forms of communication can be to distinguish instrumental, purpose oriented expression from communicative which offers a justification for action that claims rational validity from the perspective of the agent. The body of theory developed by Habermas makes reference to validity claims as commitments that have the social function of coordinating action. This explicitly links discourses with social action. #p#分页标题#e#

 

By working with his distinction of formal and informal spheres of politics, it is possible to focus on that which is outside the arenas that are specifically designed to make and implement decisions. Nevertheless, a political analysis in the spirit of democratic theorists utilising Habermas' theorisation still fails to enter the haphazard, subjective realities at the society-nature boundaries. Another continental school that perhaps is better prepared to enter those spaces are French thinkers, and in particularly the ideas usually discussed with the aid of Foucault's writings.

 

A Foucaultian analysis then, would engage in an historical analysis of the changing governing rationalities that increasing consultation processes represent and that supposedly animate and give coherence to the state. It would be a highly idiosyncratic account of the state that aims to grasp it as a strategic relation or strategy. In adopting such stances, Foucault's ultimate aim is to provide a strategic account of the state. This, however, requires the unit of analysis to shift from the interactions of motivated agents - within the roles they bear - to anonymous actors that the state groups into categories. Employing Foucault's historical interest in genealogy, an analysis of the categories constructed by state discourses would attempt to un-frame the subjects of these discourses.

 

Rather than rejecting the ideal of communicative rationality, Habermas's concept of deliberative democracy could greatly benefit from a strategic account of the state. In that way it would be possible to formulate an approach without falling into the trap of ignoring strictly incompatible assumptions that underlie complementary elements. The result of combining the two approaches, or, at least to import a Foucauldian analysis into the Habermasian framework, would be an approach that promises to yield critical knowledge, both normative and strategic, as for instance Biebricher suggests. (Biebricher 2007)

 

[##develop and conclude]

 

In this section I have ambiguated important notions used in regarding environmental governance situations that are used in top-down analysis of theorists and practitioners. By enlisting sometimes contradictory or distinctive theoretical perspectives I have opened possibilities to employ these abstraction to approach empirical settings from multiple angles. This will prove important not simply to diversify the literatures brought into a discussion but to bring focus to actor perspectives and narratives. The next section will discuss how that can be done.

 

1.3低端视角：面向行动者，情景式研究和机构的出现-1.3 Views from the bottom: An actor-orientated, situated approach and the emergence of agency.

 

“The current popularity of discussion about governance has its genesis in the fact that our traditional institutions have kept pace neither with the changing world around us nor with the expectations of citizens.”#p#分页标题#e#

 

Elizabeth Dowdeswell, Executive Director, UNEP (1992-1997)

 

Policy analysis has served policy makers well to stimulate the political processes of policy deliberation, but is not providing adequate answers to the problems facing modern society. A technocratic orientation that predominates among policy managers relies on neo-positivist principles that emphasize empirical research designs, the use of quantitative sampling techniques and data-gathering procedures, the measurement of outcomes, and the development of causal models with predictive powers. The only reliable approach to knowledge accumulation, according to this epistemology, is empirical falsification through objective hypothesis testing of rigorously formulated causal generalizations {see \Dallmayr, 1980; Popper, 1959; Sugden, Ash, Hanson, & Smith, 2003}. In the socio-ecological complexities of environmental politics this strategy has proven inadequate. 

 

In the course of 2000-1 the Department of Conservation (DOC) returned to a proposal for a marine reserve on the North-East coast of Great Barrier Island that had not been actively pursued since 1994. Scientific investigations of deep water habitats off the north-east coast had been undertaken {Jeffs & Irving, 1993} and these helped shape the new proposal. Department staff met with tangata whenua, ‘interested parties' and individuals from Great Barrier Island and the wider community. Consultation meetings were held on Great Barrier Island and in Auckland City, including with representatives from recognised iwi bodies at both locations. Advisory committees were consulted. Information material was prepared and submissions were invited, also with the preparation of a discussion document entitled ‘A Marine Reserve for Great Barrier Island? Your chance to have a say' {DOC, 2003}. 11,000 copies were distributed to people and organisations recognised as having an interest in the area or who expressed an interest in the area, including local residents, commercial fishers, recreational fishers, iwi agencies, marine scientists, commercial interests, conservation groups and others. By August 2003, 1,863 submissions had been received and analysed. From the department's point of view, an extensive effort had been made to consult with all concerned parties.

 

However, in a report published subsequently the DOC conceded that “The proposal remains controversial.” {DOC, 2004, p11}. As will be recounted later, the controversial nature of the proposal contributed to the Minister of Fisheries decision in 2007 not to concord with the application made by the DOC. 

 

The failure yet again of the participative methods so widely in use to produce a workable project for the governmental, non-governmental and private interests involved begs the question, why do such poor problem solving methods remain in use by state actors nominally at the front line of society-nature relations?#p#分页标题#e#

 

1.3.1 Understanding participative practices

 

There is currently only limited understanding of how participants actually experience different forms of political activity. Consequently, we know little about how and why political participation takes the forms that it does within different public spaces. The intention of the research approach adopted here aims to overcome such shortcomings. In this way it become possible to investigate the public spaces in which participation takes place and there to observe how participants overcome the dilemmas they encounter. 

 

The best way to gain a more detailed understanding of processes of political involvement is to talk at length to those who have experienced it, rather than continuing to rely on research strategies that remain distanced from the actual conditions of political participation. Drawing on ethnographic methodologies like participant observation, focus group discussions and qualitative methods, opens inside-out perspectives of the experiences of participation. 

 

The relevance of such a methodology was, for instance, demonstrated in the work of Fraser et al {Fraser, Dougill, Mabee, Reed, & McAlpine 2006} in their analysis of participatory processes for sustainability indicator identification. This followed a process of reflecting upon the experiences and impressions of a cross-section of those who take part in political life, ranging from the most intensely active to the participants with minimal involvement. The insights gained in that study showed that crude models of consultation do not reflect the diverse relations that are played out in real life participatory processes.

 

1.3.2 Locating the social in the environment

 

The conceptual division of the environment from the human world naturally separates environmental problems from the social context. This of course has not been overlooked in the literature [##reference] but remains institutionalized with government agencies and interest groups focused on environmental issues. Efforts to overcome this barrier and address issues have had partial success.

 

Scholars have offered alternative conceptualizations of environmental problems. For instance, Memon and Perkin {, 2000 #445 @11} argue that in the New Zealand context, there is recognition that many environmental problems are social and thus are approached with a political-economic framing. This view originates in the social sciences and posits a significant interdependence between people and the natural environment and focuses attention on an examination of the complexity and contradictions of environmental management. Such a mode of analysis emphasises the social, political and economic factor that give rise to environmental problems and issues, as well as associated intuitions, policies and outcomes. #p#分页标题#e#

 

[## discuss social analysis in use]

 

However, technocratic policy recommendations relying on adding social analyses have shown limited empirical success. Post-positivist like Fischer (1998) are quick to point out that the problem is rooted in the empirical social scientist's misunderstanding of the social. The very concept of a generalizable, value free objectivity is seen to be at odds with the social reality in which these methodologies are applied. Social science can offer a range of alternative approaches.

 

1.3.2.1.1 Theorists from the humanities have developed critiques of positivist inspired approaches.

 

A more humanistic approach does not entirely discount the importance of political economy, but focuses more on the socially constructed meanings of society-nature relationships, and the social and cultural behaviours that arise. Socially circumscribed explanations contrast with the supposed neutrality of the dominant neo-classical economic approach, which advocates maximising welfare from resource use in a free market culture. Behaviourist theories in turn stress the importance of perceptions, attitudes and values with a focus on the individual.

 

1.3.3 Examples in context: Governance reform as solution to social problems

 

In fisheries, for instance, the processes of globalisation are singled out as raising concerns not only about ecosystem health but also about social issue like social justice, livelihoods, food security and food safety by authors such as in Kooiman {, 2005 #1090}. And this constitutes part of an analysis that justifies arguments that these issues should be primarily addressed by people who are directly involved. Kooiman and his co-authors conclude that a governance approach is fundamental to fisheries management. Governance reform of fisheries are thus seen as a prerequisite for obtaining positive ecological outcomes that are interlinked with human concerns. Involving communities in managing their own resources was so the rational implication. Following this rationale, Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) has been practiced for more than twenty years. But as experience has accumulated, CBNRM has met with increasing disillusionment.

 

The earliest ideas date to the late 60s, but uptake of CBNRM was not consistent and rapid. However, it has now become a well-established approach. As of 2002, Min-Dong {Min-Dong 2002} reports, some 60 countries were in various stages of decentralizing the management of their natural resources and institutionalising citizen involvement in resource management decision making. But Min-Dong, citing a range of authors, showed that despite the popularity of ‘decentralization' reforms, the authenticity of their positive impacts has yet to be empirically demonstrated, and in some cases these reforms have arguably been characterized by disappointed expectations of their promised results. “There is wide-spread belief that decentralization leads to better services, more efficiency and democratic government. Although this causal relationship is often assumed to exist, there is little hard evidence beyond the perception of those directly involved: ministers of finance, regional governors, mayors, donors and civil society” [#PAGE?]. #p#分页标题#e#

 

Collaborative approaches are increasingly being promoted by coalitions of practitioners and users, as able to embody universal democratic and environmental values while offering systems of responsive and effective management of resources exposed to a diverse range of pressures and political interests. Regulatory agencies have been engaging with these initiatives, if not at least in response to international influences. Participation has evolved from disparate roots in areas such as democracy theory, political empowerment, colonial development and planning {Campbell, 2001}. More recently, it has become an important component of environmental reform in development. For example, Veitayaki and colleagues write of “a new consciousness to involve people in local communities in the management of their marine resources using the participatory approach is spreading in the Pacific Islands.” {Veitayaki, 2003} 

 

Such processes diversify the discourses involved to include more voices from traditional and non-institutionalised agents from, among other, indigenous cultures, the commercial sector and civil society. Public participation processes take different forms and can entail significant social repercussions that are often unforeseen. In a wide review of public participation processes in natural resource management with specific reference to forest planning, Buchy and Hoverman {,2000 Buchy } highlight the importance of power as one possible explanation. They warn that to engage in a participatory process will ultimately change relationship patterns and affect power relationships. 

 

The experience of aid workers like myself warn that the convincing rationales of win-win project outcomes are all too frequently encountering obstacles. Kumar (2002) for instance found that poor villagers are not easily organised around local systems of politics or stratification and warns that development projects will be destined to fail when judged against unrealistic assumptions about the possibilities and merits of ‘participation'.

 

In international development assistance, scholars and practitioners are often formulating issues around shared threats. Western aid donors are encouraging and funding new ways to identify and support opportunities presented by the spatial overlap between indigenous peoples' territories and regions targeted for biodiversity conservation. By integrating arguments from economic development, cultural assertion and biodiversity conservation, shared interests can be manufactured. To motivate reframing efforts, advocates are emphasising the shared threats to cultural and biological diversity which are often attributed to poor governance {e.g. \Alcorn, 2001 #23}. 

 

The subject of participation in development practice is actually complex and often misunderstood. There are many ways of defining participation and many ways of participating. ‘All too often the term is used to describe a situation where village people are merely co-opted into an outsider's activities.' {Campbell, 2001} [## page?] Scholars have noted this contradiction and sought for explanations in political theory.#p#分页标题#e#

 

1.3.3.1 Explaining Community-Based Natural Resource Management: Participation as a governance mechanism 

 

Community Based Conservation (CBC) can be seen in the context of new approaches in ecology and applied ecology. Berkes {2004 , Berkes} identified three conceptual shifts toward a systems view, toward the inclusion of humans in the ecosystem, and toward participatory approaches to ecosystem management that are interrelated and pertain to an understanding of ecosystems as complex adaptive systems in which humans are an integral part. He finds insights into CBC through a number of emerging interdisciplinary fields that have been pursuing various aspects of coupled systems of humans and nature. These fields are common property, traditional ecological knowledge, environmental ethics, political ecology, and environmental history. 

 

Closely related to CBC, co-management is often described as requiring the integration of indigenous and scientific approaches to resource analysis and management. While some progress has been made in the recognition and use of traditional knowledge and traditional management approaches, examples from the practice of co-management do not indicate that the integration of approaches to analysis is being effectively accomplished. Indeed, the cultural barriers involved make this one of the most difficult challenges facing co-management {Rusnak, 1999 @32}. Co-management institutions have generally been limited to implementation and have not extended user participation to include the knowledge basis for management decisions, writes Degnbol { 2003, Degnbol }. He describes alienation of the immediate users from the formalised research knowledge, and the different perceptions of stakeholders where knowledge is used for varying management, policy and marketing purposes. 

 

The diverse methods for community-based governance and collaborative approaches are evidence of a continuing search for effective models of practice, but at the same time also serve to demonstrate the need for context-sensitive approaches. While the reporting of successes - and failures - contributes to an increasingly rich literature of field experiences, this work also represents an acknowledgement of the creative responses developed by practitioners and academic interventions that in many ways represent a situated approach to the complex socio-political contexts encountered. 

 

A bottom-up position to examine environmental governance reforms then must also be a carefully situated assessment that responds to the particular context it is found in. Why is it then that this academic deliberation is not acknowledged as simply that - an opening up of possibilities that should un-frame processes, instead of searching for impermanent modes of abstraction? Rather than the inherently futile attempt to abstract universal methods for complex and intrinsically unpredictable situations, a more meaningful framework such as the one being developed here, must also go beyond top-down critical analysis and bottom-up situated actor perspectives to consider the discursive and relative nature of knowledge. The next section attempts to show how that can be approached. #p#分页标题#e#

 

1.4关系视角,或者说介于在顶部和底部之间:将治理作为共同标语-1.4 A relational view, or between top and bottom: Governance as co-constructed discourse.

 

Who is included and who is excluded in participatory activities often remains obscure. While different approaches to ‘representation' are used in the cases examined, the question of whose voice is heard is less often discussed. Broader questions of who convenes the process and who frames the questions are therefore key. 

 

(T. Holmes & Scoones, 2000, p. 7) 

 

Public sector organisations have faced, and continue to face considerable criticism by increasingly sceptical and vociferous publics. The new emphasis on accountability, efficiency and transparency has demanded challenging transformations. To what extent these efforts have achieved their aims or have effectively responded to criticisms remains the task of in-depth institutional analysis. But underlying perhaps soluble demands for restructuring, there are more fundamental constraints, which undermine improvements in the capacity of the public sector to stimulate, facilitate and regulate pluralistic, market driven economies (Carney & Farrington, 1998). 

 

In particular, the ‘paradox of power' (Rondinelli, 1993), concerns the fact that for reforms to be successful there must be widespread political support and participation, yet such change is viewed as a threat by those in power. The guarded hesitancy is often interpreted by participants as reflecting hidden agendas, but a conflict exists between an idea of participation that cedes power outside an institution and an administrative rationality that demands adherence to an institutional logic. This emphasises the political nature of the public sector which has historically been studied with a range of paradigmatic approaches. 

 

##I begin this section by first clarifying my understanding of politics, power and deliberation before I will …

 

1.4.1 Forms of power: Fragmented power, power effects and discourse as instrument of power

 

Classic policy analysis risks applying models of political processes that eliminate important sites of politics (Bardach, 2005). A relevant conception posits a diffuse, societal power that is in effect in an anti-hierarchical contemporary politics shaped by post-material values and split into a range of specific conflicts and localized issue-driven struggles {Foucault, 2002 #1162; Foucault, 1966 #1437}. But such a use of intangible effects and diffuse influences does not altogether eliminate the risk of rendering important actors and places invisible.

 

Common textbook definitions of power revolve around the ability to influence the actions of others, but inevitably will ignore important linkages when used to analyse power relations. It is not necessary at this point to pursue the various attempts at fixing the meaning of this term but simply to acknowledge that it is of concern to analysts, policy makers and policy subjects and that of interest here is to reveal powers that are not coercive and visible but are active outside the traditional spaces of politics and administration. #p#分页标题#e#

 

Developing such an interest in power will look beyond 'powerful' actors and consider other categories of power effects, in particular structural. The ideas of Foucault take this forward, allowing power to be conceived as a quality dispersed throughout a society, in different locations and political sites. By disconnecting it in this way from agents and their agendas, it opens up to examination the wider context of a given situation. It then remains for the analyst to retrace the chain of links along which power circulates. Most importantly, Foucault also locates power within the subject as an internalized governmentality. But this suggests, I will argue, that the first point of resistance is also within the subjective self.

 

If power cannot be reduced to state authority, and as we will see, is not replaced with economic power, then the sources of power will diversify. A non state-centric analysis of power, positions government as one of many agents in a setting, who will utilize non-authoritative, discursive instruments of politics. This is how discourse becomes an instrument of power.

 

1.4.2 Chasing the ghosts of positivism

 

Post-modern critique for decades has been chasing the elusive ghosts of positivism, but along the way scholars have also opened new directions. Flyvbjerg {, 2001 #1466} developed this criticism by ‘reviving' a phronetic social science, which asks value-rational questions and aims to move beyond an epistemic social science modelled after the natural sciences. If the social sciences modelled themselves after phronesis they would be strong where the natural sciences are weak, namely in the deliberation about values and power that is essential to social and economic development in modern society. 

 

Hay {, 2002 #1561} in turn, argues that alternative epistemological methods from diverse paradigms, including a holistic ecology, a teleological Gaia theory, phenomenological investigations and eco-feminism, can come together in a coherent framework opening the possibility of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. While Hay proposes an ambitious project, his readiness to re-assemble epistemological tools challenges a critique of reductionist sciences to respond with fresh approaches and relevant frameworks.

 

I will propose that the task for theorists and resource managers does not lie in revising methodologies and technologies as such but that theory, practice and subjects must find new ways of engaging that are deliberatively based. 

 

Practice based epistemologies can integrate both established and alternative methods to achieve contradictory goals, and can produce the creative tension necessary for a shift in orientation, if not an outright paradigm shift. It will need to construct a coherent map through a complex world that must fragment taken for granted categories. It needs to connect across scales, map linkages between systems and reveal the interaction between complex processes. In other words, a deliberative practice needs to adopt a relational approach to rearrange categories of abstraction in use.#p#分页标题#e#

 

In response to his scathing criticism of the ‘empirical social sciences', Fischer suggests a ‘post-positivist model of practical deliberation' {, 1998 #1678 @129}. As a discursive orientation grounded in practical reason, this approach situates empirical inquiry in a broader interpretive framework. Fischer's ‘practical deliberation' points to a direction that makes it possible to address the multi-dimensional complexity of social reality and reconnect the empirical data, the normative / ontological assumptions, the interpretative judgements of the researcher, the situational context and the conclusions thus obtained. Most importantly, a model of practical deliberation holds out important implications for transforming the institutional structures and practices of policymaking in general, a point I will take up again in the closing discussion. For now interrogating how motivation for action around human environment is actually constructed suggests a beginning to reconstruct a model of ‘practical deliberation'.

 

1.4.3 Rethinking deliberation as subjective performances: Questioning environ-mentality

 

There is a wide range of concepts used by scholars to represent internalized states that are motivating action. Approaching with widely different theoretical framings and intentions, researchers have made many attempts to theorize and study social behaviour and moral judgements that are explained with beliefs, conviction or values (Fehr & Gintis, 2007). Economists, sociologists and anthropologists, and poststructuralists often refer to similar empirical phenomena, even when the terminology varies, and have developed models accordingly. To consider such 'cognitions' as stable, internally-represented conceptions of the world constrains the view of how these are produced, as artefacts that serve interactional and/or institutional purposes (Antaki, 2006). This becomes evident from empirical studies. 

 

What is perhaps the most interesting and underexplored question in relation to environmental regulation is concerned with the development a of an 'environmentality': When and for what reason do socially situated actors come to care about, act in relation to, and think about their actions in terms of something they identify as “the environment”? To determine an answer requires the actors' behaviour to be interpreted not only as a social subject but as one whose actions shape patterns of cognition.

 

Research that studies government and community involvement finds that a form of subjecthood is produced. Work by Agrawal (2005) illustrates how that can be empirically explored. He shows the deep and durable relationship between government and subjecthood and how regulatory strategies associated with and resulting from community decision making help transform those who participate in government. With the term subjecthood, Agrawal attempts to express how people become the subject of ideology and discourses that reshape beliefs. Using evidence drawn from archival records and field work in India, he reports the extent to which varying levels of involvement in institutional regimes of environmental regulation lead to new ways of understanding the world, forms of ‘environ-mentality'. #p#分页标题#e#

 

Agrawal's concept of environmentality relates to a rather distinct strand of environmentally concerned political theory, stressing the role of discourses in shaping subjectivity and citizen attitudes towards environmental matters. This is related to work of authors such as Maarten Hajer {see also \Hajer, 1997 #1598; Hajer, 2005 #268; see also \Sharp, 2001 #592; Dingler, 2005 #818; Swyngedouw, 2005 #1567}. These scholars are centrally concerned with Foucauldian questions of knowledge and power in both the construction of, and policy responses to, environmental problems. 

 

Governmentality theorists warn, that forms of power beyond the state can often sustain the state more effectively than its own institutions, enlarging and maximising its effectiveness. This is not achieved through coercive control, but through a more complex and subtle diffusion of techniques and forms of knowledge through which communities “can be mobilised, enrolled, deployed in novel programmes” and “techniques which encourage and harness active practices of self-management and identity construction, of personal ethics and collective allegiances” (Rose, 1999, p. 176).

 

There is another way of approaching the subjectivity that Agrawal describes, a way that accounts for history and rehabilitates prejudice from its pejorative status. Gadamer's treatment of prejudice draws from a framing of understanding and knowledge as simultaneously subjective and social (1989; orig 1960). One could object that involvement in a situation cannot but remain subjective or emotional simply on the grounds that it is always determined by particular dispositions of the subject, to experience things in certain ways rather than others - that such involvement is thus always based on subjective ‘prejudice'. Gadamer takes issue directly with this view of prejudice, and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing off, prejudices (or ‘pre-judgments') are themselves what open the subject up to what is to be understood.

 

Gadamer responds by employing a notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness. This represents ‘fore-structures' of understanding, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. This founds beliefs, preferences and actions on the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful. I will develop this notion of prior hermeneutical situatedness as part of the methodological approach since it theorizes what ethnographic research aims to achieve, to enter the ‘horizons' of the research subjects.

 

Against the common presumption that actions follow beliefs, Agrawal showed that people involved in community based forestry management in India often first come to act in response to what they may see as compulsion or as their short-term interest and only then develop beliefs that defend short-term-oriented actions on other grounds as well. He also showed that the subjects studied vary in their beliefs about forest protection and that these variations are related to their involvement in regulatory practices rather than their social-structural location in terms of caste or gender. In the process it helps explain transformations over time and differences at a given point in time in how people view their relationship with the environment. #p#分页标题#e#

 

This opens up a quite different notion of beliefs and their malleability, as beliefs that are moulded by experience. "My argument is that beliefs and thoughts are formulated in response to experiences and outcomes over many of which any single agent has little control. There is little doubt that one can change some aspects of the world with which one is in direct interaction, but equally certainly the number and types of forces that affect even one's daily experiences transcend one's own will and design." (Arun Agrawal & Gupta, 2005, p. 163)

 

1.4.4 Governmentality and active subjects 

 

Agrawal showed restraint by not creating notions of passive actors subject to manipulative governmentalities, as authors drawing on Foucault have been criticised (M. Taylor, 2007). He is more concerned with how beliefs that underlie action are transformed.

 

Governmentality theory does helps to explain the ways in which state power persists even when governing is increasingly devolved; however, it also allows for the possibility of active subjects, who can shape and influence the new spaces into which they have been invited. This is a concept also taken up in an ‘actor-oriented' sociology of development (Long, 2001) which looks beyond broad social forces at the social cognitive dimensions of social behaviour. 

 

In this sense, at any given moment, people may plan to act in accordance with their beliefs. But all plans are incomplete and imperfect, and none incorporate the entire contextual structure in which actions lead to consequences. For these and other reasons, actions have unanticipated outcomes. Agrawal argues from this that outcomes inconsistent with one's beliefs about the world are thus revised. In these situations, actors have an incentive to work on their beliefs, preferences, and actions, incorporating into their mentalities new propensities to act and think about the world. Even if these adjustments are small, the incremental effect over time can lead to opportunities to arrive at subject positions that are quite different from those held earlier. " In this way of thinking about subject positions, the durability of subjectivity or the notion of subjectivity as the seat of consciousness is what is being contested" (ibid.).

 

With subject positions and their immutability thus conceived as contextually sensitive variables, the question arises of what the mechanisms are that allow for beliefs to be reformulated. Agrawal suggests that this related to involvement in practices rather then simply resorting to a structural explanation in terms of social position. Another researcher, Toren working in Fiji (1999), aimed to “to arrive at an idea of human beings that is rooted in inter-subjectivity and the history that is its artifact, and to show how, exactly, we humans can be understood to embody the history of our own making” (p2). Toren resorts to Piaget's cognitive scheme to describe ‘self-regulating transformative system. “… all behaviour has innate roots, but becomes differentiated through functioning; and all behaviors contain the same functional factors and the same structural elements. The functional factors are assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration” (p2). #p#分页标题#e#

 

But Torne concedes that the idea of a schema as a self-regulating, transformational system in which structure and process are aspects of one another has not been widely understood. It follows that the theoretical usefulness has not been recognized. But while this holds promise, this does not represent the most promising approach since it must depend on assumptions about inaccessible cognitive processes. Hermeneutics offers an alternative that I will work with.

 

1.4.5 Circulating imaginaries: Co-constructing new framings

 

##imaginaries circulate, are available to be used in political projects etc 

 

In this final section elaborating a three-part framework, I attempted to liberate the social actors from the constraints that a structural view - even with a critical attitude - places around actors, as well as from the intractable struggles that an actor-oriented bottom-up perspective focuses on. By appropriating notions of environ-mentality and active subjects, the spaces of deliberation can also be seen to become spaces of social action. If the process of co-constructing the rationales for action is open to the subjects of governance, the research interest then turns to what conditions can possibly explain active engagement by governance participants that successfully reframes environmental decisions. With relevant conditions identified, it then becomes possible to recognize the possibilities for future opportunities in which actors can realign their knowledge systems in constructive or destructive orientations. To see how this may be achieved, it is necessary to reveal the imaginaries circulating in a range of empirical interventions, which the reports will present after the methodological approach has been elaborated in the following chapter.

 

1.5结论：制定情景化的历程1.5 Conclusion: Framing situated journeys 

 

Before closing this chapter, I will review in detail what has been achieved. I ahve developed the notion of environmental governance as both an assembly of practices and as a body of political theory. That was successful in showing how efforts to reform society-nature relations as sustainable development draw on democratic theory but remain contested and how governance as a more participative practice has diversified the politics of the environment. By relating this to external context and subjective experience, I drew attention to the need for a political explanation to account for inter-subjectivities.

 

How shared meanings are established is central for explaining the experience and outcome of participation. This in turn, prompts an interest in how different types of participation that inhabit the spaces of voluntary political participation mediate interpretation of meanings. By bringing attention to the inter-subjective character of participation, rather than attending to demographics and quantitative parameters, a better understanding of the conditions for shared understanding can be arrived at. #p#分页标题#e#

 

If it is accepted that the quality of dialog and debate are critical for the democratic processes of environmental governance, or environmental democracy, then this poses questions about locating and evaluating deliberation. Theories of deliberative policy analysis and democratic legitimacy offer criteria for qualifying political action, but given the fragmentation of political spaces it becomes difficult to draw analytical boundaries to comparatively assess deliberative situations. Instead, I will argue, interest should focus on the context of deliberation, to question how and why certain forms of political participation develop within and outside different political structures. This moves the research focus to question not just what the ideals of environmental democracy are, as much of the deliberative democracy scholarship does, but to identifying the potential for engagement in public deliberation over environmental governance. 

 

Three positions were constructed in this chapter to offer top-down, bottom-up and reflective perspectives on reform situations that should be located in boundary situations. To show that this framework is relevant to addressing the stated research problem, two conditions must be met. A relational perspective considering situations in managed environments should be able:

• to show that it can help reinterpret prior experience and shed new light on reasons for success or failure; and

• to help analyze specific circumstances and devise improved strategies for future policy reform that take into account the possibilities of action that exist.

 

In the next chapter, I will develop a methodological approach for the empirical interventions that can address these objectives.