Abstracts for Interdisciplinary Workshop
Political Ecologies of Knowledge, Science and Technology

Sponsored by the Environment and Development Advanced Research Circle (EDARC) of the International Institute and Global studies, in collaboration with the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies , at UW-Madison
March 6-7, 2006
The Pyle Center – 702 Langdon Street
University of Wisconsin–Madison

From Outside UW

J. Peter Brosius
Department of Anthropology
University of Georgia

Conservation and the Metrics of Accountability
In recent years we have witnessed a proliferation of strategic discourses in conservation, evident most notably in the linked enterprises of ecoregional conservation planning and conservation finance. This strategic turn has entailed a reconfiguration of relationships with donors who support the work of major conservation organizations. Increasingly donors demand not only strategic visions, but ever more rigorous standards for measuring the success of initiatives they fund. The use of “Monitoring and Evaluation” (M&E) tools has now become virtually obligatory in contemporary conservation programs. Accompanying this, we see the emergence of a cadre of specialists to coordinate and administer these measures and enforce standards of accountability.

These new structures of accountability, and new mechanisms to measure accountability, have transformed the practice of conservation. In this paper I examine the strategic turn in conservation and explore the implications of the metricizing of accountability that it has produced. How do proliferating metrics of accountability impose certain definitions of failure or success, and how does this marginalize or privilege certain actors in the conservation domain? What are the implications for local communities when conservation organizations must provide tangible measures of the success of their investments over very short funding cycles? When conservation organizations must be more accountable to donors, do they not become less accountable to local actors? In addressing the strategic turn and the metrics of accountability, I raise a more general set of questions regarding the politics of knowledge in conservation.

Tim Forsyth
Development Studies Institute
London School of Economics and Political Science

Discursive governance and land-use-cover-change: moving beyond narrative analysis
In recent years, political ecologists have highlighted various approaches to the politics of environmental knowledge, and in particular, the existence of ‘environmental narratives’ - or widely held, yet commonly highly questionable, beliefs about the cause, nature, and impacts of environmental change. Various scholars have employed different aspects of Science and Technology Studies such as Cultural Theory or Actor Network Theory to explain how such narratives evolve. Yet, despite these debates, much research into environmental change is still dominated by orthodox approaches to land-use-cover-change (LUCC), such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which continue to prioritize essentialistic ecosystem changes as indicators of environmental risk. Such approaches fail to acknowledge the deeper connections of social norms and history with environmental assessment, and consequently support environmental policies that seek to constrain the influence of poor people ‘on’ a supposedly natural and separate environment (which may restrict local adaptive capacity) and may enforce old-fashioned 'narratives' of environmental explanation. This paper seeks to consider alternatives to this situation, and for making narrative analysis move beyond critique alone, and onto new and inclusive forms of discursive environmental governance using the insights of existing STS in more applied ways. Rather than discussing whether – for example – ‘more people’ may indeed mean ‘less erosion,’ it is more important to ask how and why does ‘erosion’ form a problem; what social networks allow households to avoid erosion; and which networks continue to define risk only in terms of naturalized and unvarying such as erosion. By undertaking this analysis, the paper seeks to shift the focus of LUCC research from physical processes alone towards an understanding of the social processes that coproduce both environmental risks and policy responses. The paper draws upon examples of watershed management and upland agriculture within Thailand, and can be applied to general debates about ‘poverty and environment.’

Rebecca Lave
Department of Geography
University of California, Berkeley

Stream Restoration: Emerging discipline, emerging market
In contrast to traditional environmentalist attempts to protect nature from further human damage, ecological restoration claims that we can go beyond conservation and repair the environmental damage already done. The tremendous appeal of this image of humans as a positive contributor to environmental health has rapidly made restoration, particularly stream restoration, a driving force of the environmental movement and an institutionalized commitment at all levels of American government. Unfortunately, the demand for stream restoration projects far outstrips knowledge of how to implement them. There is thus great demand for the creation of a field of stream restoration science, but as yet no university has created such a department. Instead, a private consultant named Dave Rosgen has stepped into the breach, developing many of the tools the field needs to get started, including methods, a shared vocabulary, and social reproduction/training. Despite vocal opposition from university-based scientists, Rosgen’s system has been widely adopted by the federal, state and local agencies that fund stream restoration projects. This paper draws on STS insights about the politics of scientific practice and Political Ecology insights about the environmental impacts of political-economic relations to analyze the fight between academics and the private sector over who will control the new field.

Joe Masco
Department of Anthropology
The University of Chicago

On the Value of Synthetic Forests
The paper interrogates the relationship between forms of nature and security discourse in the U.S. It begins with a discussion of early Cold War efforts to build synthetic forests to test against the atomic bomb in a pursuit of national security, and concludes with a discussion of how climate change can be repositioned as a "security" issue. The paper engages a peculiar strand of global thinking, interrogating how the technoscience of the Cold War security state transformed the earth into an experimental theater, and how the current security state engages both the legacy and the implications of that project when it comes evaluating the risk and science of global warming.

Nancy Peluso (with Peter Vandergeest)
Environment, Science, Policy and Management
University of California, Berkeley

Emergencies, Insurgencies and Forests in Southeast Asia
In this paper we look at the construction of political forests as influenced by military activities and political violence. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand experienced “Emergencies” and insurgencies during which political violence was staged in or from many of these countries’ tropical forests. We argue that these kinds of political violence, as well as subsequent government policies and practices for counter-insurgency, helped shape the contemporary “political forests” of these countries. During war, low-intensity conflicts, communist and Islamic insurgencies, and subsequent counter insurgency operations, political forests were established as normal components of the modern nation-state in much of SEA. Their normalization was the effect of a number of processes, including the practices, ideologies, and effects of war. Militaries, militias, revolutionaries, and guerrillas in the region shaped forests directly by burning and clearing, or by using standing forests as hiding places, training grounds, and meeting places. In the aftermath of war or insurgency, many of the strategies initiated during political violence—such as resettlement-- were maintained as part of new management plans, forest reservation, and forest conversion. Resettlement took different forms in different countries and had different effects in the long and short terms. We document and compare the ways Emergencies and Insurgencies in these three countries affected forest access and control (including the redefinition of some areas as forest, or their gazetting as such), development (including mapping), and the dispersal of settlement in selected regions.

Roopali Phadke
Environmental Studies
Macalester College

Damming the Krishna Valley: Lessons in technological reclamation
In the conclusion to their 1997 chapter "Nature as Artifice, Nature as Artifact", geographers Michael Watts and James McCarthy argue that science studies, environmental history and social movement theory are all “critical ingredients of political ecology”. While political ecologists have closely engaged with both environmental history and social movement theory, their attention to science studies has been far less systematic. Actor-network theory and feminist approaches to science studies have greatly influenced the work of political ecologists. However, STS interests in hybridized expertise and democratic technology development have been largely overlooked.

Building on the scholarship of those working at the crossroads of political ecology and STS, such as Anna Tsing, Tim Mitchell, Tim Forsyth, James Scott and Michael Goldman, this paper explores how People’s Science Movements in India are building new technological hybrids that reimagine development. Focusing on the water sector, the paper describes how activists and engineers are materially and cognitively building new kinds of dams, ones that are productive and restorative, organic and synthetic. By melding scientific expertise with traditional ecological knowledge, technological artifacts that have become naturalized embodiments of hegemonic knowledge and power are being reclaimed to stand in for a different set of moral, political and ecological virtues. Drawing on the Krishna Valley example, the paper aims to further break-down two dominant binaries in political ecology and STS: the reification of the global/local on the one hand and the lay/expert on the other.

In addition to demonstrating how knowledge is being hybridized in Indian development practice, the Krishna Valley water reform movement helps articulate how hybridization can be a part of a broader process of “technological reclamation”. To understand how technological reclamation works the paper asks: what is being reclaimed, with what instrumentalities, by whom, and for what purposes? The Krishna Valley case demonstrates that protest politics, knowledge brokering, and alternative technical design are all important ingredients for remaking technological systems into models of democratic expertise. Social movements produce various social goods by engaging in these processes. In the Krishna Valley case this has meant more alternatives, more acceptable designs, better knowledge, and more political buy-in.

Samuel Randall
Environmental Change Institute
Oxford University Centre for the Environment

Selling weather derivatives: weather, risk and climate change
Since 1997 a new financial market has emerged in which companies can manage the costs of non-extreme weather. This weather derivatives market was initially shaped by the US energy sector, but has since grown sectorally and internationally to become an $8.4 billion market in 2005. Selling weather derivatives has however proved a difficult process and this paper illustrates one form of marketing by the weather market, namely direct advertising. Though there are attempts to enrol credit rating agencies or use derivatives to support financing deals, adverts remain a key marketing strategy for the market. These adverts draw upon discourses about climate change to suggest that it is vital to manage the costs of the weather now, because climate change is altering the nature of weather risk. This risk must be normalized through a financial market. An analysis of an advert for the Swiss Re weather desk highlights this normalization as well as themes of enlightenment and control. This advert, alongside others within the weather derivatives market, suggest that businesses can no longer accept the weather as in the hands of providence, but rather that companies must actively manage that weather exposure, particularly if they wish to secure financial stability. The example of weather derivatives can be read as an interesting sociology of science in which a new product becomes stabilized and marketed, enrolling a range of actors in this process. Yet this product also has very real material and discursive implications on both economic and environmental governance, particularly in relation to climate change concerns.

Dianne Rocheleau
Department of Geography
Clark University

Powered Webs and Rooted Networks in Complex Landscapes
Contemporary landscapes and ecologies challenge our ability to explain and address the changing patterns and structures that people simultaneously co-create and inhabit. We are faced with complex connections between local and transnational realities, from markets, media, migration and social movements to land use change, species extinctions and invasions, viral plagues and climate change. We live in networks of the sort described by Bruno Latour , yet we are also rooted in specific geographical locations, often several simultaneously and in series. We are both denizens and artisans of the Hybrid Geographies described by Sarah Whatmore.

Networks are ecological and material as well as social, and carry power relations in both the patterns and processes of connection. To study the past, present and possible futures of people-in-place I have used the lenses of ecologies and networks, linked to landscape, all embedded in uneven and dynamic relations of power. I propose a form of situated science based in a polycentric empiricism, a science that seeks out, combines and evaluates observations from distinct positions within any given network. To accomplish this we can use a selective combination of Political Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, Complexity Theory and Feminist Poststructural Theory to make sense of life in the “New World Order” and to better imagine the multiplicity of “Other Worlds Still Possible”. Examples from Kenya, Dominican Republic, Mexico and the U.S. demonstrate promising ways of knowing and being in rooted networks, webs of power and landscapes past, present and possible.

Peter Taylor
Science, Technology, and Values
University of Massachusetts, Boston

Political ecological accounts of intersecting processes as a model for addressing the social situatedness of political ecological researchers
In political ecology we find analyses of socio-environmental dynamics that develop over time among particular, unequal agents whose actions implicate or span a range of social domains. In social studies of science we find descriptions of knowledge production-in-process that involve networks of heterogeneous components. This paper invites political ecological researchers to take the frameworks they use for studying intersecting socio-environmental processes, apply them to analyzing their own social situatedness as researchers, and consider the methodological and political implications.

Sarah Whatmore
Environment and Public Policy
Oxford University Centre for the Environment

Knowledge controversies: science, democracy and the redistribution of environmental expertise
This paper reflects on conversations between Geography and Science and Technology Studies over the last ten years or so, coloured by my own involvement. Drawing on the influential ideas of the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers to frame these reflections, the presentation will trace through three key dimensions of their shared concern with addressing and practicing relations between politics and ecology differently. These are – (i) an ontological commitment to more-than-human modes of enquiry (ii) an interest in knowledge controversies as generative events in the socialization of new technologies; and (iii) a recognition of the importance of spatial imaginaries and practices to the ways in which relations between politics and ecology are understood and, consequently, to how (social) scientists engage them.

From University of Wisconsin-Madison

Chris Duvall
Department of Geography

Divergent environmental narratives in divergent scientific traditions: Ferricrete and forests in Africa
‘Science’ is often represented as a unitary viewpoint in political ecological challenges to dominant environmental narratives. This paper argues that there have been divergent scientific viewpoints of the African environment during the 1900s, and only a portion of these viewpoints contributes to dominant, politically charged environmental narratives. This argument is made in reference to the scientific history of ferricrete formation. Before the 1930’s, soil scientists believed that ferricrete—hardened, iron-rich soil—forms very slowly on a human timescale, but botanists believed that poor African land management could greatly accelerate ferricrete formation. However, botanists had no theoretically sound justification for belief in rapid ferricrete formation. In the 1930s, soil scientists became concerned that tropical soil-forming processes were faster than previously believed, and that human activities could amplify natural climate variation, leading to observably rapid ferricrete formation. In 1947, the botanist Aubréville linked botanical and soil scientific views of ferricrete in a manner that represented an interdisciplinary scientific advance, which also contributed to the still-dominant environmental narrative that semi-arid Africa has been deforested due to poor African land management. Although Aubréville’s work gained immediate acceptance across disciplines, soil scientists soon rejected earlier ideas of rapid tropical soil formation, and rejected the idea that human activities create ferricrete. Nonetheless, botanists continued to cite Aubréville’s work to argue that African land management is inherently destructive. The paper’s main conclusions are: temporally limited interdisciplinary linkages may create received environmental wisdom; and received wisdom may not arise entirely from politicized, social ideologies.

Joan Fujimura
Department of Sociology

Conceptualizing environments in human systems biology
Systems biology is a new field and new paradigm that aims to make sense and knowledge of biological complexity. The hope for some researchers is to transform human biology into an ecological problem from one that has been the domain of reductionist molecular biology of the last forty years. Thus, for example, complex systems models could take into consideration the roles of diet, nutrition, and microbial factors in the development of complex diseases and in the efficacy, metabolism and toxicity of drugs in human populations. This paper examines these attempts to understand how environments are being conceptualized in various approaches that are attempting to place human biology within larger systems thinking.

Ryan E. Galt
Department of Geography

Local-Global Discontinuities in Agro-Food Markets: Scientific Risk Assessment’s Translation into Market Regulation
Science has not and likely cannot determine the effects of a lifetime of low-dose, cumulative exposures to pesticides as residues on food. Yet, governments in industrialized counties regulate pesticide residues by setting pesticide tolerances, a process involving the translation of reductionistic scientific risk assessment into an exact level of pesticide residue allowed to persist on food. This paper combines approaches from science and technology studies and political ecology to understand the social construction of pesticide tolerances, their translation into regulation that creates regulatory risk for the farmer, and their effects on exporters and farmers (political ecology’s land users) who grow crops for export to the US. Using a political ecological approach and findings from fieldwork in Costa Rica, it investigates export farmers’ understandings of and responses to the regulatory risks created by agro-food pesticide residue regulations. A comparison of export farmers and national market farmers in Costa Rica reveals that US regulations have substantial impacts on export farmers’ pesticide use in that they are more cautious about leaving pesticide residues. There are, however, important discontinuities between regulation and practice, as well as disconnects between scales—national and international—that are typically considered nested in political ecology’s venerable chain of explanation. In light of these discontinuities, it argues that the chain of explanation must be substantially modified to incorporate a conceptualization of how markets and government regulation work through social mediation, local histories, and segmented markets.

Mara Goldman
Department of Geography

Conservation Corridors: Constructing continuity
Habitat fragmentation is now recognized as the largest threat to biodiversity globally. Consequently, conservation science and conservation activities have become increasingly focused on techniques to understand and protect landscape level processes, mitigate further fragmentation, and maintain habitat connectivity. The essential connecting structure in this new conservation discourse (and across conservation landscapes) is the (conservation) corridor. Corridors are the most visible, and in some places the most dominant, expression of landscape conservation planning. This is paradoxical, since while corridors might connect, they simultaneously divide; structurally being but a linear fragment, the function of which is to connect other fragments. The vision of ecological wholeness called for in landscape conservation is sacrificed in the name of conservation urgency, practicality and doability. Protecting ecological processes and functions is complex and difficult, particularly when they include (and occur across) human occupied landscapes. Corridors offer a structural approach to protecting complex ecosystem functions. And corridors connect more than fragmented habitat patches in a landscape. Corridors connect people, theories, disciplines, communities and tools. In other words, Corridors provide a conceptual framework and set of standardized tools to connect diverse communities and scientific disciplines (social worlds) in dialogue, link old and new ecological theories into practice, and unite scientists, activists, state and donor agencies, and policy makers in a common goal.
I demonstrate this process with a discussion of the dominance of the corridor model and its application in Northern Tanzania for the protection of migratory wildlife. I utilize concepts from STS (boundary objects and standardized packages) to understand how corridors are being stabilized as facts—constructed both as naturally occurring entities and as the only possible conservation solution, foreclosing other possibilities. Yet I will also show that while standardization of the corridor package seems nearly complete, enrollment is not. There are dissenting voices and knowledge contributions coming from local Maasai villagers—a community outside of conservation science but vital to corridor projects in this area. Incorporation of these voices into the dialogue reveals the power of corridors as a connecting concept and the popularity of the associated geo-spatial tools, but the failings of the corridor as a conservation initiative or connecting agent.

Mrill Ingram
Environmental Resources Center; La Follette School of Public Affairs

Characterizations and categorizations of microbes
As Latour showed us in his work on Pasteur, the identity of microbes is a negotiated process. This continuing process is reflected in the pages of popular and technical medical publications where authors debate ways of contending with multi-drug resistant disease organisms or the health benefits of diverse microbial flora. Long standing medical and public health commitments to a “contain and control” approach to pathogens are recently being questioned in the face of continued food safety incidents, growing bacterial drug resistance and new technologies redefining pathogenic behavior of microbes. One policy arena in which different, and conflicting, microbial identities are being discussed is in the implementation of U.S. federal organic standards on composting. Concerns over food safety have led to restrictions for organic farmers on the uses of compost and compost teas, which farmers have relied on in managing soil fertility. Although organic farmers have developed an independent line of thinking about microbial action in composting, in many ways the organic approach is compatible with new scientific thinking about microbial identity, public health and food safety. This paper examines the technologies of different ways of working with microbes and discusses the implications of the broader, underlying discursive framings of microbe-human relationships.

Tori Jennings
Department of Anthropology

Headlines and heresies, why we debate climate change
Global climate change is increasingly at the divided center of national and international policy debates. Despite the immense debate over the causes and effects of climate change, however, the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of climate change have generally been ignored. This oversight is rooted in the way various scholars implicitly view the concept of climate. Social theory suggests that concepts like climate are socially and culturally constructed, yet anthropologists have generally not applied this idea to “climate,” seeing it not as a concept, but as an objective constraint on human action. By accepting uncritically the concept of climate, anthropologists and other researchers remain surprisingly unaware of cultural elaborations that produce what we label as “climate,” or how climate might be implicated in unequal power relations. The focus of this paper is therefore not climate change itself, but rather the cultural understandings and social processes that give climate its meaning. I argue that the various ways politicians, scientists, and media invoke the climate concept impoverishes the required debate over land-use practices, social inequalities, and public policies related to climate change. My analysis draws upon an ethnographic case study of Boscastle Habour, a small seaside village in North Cornwall, England devastated by a flash flood in August 2004. The Boscastle Harbour disaster illustrates how the implicit assumption that climate is part of “nature” rather than society conceals important sociopolitical processes. The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the climate concept as a social category, and reveal the political consequences of the concept in social practice.

Maria Lepowsky
Department of Anthropology

Sacred Space and Cultural Memory in Southern California
Indigenous people in the Los Angeles region are asserting claims to ancestral sacred places threatened by development. This paper will focus on the ongoing cultural work of movements to reinhabit and reclaim three contested sites by people who themselves were long ago described as vanished from their homeland. The prehistoric village and burial sites at Puvungna - threatened by a proposed strip mall - are remembered by Tongva (Gabrielinos) and Acjachemen (Juaneños) as home to one of the First Beings, Wiyot; and much later to the new god Chinigchinich, who was the focus of a regional prophetic movement, some of whose ceremonies continue. A drainage ditch for a giant project developers call Playa Vista and environmentalists know as Ballona Wetlands has uncovered the Tongva village of Sa’anga and about 400 burials, some 9000 years old, others buried 200 years ago alongside metal tools and glass beads. The site of Putiidhem, in Acjachemem myth the ancestral village founded by the female chief Couronne, is currently being transformed into the athletic field of a new Catholic high school named for Junípero Serra, the Franciscan who founded California’s missions: candidate for sainthood to the Vatican, architect of genocide to many Native Californians. Tongva and Acjachemen are using Web pages and mass emails to alert descendants, educate other Southern Californians, fight for tribal recognition, and link up with non-Native allies such as environmental activists. Their prayer vigils, pilgrimages, ceremonies, and protests (re)claim these spaces as indigenously named, remembered, and sacred. Some (though far from all) outsiders can easily grasp the idea that a snowy mountain peak, year-round spring, or grove of ancient sycamores is sacred to an indigenous people. But what happens when sacred lands underlie a world city and its ever-expanding suburban edges? These Southern California contests over rights to place reveal complicated overlays of cultural memory upon the landscapes of one of the world’s most populous, ethnically diverse regions, infamously labeled a country of migrants and a place without history.

Clark A. Miller
Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

Governmentality and the Globe
For much of the past decade, I have explored the concept of globalism—the idea that certain kinds of problems can be categorized (i.e., framed, analyzed, understood, and managed) on scales no smaller than the globe itself. This idea has become extremely important in underpinning several prominent efforts to develop environmental policies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and it also has deeper roots in the history of global politics since World War II. It is also an idea grounded in science, in the ideas and work of scientific communities from climate scientists to macroeconomists who have taken it upon themselves to describe, model, and analyze the behavior of global systems. While these scientists often work closely with policy communities, it is their classificatory work and epistemic models that frequently serve as the foundation for globalist movements, and much of my work has investigated the institutional mechanisms by which ideas of the globe have acquired power and influence in global society.

In this paper, I am interested in extending this previous work to examine the relationship between globalist ideas and the notion of governmentality in world politics. Foulcault’s notion of governmentality offers a valuable perspective on the emergence of a certain kind of state within national political communities during the 19th and early 20th centuries. I am curious, however, whether it also provides a useful perspective for thinking about state-like discourses and politics in international politics at the outset of the 21st century. This curiosity stems from two projects I am currently working on: one, a study of comparative globalization in the U.S., Germany, and India; and, the second, a book on the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. This paper will draw primarily but not exclusively from the first.

In particular, this paper will examine the categorization of vulnerability, which has not only become widespread in international environmental policymaking but has also developed intriguing parallels to the concept of poverty with regard to the welfare state and risk with regard to social legislation of the 1960s and 1970s. It is, in other words, one of the new human sciences of the 21st century. But what is its relation to the politics of governmentality and the state in global politics? This is the terrain I hope to begin to grapple with in this paper.

Joshua Ramisch
CIAT
Land Tenure Center (visiting scholar)

Interpreting farmers' soil fertility "experiments": Performances at the development interface
A growing body of literature describes the interface between formal agricultural research and the knowledges of local communities. While this research has advanced the wareness of rural practice it usually does so with utilitarian goals of "integrating" knowledge systems or validating local practice in more cosmopolitan forums. Yet encounters between development actors are power-laden such that claims of knowledge", Evidence of "learning", or indeed the very construction of "local practice" are contestable subjects. Specific examples from community-based learning and development projects in western Kenya illustrate the performative and negotiated nature of both local and formal knowledge as applied to constructing and interpreting "experiments" relating to soil fertility management. The diversity of practices and outcomes reveals the problems of generalizing principles about actual soil fertility management strategies without an understanding of their social context.

Matthew Turner
Department of Geography

Toward more fruitful critical engagements with environmental scientific practices
This paper is concerned with the interface between science studies and political ecology. In resource-poor areas such as Sudano-Sahelian West Africa, environmental concerns figure heavily not only for conservation but development policy. The environmental narrative literature in political ecology has exposed the underlying power of “scientific” modes of explanation and how these knowledge claims shape the futures of peoples through their exclusion or incorporation in conservation and development. The counter-narratives produced by such scholarship however have proven to be blunt instruments to effect change – stories that run parallel to existing dominant narratives but with insufficient critical engagement to overturn them or to fill explanatory voids. Science studies scholarship holds promise for providing critical tools for moving beyond the counter-narrative tradition in political ecology. This promise can only be realized after a serious consideration of the differences in both the underlying motivations and
the scientific practices that attract attention of political ecological and science studies. After reviewing these differences, the paper argues for a more fine-grained critical engagement with the implicit and explicit methodological frameworks used by applied scientists and development practitioners. Using the case of “livestock grazing”, it will be argued that such critical engagement can most fruitfully be directed at boundary objects that attract multidisciplinary attention, hold multiple meanings, and represent fragile nodes on which multidisciplinary understandings of environmental problems depend.

Yen-Chu Weng,
Department of Geography

Negotiating Nature in the Process of Recreating Nature: A Critical Investigation of Restoration Ecology
"To restore nature" is perhaps one of the boldest attempts ecologists have made to manipulate the environment at a large scale. By actively engaging in recreating nature and remaking the human-nature relationships, I argue that this field is well-situated in the socio-nature debates in political ecology. Nevertheless not only are restoration ecologists unaware of the complications of their practice but neither have political ecologists explored this field to a great depth so far. In this paper, I attempt to critically investigate how restoration ecologists treat nature and science in their practice. Four models are identified with regard to restoration ecologists’ treatment of nature and science—ecological composition-focused, ecological function-focused, holism/dynamism, and social constructivism. In terms of human-nature relationships, the variation ranges from humans as manipulators of nature to humans interact with nature and contribute to how nature is constructed. In terms of science-nature relationships, the variation ranges from science as the orthodox reading of the landscape to the pluralities of knowledges. My analysis demonstrates that in ecological restoration there is no consensus with regard to the role of humans in nature and the role of science in understanding nature; instead, such relationships are rather complex and dynamic. Given that ecological restoration is at the forefront of the practice of constructing nature, I argue that investing more political ecological engagements in this field can contribute to our understanding of the socio-nature complexities.