Enacting things through numbers: Taking nature into account/ing

In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the ‘critical limits’ of nature under the impact of acidification was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not ‘Nature’ as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the effect of this process was to produce ‘a nature as a whole’, in a process of unification. This I argue can only be understood relationally: ‘Nature’ is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour’s work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look first at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.     

Making Alzheimer’s disease matter. Enacting, interfering and doing politics of nature

This article contributes to recent discussions about the politics of nature by exploring how Alzheimer’s disease is being shaped as a ‘matter of concern’. Drawing on work on differences in medicine from science and technology studies, and from the geographies of naturecultures, it explores the ‘mattering’ of this disease in a number of locations including: an international Alzheimer’s patients’ movement; a medical textbook; laboratory science; daily care practice; an advertisement for anti-dementia medication; general practice; parliamentary politics; and a conference on dementia. It explores how these locations interfere and co-exist with one another and argues against the ‘science centrism’ of science and technology studies which contributes to the dominance of science and medicine by granting these analytical privilege. The same problem is posed in the recent STS turn from science to politics - the danger is that politics is similarly privileged.     

Enacting environmental justice in Singapore: Performative justice and the Green Volunteer Network

Environmental justice research has of late expanded beyond its’ original focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads’ to debate injustices at a wide array of sites and scales. Despite this expansion, the applicability of an environmental justice framework to seemingly apolitical and banal expressions of environmental concerns remains open to question. This paper argues that environmental justice struggles can be located in the mundane environmental politics of Singapore, by employing a performative rather than rights-based approach to both justice and politics. It draws on qualitative research into volunteers’ practices in one Singaporean environmental organisation, and asserts that through their focus on experiential learning and re-inscribing ‘developmental’ spaces as spaces of care and justice, volunteers seek to redress the social, political and environmental injustices replete within the spatial politics of Singapore.     

Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world.     

The rise and transformation of the Brazilian landless movement into a counter-hegemonic political actor: A Gramscian analysis

The Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) is widely acknowledged as one of the most organized, dynamic, and influential social movements in Latin America. The MST has increasingly inserted the struggle for land within larger political contestations for broad social change, leading conservatives and leftists alike to describe it as a “first class actor” in Brazilian politics. What explains the move from corporatist struggles for land to broader counter-hegemonic contestations; put differently, how did the MST come to acquire ‘global ambition’? Much of the literature on the MST analyzes its external actions but without explaining what drives these actions. This paper utilizes a Gramscian political ecology approach to comprehend the MST’s political actions and its rise and transformation into a counter-hegemonic political actor. Specifically, I evaluate the development of the MST’s organizational praxis from corporatist struggles for land in the late 1970s to ‘global ambition’ and changing nature-society relations by the early 2000’s. Such an approach brings to light the role of organization building, political education, alliance building, and subaltern agency in propelling the MST’s political mobilizations. In so doing, this paper contributes to the literature on the MST and collective action. This paper also engages with a ‘politics of scale’ since the conquest of geographic scale is critical to understanding the MST’s national growth and political actions. This paper concludes by arguing that the rise and transformation of the MST into a vibrant counter-hegemonic actor in Brazilian politics was a gradual process that matured as it territorialized into a national movement.     

The dilemma of decontamination: A Gramscian analysis of the Mexican transgenic maize dispute

An intense environmental dispute surrounds the maize-fields of Mexico. Mexican maize traditional varieties (or ‘landraces’) constitute a global genetic resource that may well be critical to future agricultural development and corn breeding. Many environmentalists, farmers, and consumers in Mexico are therefore concerned that their maize landraces may have been ‘contaminated’ by imported transgenic maize, grown in the USA. The criticisms of this transgenic technology are complex and call into question the nature of the boundary between political and ecological (i.e. scientific) disputes. Our paper surveys these criticisms, and this political-scientific boundary, in a three-part analysis. First, we turn to Gramsci’s notes on science from his eleventh prison notebook to rethink the political ecology of transgenic maize, i.e., the way the ecological analysis of transgenic introgression is treated as politics. Second, we present the multiple criticisms of transgenic maize as scalar phenomena. Third, we review the recent scientific literature on transgene introgression to evaluate recent calls for the ‘decontamination’ of Mexican maize. Our reading illustrates two dilemmas facing the group that occupies the hegemonic subject-position in this dispute, ecological scientists. First, the popular desire to ‘decontaminate’ Mexican maize exceeds their capacities (due to complications involved with sampling). Second, although the political debate surrounding ‘contaminated’ Mexican maize exceeds science, the boundary between the dispute’s scientific and parascientific elements cannot be adjudicated scientifically. In other words, the boundary between science and politics is porous. Thus in two respects the dispute is ecological, yet beyond the capacity of this science to resolve. Yet, following Gramsci, these findings should not lead us to see science as mere ideology, or apolitical, or encourage a retreat into metaphysics. Rather it points to the need for a social transformation that sees science as “humanity forging its methods of research … in other words, culture, the conception of the world.” By exploring the dilemmas of decontamination, the dispute over transgene introgression in Mexican maize-fields provides an opportunity to elaborate upon Gramsci’s neglected insights into the politics of science.     

Slowing things down: Lessons from the GM controversy

This paper stages an encounter between one strand of the controversy around genetically modified food crops and some conceptual resources from the field of science and technology studies, with the aim of illuminating the relationship between science and politics. Contrary to some suggestions, it is argued that the spatial, temporal and material imagination encapsulated in the figure of Progress remains central to their contemporary articulation. Best described as an ‘anti-political’ strategy, Progress does not leave room for anything else but one story of the world. Through following the attempts of both scientists in the field and protestors on the streets to make public some of the trajectories which this story leaves out, what emerges is the possibility of an alternative to Progress that is not based simply on its rejection. Instead, such efforts offer resources for inventing another way of collectively going forward which chime with some more theoretical attempts to elaborate how things might be productively ‘slowed down’. An example of how government was forced to construct a way of dealing with things that is more adequate and appropriate to life in a full world is compared with Bruno Latour’s model of due process for nonhumans, before some conclusions are drawn about whether we should be depressed or hopeful about our ability to move on in the lights of such attempts.     

The contested spaces of Cuban development: Post-socialism, post-colonialism and the geography of transition

The experience of the (post)socialist South has been marginal to the study of transition, despite the many similarities between processes of transition and development. This paper tries to better understand this overlap by exploring some empirical and conceptual connections between processes of development and processes of transition in Cuba. In doing so it makes two sets of arguments. The first set of arguments concerns the nature of ‘transition’ itself. I use the ‘contested spaces’ of the Cuban (socialist) biotech sector, and specifically its attempts to attract foreign (capitalist) investment as a case study. As a high profile industry, biotechnology functioned in Cuba as a political space within which questions of transition and development could be reconfigured by blurring the boundaries between them. In turn, this has enabled the Cuban State to legitimise responses to transition that would otherwise have appeared contradictory. The second set of arguments try to explain how this was possible. I argue that the slippage between nationalist and socialist visions of development allowed biotechnology (as a specifically developmentalist project) to be variously understood as, for example, a post-colonial socialist, or anti-colonial nationalist project in ways that suited the needs of transition at any one time. Such recombinations in many ways account for the non-linear and reversible nature of transition in Cuba. I speculate as to whether Bruno Latour’s work on the way capitalist societies understand themselves to be ‘modern’, helps explain how, in (post)socialist countries, processees of transition can be shaped through different historical constructions of modernisation and development.     

Contested H2O: Science, policy and politics in water resources management in Chile

This paper critically explores the politics that mediate the use of environmental science assessments as the basis of resource management policy. Drawing on recent literature in the political ecology tradition that has emphasised the politicised nature of the production and use of scientific knowledge in environmental management, the paper analyses a hydrological assessment in a small river basin in Chile, undertaken in response to concerns over the possible overexploitation of groundwater resources. The case study illustrates the limitations of an approach based predominantly on hydrogeological modelling to ascertain the effects of increased groundwater abstraction. In particular, it identifies the subjective ways in which the assessment was interpreted and used by the state water resources agency to underpin water allocation decisions in accordance with its own interests, and the role that a desocialised assessment played in reproducing unequal patterns of resource use and configuring uneven waterscapes. Nevertheless, as Chile’s ‘neoliberal’ political-economic framework privileges the role of science and technocracy, producing other forms of environmental knowledge to complement environmental science is likely to be contentious. In conclusion, the paper considers the potential of mobilising the concept of the hydrosocial cycle to further critically engage with environmental science.     

Conspicuous redemption? Reflections on the promises and perils of the ‘Celebritization’ of climate change

With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science-policy-celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees.     

At the base of Hubbert’s Peak: Grounding the debate on petroleum scarcity

M. King Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of a ‘peak’ in US oil production has spurred a durable and divisive debate on the exhaustion of the petroleum resource. Pitting physical against economic explanations of resource scarcity, the peak oil debate has seemingly sunk into the well-worn grooves of a long history of scarcity debates. Yet, as this paper argues, this ‘stale dichotomy’ can partly be attributed to a severance from the contexts and ideas that informed Hubbert’s mathematical calculations. Specifically, this paper examines the broader influences on the peak oil model: Hubbert’s career in the newly formed field of geophysics; his personal concern with the relationship between energy and population growth; and his ties to Technocracy, Inc., a social movement originating in the US that aimed to replace political and business control with a group of specialist engineers and technicians. The paper further emphasizes the importance of institutional and political interests to the arguments launched against Hubbert, and in motivating change in this opposition over time. Last, it makes the case that the contemporary de-contextualization of Hubbert’s model has contributed towards a narrow focus of discussions within the oil industry and in certain governments on predicting the timing of a global peak, without addressing the wider questions implied by Hubbert’s model.     

Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.     

Something in the Air: Civic science and contentious environmental politics in post-apartheid South Africa

The emergence of an environmental movement in post-apartheid South Africa has involved the reframing of the environment as a ‘brown’ issue, articulating the discourse of social and environmental justice and a rights-based notion of democracy. Environmental movements have pursued a dual strategy of deliberation and activist opposition. Environmental movements have deployed science to pursue the strategic task of democratic opposition and have established networks of environmental knowledge and expertise. Ecological modernization is the dominant approach to environmental governance and adopts a science-based policy approach. In this context the regulation and management of the environment is premised on the need for science, which provides the authoritative basis for a regulatory response. In local environmental movements, there exists a fundamental tension between a cumulative history of lay knowledge about pollution and the lack of official acknowledgement of qualitative narratives. This is accompanied by a lack and suspicion of reliable official data. Environmental movements have thus employed ‘civic science’ strategically to place the issue of air pollution on the political agenda. This paper uses the case of environmental politics in Durban to reflect on the ways in which civic science and lay knowledge, together constituting community hybrid knowledge, are produced and disseminated in order to pressure the state and capital. The three ways in which knowledge is deployed are: to frame environmental problems, in strategies of oppositional advocacy, and in deliberative policy forums. Empirical analysis shows that civic science is produced through knowledge networks, and both lay knowledge and civic science are opportunistically used by environmental movements to engage both inside and outside formal policy making arenas. This deployment of hybrid knowledge by environmental movements represents a broader challenge to the power of science and technology based on increasing evidence of the hazards and risks facing ordinary people in their daily lives.     

Intervening in the environment of the everyday

This paper seeks to explore the radical democratic potential in urban artistic interventions. It does so through bringing Gramsci’s concept of nature together with his ‘cultural writings’ and broader debates around avant-garde artistic practice. Empirically, I focus on the work of City Mine(d), a Brussels-based interventionist collective, and Siraj Izhar, a London-based artist-activist. Within Gramsci’s writings, I argue, socio-natural relationships emerge through sensuous activity or work. Making a somewhat more ambitious claim, I suggest that Gramsci’s concept of nature rests on what geographers have come to understand as the production of nature. Whilst attention has only recently turned to this implicit political ecology, much greater attention has been focussed on Gramsci’s cultural insights. For Gramsci, cultural struggles are an integral part of the effort to shape a new reality. Whilst he emphasises the ‘bottom up’ nature of such struggles, the intervention of enlightened outsiders is often a necessary and frustrating complement. However, by turning attention to the manner in which hegemony relates to the production of nature, and through bringing this into dialogue with radical artistic practice, such implicit elitism might be challenged. City Mine(d) and Izhar, I argue, develop a non-vanguardist politics that sees the contestation of hegemony as a struggle integral to the day-to-day nature of cities.     

Models,validation, and applied geochemistry: Issues in science,communication, and philosophy

Models have become so fashionable that many scientists and engineers cannot imagine working without them. The predominant use of computer codes to execute model calculations has blurred the distinction between code and model. The recent controversy regarding model validation has brought into question what we mean by a ‘model’ and by ‘validation.’ It has become apparent that the usual meaning of validation may be common in engineering practice and seems useful in legal practice but it is contrary to scientific practice and brings into question our understanding of science and how it can best be applied to such problems as hazardous waste characterization, remediation, and aqueous geochemistry in general. This review summarizes arguments against using the phrase model validation and examines efforts to validate models for high-level radioactive waste management and for permitting and monitoring open-pit mines. Part of the controversy comes from a misunderstanding of ‘prediction’ and the need to distinguish logical from temporal prediction. Another problem stems from the difference in the engineering approach contrasted with the scientific approach. The reductionist influence on the way we approach environmental investigations also limits our ability to model the interconnected nature of reality. Guidelines are proposed to improve our perceptions and proper utilization of models. Use of the word ‘validation’ is strongly discouraged when discussing model reliability.     

Substitution and scalar politics: negotiating environmental compensation in Cardiff Bay

One of the most contested dimensions of sustainable development is the issue of substitutability--the extent to which environmental qualities can be substituted, either for human-made assets, or for some equivalent environmental function. The main argument of this paper is that dominant economic discourses of sustainability neglect long-standing geographical concerns with scale, embeddedness and abstraction that are inevitably embroiled in the practical negotiation of substitutability. In particular, it seeks to demonstrate how relations of ecological and political scale frame the ‘decision space’ within which debates about substitution take place. These arguments are developed by analysing conflicts over the development of an amenity barrage across the Taff-Ely estuary in Cardiff, South Wales, and the provision of new wetlands to compensate for the resulting loss of wildlife habitat. This case shows that the scale at which environmental ‘assets’ are constructed--whether local, national or global--can reveal or obscure distributive effects incurred in maintaining environmental capital through compensatory measures. It also demonstrates how the re-scaling of governance arrangements (in this case to the European Commission) can empower the delivery of environmental management measures but simultaneously re-structures the objects of sustainability, rendering habitats and wildlife populations as disembedded symbols.     

The mirror of consumption: Celebritization, developmental consumption and the shifting cultural politics of fair trade

This paper explores the shifting cultural politics of development as expressed in the changing narratives and discursive transparencies of fair trade marketing tactics in the UK. Pursued through what I call ‘developmental consumption’ and the increasing celebritization of development, it is now through the global media mega-star that the subaltern speaks. After a more general discussion of the implications of the celebritization of development, specific analysis focuses on two parallel processes complicit in the ‘mainstreaming’ of fair trade markets and the desire to develop fair trade as a product of ‘quality’. The first involves improving the taste of fair trade commodities through alterations in their material supply chains while the second involves novel marketing narratives designed to invoke these conventions of quality through highly meaningful discursive and visual means. The later process is conceptualized through the theoretical device of the shifting ‘embodiments’ of fair trade which have moved from small farmers’ livelihoods, to landscapes of ‘quality’, to increasing congeries of celebrities such as Chris Martin from the UK band Coldplay. These shifts encapsulate what is referred to here as fair trade’s Faustian Bargain and its ambiguous results: the creation of increasing economic returns and, thus, more development through the movement of fair trade goods into mainstream retail markets at the same time there is a de-centering of the historical discursive transparency at the core of fair trade’s moral economy. Here, then, the celebritization of fair trade has the potential to create ‘the mirror of consumption’, whereby, our gaze is reflected back upon ourselves in the form of ‘the rich and famous’ Northern celebrity muddling the ethics of care developed by connecting consumers to fair trade farmers and their livelihoods. The paper concludes with a consideration of development and fair trade politics in the context of their growing aestheticization and celebritization.     

Tales of power in biotechnology regulation: the EU ban on BST

Biotechnology regulation has been dogged by allegations of bias, usually phrased in terms of ‘conflicts of interest’. Social constructionist analyses of regulatory science have shown up serious epistemological difficulties with such ‘interest’ explanations of regulatory power, but in the process they have also destabilised the platforms such as ‘objectivity’, upon which critiques of regulatory bias are usually grounded. This paper argues that their critical impotence follows from not being constructivist enough. Building on Hajer’s notions of ‘story-lines’ and ‘discourse coalitions’, it argues that recovering the non-human, material components that construct regulation offers sufficiently firm ground for evaluating regulatory power even in the absence of the firm benchmarks assumed by interest accounts. The paper develops this approach by focusing on a single story-line, characterised as ‘scientism’, as it is deployed in the build up to a European Union (EU) ban on bovine somatotrophin, the first food-related product of the ‘new biotechnology’. The essay ends by discussing how far this retrospective analysis can help us to understand and intervene in the current and future EU regulation of biotechnology.     

Globalisation in practice: On the politics of boiling pigswill

This paper is about ‘material politics’. It argues that this may be understood as a material ordering of the world in a way that contrasts this with other and equally possible alternative modes of ordering. It also suggests that while material politics may well involve words, it is not discursive in kind. This argument is made for the mundane and material practice of boiling pigswill that the 2001 UK foot and mouth outbreak showed to have a layered importance. Boiling pigswill was a political technique in at least three different ways. First it made difference, dividing the rich from the poor by separating disease free countries from those in which foot and mouth is endemic. Second, it joined times and places by linking past agricultural practices with those of the contemporary world, and linking Britain with the world. And third, it also showed a way of limiting food scarcity on a world wide scale because it allowed food to be recycled, albeit on a small scale, in a region of plenty. ‘Politics’ is often linked to debate, discussion, or explicit contestation. Alternatively, it is sometimes seen as being embedded in and carried by artefacts. For the case of boiling pigswill neither approach is satisfactory. The first privileges the life of the mind while in the second politics is linked too strongly to a single order. The version of politics presented here foregrounds both materiality and difference. And it involves articulation: the question is not whether something is political all by itself but whether it can be called political as part of the process of analysing it.     

Market triumphalism and the CBNRM ‘crises’ at the South African section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Transfrontier conservation has taken Southern Africa by storm, where the modus operandi remains simple and intuitive: by dissolving boundaries, local benefits grow as conservation and development spread regionally. However, in the case of South Africa’s section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, political and economic change redirects benefits to support ‘modern’ economies at the expense of rural livelihoods through community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Neo-liberal agendas promoted by government and the transfrontier park derail efforts at decentralizing CBNRM initiatives beyond markets and state control. This paper argues that ‘hybrid neoliberal’ CBNRM has arisen in private and public sector delivery of devolved conservation and poverty relief projects as ‘tertiary production’ for regional development. As a result, ‘CBNRM’ projects related to and independent of transfrontier conservation support private sector interests rather than the resource base of rural livelihoods. Concluding sections assert that CBNRM can counter this neoliberal trend by supporting the land-based economy of local users living near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.