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1 Introduction
Who knew and when did they know it?
Gabriela Kütting and Ronnie D. Lipschutz
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free
(Jesus, in John 8:32, KJV)
Scientia potentia est
(Knowledge is power, Francis Bacon, 1597)
Power/knowledge
(Michel Foucault, 1980)
Introduction
Before science was rational, it was metaphysical. The first modern scientists were alchemists, seeking Truths that would transform them and return humanity to a State of Grace. Those scientists—among them, Isaac Newton—sought the kind of “Truth” invoked by Jesus, not “truths” as they have since come to be understood and propagated by scientists and science. Only later, after the methods of alchemy were adapted to what we now call, in shorthand, the “scientific method,” were the logics of rational cause and effect reified as the key to Universal Truth. As Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century, today we regard science and knowledge in instrumental terms, enabling a capacity not only to predict outcomes but also to cause them. Even after the post-modern turn, science possesses authority because it enables such capacities and calls then “power.” And because science still seems Universal and True everywhere in the Cosmos, it appears to possess those powers once attributed to the alchemists’ philosopher’s stone: the ability to transform both the World and the Self.
Yet, as we shall suggest in this book, and following Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and others, knowledge cannot be regarded as either so simple or straightforward, even when it appears in the guise of scientific research. What we know, how we know it, and where we know it best are not merely the products of laboratories, fieldwork and computers. As Latour has shown, knowledge is social and, consequently, it cannot be abstracted from the context in which it is produced, accumulated, and deployed. Nor can it be detached from the relations of power that operate in those social contexts. Today, when the state of the global environment—especially with respect to climate change—is a focus of growing concern, debate and politics, the truths offered by science and scientists are being challenged in ways that seem irrational, if not downright nihilistic. We know what must be done! Why, then, don’t we do it?
Let us, for a moment, consider climate change and the science that describes and accounts for it. The cumulation of data seems to point definitively in the direction of rising average global temperatures, with larger and smaller increases according to latitude, altitude, ocean currents, and other factors. Even the most sophisticated computer models and data sets cannot, yet, predict the specific effects of climate change on particular places and spaces, on valleys, meadows, communities, cities. At the same time, observations of rising temperatures, decreased rainfall, more intense storms, etc., in these particular places and spaces might, increasingly, appear to point to climate change as the culprit. Given the scientific method and its statistical requirements, however, most of the data are too anecdotal and too local to clearly determine cause and effect. The result is a crisis of inaction—too much information, not enough knowledge—exacerbated by the fear of risk: that we will act too soon, act in the wrong way, act at too much cost, act with too few benefits.
This is not a problem unique to research on climate change, environmental damage, or even social behavior. Our scientific methodology is flawed by what might be called “the uncertainty principle” (as opposed to the precautionary principle, and not to be confused with Heisenberg’s). The uncertainty principle (UP) demands that valid inference depends on adequate statistics and minimal standard deviation from a norm. Thus, even if we “know what to do,” as we do in the case of global climate change, we are inhibited from acting out of fear of unanticipated consequences (physical, social, economic) or appearing foolish. At the same time, we are warned that to act without a reliable sense of benefits is to act irrationally and to court high costs that we might never recover. This is the perhaps ironic lesson we take from Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action (1965). Hamstrung by the UP, the group cannot act together even as the individual cannot act alone.
This is the context in which knowledge in space and knowledge in place act at cross purposes. Knowledge in space is presumed to be universal, to encode that which applies equally in all places and at all times. Knowledge in place is assumed to be particularistic and contingent, and to have no relevance outside of the space in which it is acquired and applied. More to the point, as Timothy Luke argues in this volume,
Place-based parameters for situating knowledge, spatializing community, and sizing contradiction concretely all too often are dismissed in favor of planetary-scale solutions conceptualized in abstract, place-effacing terms. Local knowledges, vernacular technics, and civic sciences as environmental mediations, in turn, also are dismissed before the privileging of international knowledge formations, transnational technical networks, and national scientific societies.
It is not that “local knowledges” are invalid: bio-prospectors seek out place-based practices for clues about potential medicinal organisms, sometimes with extraordinary returns. The domination of space over place is ineluctably tied up with power as articulated in particular discourses of global management and governmentality. To quote Humpty Dumpty’s response to Alice, “The question is … which is to be master—that’s all.”1
Yet, Foucault reminds us that power is not a thing that can be accumulated or wielded; it produces us as subjects; it flows through the capillaries of social life, so to speak; it operates through discourses that serve to order social life that, in so doing, reproduce that life and discipline its tendencies toward unruliness and uncertainty. It is this last that is the fear of those who are master: risk is the lifeblood of capitalism, but too much disorder poses too much risk, more than even venture capitalists are willing to countenance. Too many demands for participation and inclusion, too many alternative “ways of doing things,” too many challenges to the conventional wisdom—these all pose unacceptable risks to those who want to maximize returns but minimize losses (unless, of course, it is tax deductible).
To put the point another way, the uncertainties associated with science are paralleled and made worse by the uncertainties associated with social life. Science deals with physical “facts” whose invariance over time and space is central to prediction (and investment). Social life, by contrast, is the realm of habit and unanticipated consequences, of action and agency, of constraints that never constrain quite predictably enough. If place is where we act, space is invoked to render us politically docile. By the same token, if place is where we have power, that is where we must act to assert social power that flows beyond place and across space to other places.
Place, space and all that
This book is about knowledge and nature, place and space. In taking on these relationships, we make no claims to be the first to do so. Both editors of this volume have, in other works, interrogated those matters and others linked to them. What is different about this book is its inclusion of power as central to those relationships. The literature on environmental governance has mostly developed without reference to power, primarily as a result of its neoliberal-institutionalist focus. Where power is invoked, it is primarily through the lens of International Relations theory, for which it remains the main currency. As a general rule, the discourses on global governance (GG) and global environmental politics (GEP) fail to take account of inequalities in social power relations in environmental politics, whatever the level of analysis. Nor, with rare exceptions, do they treat the interplay between global and local as it is related to social power (for example, Breitmeier et al. 2006; Mitchell et al. 2006).2
There are several reasons for these lacunae. In essence, mainstream International Relations literature is based on the neoliberal-institutionalist assumption that multilateral institutions and their frameworks are the best way to address transboundary problems and it is, therefore, concerned with the “fine tuning” of global governance mechanisms and institutions. Thus, the study of both GG and GEP has been dominated by a somewhat revised and improved concept of what were once called “regime theoretical” approaches. Both GG and GEP are concerned primarily with relations between political actors and the institutional structures within which they operate. Scholars working in these two discourses regard institutions (aka “regimes”) as the important social and political variable, both in terms of causing change and prescribing solutions (Young 2002: 3).3 They are concerned with instrumentally solving environmental problems as political, institutional or policy issues. To put this point another way, GG and GEP are about what political science is about more generally: setting up institutional frameworks to solve problems facing sentient actors with standing (in both the legal and social sense). By contrast, we argue, environmental problems are different and, indeed, unique in social science analysis: Nature (our shorthand for “the environment”) must be represented by interested parties rather than by itself (see Stone 1988; Latour 2004). Not only does this raise issues of “interest,” it also makes nature vulnerable to compromises and frameworks that may be robust politically but ineffective ecologically.
The mainstream GG and GEP approaches are, however, being exposed to a growing number of challenges, some of which, such as the increasingly transnational nature of governance, have been taken up and incorporated into the GEP literature. But most of these challenges have led, instead, to alternative foci, such as the importance of consumption, structural issues surrounding global civil society outside of global governance, structural relations between nature and society, and the global role of environmental justice, to name some of the most important. Nevertheless, this work does not really communicate with the mainstream. At the same time, another group of scholars have been moving away from—or in some instances, were never close to—challenging the mainstream, focusing instead on alternative ways of protecting and restoring the environment at the global level. This approach may be focused on structural conditions, actors and agents, the relevance of the micro level to the macro, connections within the global political economy, or even normative (for example, global civil society studies, consumption issues, environmental justice). Again, there is a gap between the institutional and alternative ways of studying global environmental politics, and there seem not to be any significant attempts to analyze the interaction between the institutional and normative perspectives; that is, to create overlaps or dialogue.
Thus the research foci as well as the normative elements of GG and GEP are fundamentally different from the recent literature concerned with differential power relations because their research concerns are different. The first strives for politically successful solutions in a supposedly “power-neutral” paradigm while the other highlights inequalities that cannot be captured or addressed by institutionalists’ analytical framework
Known unknowns and unknown unknowns—who knew?
This book argues that Global Environmental Governance (GEG) and its employment of environmental knowledge fundamentally constitute a top-down approach to problem-solving, employed by powerful actors in order to orchestrate and manipulate local communities within a continuing hegemonic system. We explore the relationship between governance, power and knowledge, using power as the main analytical tool from a variety of approaches, perspectives and case studies—some starting from the local level and shifting upward to the global, and some using a global perspective that narrows down to the local. Some contributors explore specific case studies while others employ a more conceptual framework—but all of them bring a new dimension to the relationship between power and knowledge in environmental governance. Power here is explored in all its guises—from relational to structural power.
But, as indicated above, this book is not only about power; rather it is concerned with the relationship between power and competing forms of knowledge: scientific and what, for lack of a better term, we call “indigenous” (aka local, experiential, social). Our concern with these relationships arises for several reasons. First, it seems evident that, without attention to the conditions and circumstances of everyday life and habitus, “top-down” approaches to environmental governance are unlikely to work as envisioned in the labs, think tanks, and conferences of decisionmakers and negotiators. Second, it is through the exercise of social power at the local level that strategies and practices best intersect with individual and group action and habitus in ways that might effect behavioral changes.
Consequently, and to a growing degree, knowledge practices and networks in environmental governance, especially as related to the way science and indigenous knowledge are practiced and socially organized, are being scrutinized as one of the cornerstones of global participatory politics, and recognized as vital to understanding the various levels at which global environmental politics intersects. Moreover, the politics of knowledge networks, power and environmental governance are fundamentally normative and their study falls into the domain of critical approaches, pushing boundaries from normative, conceptual and methodological perspectives. This puts the emphasis on structural issues underlying institutional frameworks.
Much of the GEG literature regards such local “epistemic communities” as benign, democratic, and participatory phenomena—although we ought to be careful in making such blanket assertions. Within this view, these “epicoms” have transcended traditional forms of state/interstate regulation and signal, perhaps, the beginning of a transnational era in which the power of both state and hegemonic economic actors are being challenged and undermined. Indeed, these knowledge networks are seen as elements in an emancipatory global civil society and often glorified as alternative forms of governance able to challenge both the power structures and the sclerosis of traditional state-centric forms of international policy-making and environmental diplomacy (Wapner 1996; Paterson 2000). Again, this is a proposition to be interrogated, rather than asserted.
Notwithstanding our caveats, there are two reasons why this new perspective is both necessary and desirable, stemming from problems associated with the mainstream focus on institutions. First, the mainstream focus captures a large part of global political economy and global political environment but misses the integrative, holistic level—in other words, the political ecology of the current environmental predicament. By widening this focus, a dramatically different picture of this predicament emerges and draws attention to different conceptualizations of the problem that are neglected in the institutional view.
Second, since the late 1980s, social movements and corporations have acquired rising status and recognition as important actors in both analysis of and practice in the international system, leading to a transformative shift in our views and understandings of international relations/politics. The growing shift to a global world view is also being matched by a desire to better understand global–local linkages. It is at this intersection, in particular, that this book makes its contributions.
Things to come
Theory and concepts
The first part of this book is concerned with a conceptual working through of the concepts of space, place, power and knowledge. The chapter by Tim Luke returns to Henri Lefebvre’s The Production Of Space (1974/1991) to examine (a) how social practices underpin the generation of global spaces and local places, and (b) who is privileged in these social processes of perception and situation of knowledge. Environmental governance in its current discourse is about environmental manag...
