Making democracy matter: Responsibility and effective environmental governance in regional Australia

This paper will critically examine the changing social relations of responsibility associated with Australia's current regional ‘experiment’ in environmental governance. This experiment centrally involves the transfer of responsibility for natural resource management (NRM) from Federal and State governments to community-based regional bodies. Although governments are promoting democratic NRM planning at the regional level as a more effective means of addressing Australia's environmental problems, we argue that a tension is emerging in association with the simultaneous pursuit of these goals: ‘effectiveness’ has been defined in terms of the accountability of regional communities to central governments for the achievement of short-term results, an approach which is undermining the democratic promise that regional bodies would be responsive to wider community concerns. The notion of ‘responsibility’ provides a means of investigating this tension, as accountability and responsiveness are both elements of the overarching concept of responsibility. The examination of NRM institutions through this theoretical lens indicates that the shared substantive interests required to motivate a sense of shared responsibility amongst regional actors have been sidelined by the procedural demands of accountability. We argue that, if NRM planning is to be genuinely accountable and responsive to substantive public ends, the properly social and dialogical nature of responsibility relationships must be recovered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the social and political relations of responsibility that appear to provide the best opportunities for effective environmental governance, and thus for the achievement of more sustainable NRM outcomes, at the regional level.     

“I’m not a greenie but…”: Environmentality,eco-populism and governance in New Zealand Experiences from the Southland whitebait fishery

The experiences of nascent local institutions in regional resource management issues in New Zealand can help to inform the important analytical projects of considering the impacts of neoliberalism on environmental management as well as the meanings of governance as the new order in rural and natural resource management. This study considers how devolved governance shapes individual subject positions relative to the environment in a neoliberal context, deploying Agrawal's optics of “environmentality” to analyze a case study of the political ecology of the whitebait fishery in Southland, New Zealand. This research demonstrates that the devolution of resource governance in New Zealand has cultivated empowered, ‘accidental environmentalists’ and related environmental subjectivities. The extent and quality of individual involvement in governance influences whitebaiters’ perceptions of environmental change and resource management priorities. At the same time, a strong ‘eco-populist’ conceptualization of resource management infuses the fishers’ environmental subjectivities and potentially constrains the depth and degree of fishers’ opposition to environmental degradation.     

Between argument and coercion: Social coordination in rural environmental governance

Increasingly, partnerships and other cooperative forms of governance are common-place in addressing problems of environmental management in rural landscapes. These forms of governance are multi-dimensional in the policy instruments employed; the make-up of actors; and, the types of rationalities that actors use to debate the problem and proposed solutions. This paper pursues the question of how different modes of social action, represented in argumentative claims of participants, influence social coordination in these governance arenas. An empirical study is presented of agri-environmental governance in Australia where actors debate planning and policy initiatives to reduce diffuse water quality impacts from farms on the adjacent Great Barrier Reef. Forester’s conceptualisation of practical social action which locates communicative action in the ‘real world’ of interest-based planning contexts, is used as an analytical frame to identify: (i) the type of claims made by governments, farmer groups and other actors in argumentation; (ii) the claims association with communicative, strategic and instrumental modes of action; and, (iii) their consequence for social coordination in formation and maintenance of inclusive, legitimate and viable forms of governing. The study finds that the interconnected character of claims made by actors, and the ready switching between modes of action observed, point to a situated and dynamic expression of rationality within these contested and prolonged debates on how to legitimately and effectively govern rural environments.     

Re-discovering the social: neo-liberalism and hybrid practices of governing in rural natural resource management

Since the 1980s, natural resource management (NRM) in rural Australia has been underpinned by rationalities and technologies of governing that constitute agricultural landscapes and resource managers in economically rational terms. While it is tempting to interpret these forms of regulation as part of a broad shift away from social forms of governing, this paper argues that ‘the social’ remains of crucial significance in understanding how both natural environments and the capacities of individuals to manage these environments are constructed. Drawing upon recent work in the Foucauldian-inspired literature on governmentality and, in particular, Stenson and Watt's (Urban Studies 36(1) (1999) 189–201) concept of hybrid governance, this paper examines how particular representations of ‘the social’ are assembled through strategies of NRM. Using the National Landcare Program (NLP) and Natural Heritage Trust (NHT) as examples, we consider how ‘social’ data is being incorporated into resource management strategies, and how this re-shapes both ‘the social’ and NRM as domains of governance. While the NLP and NHT incorporate concerns about social responsibility, they define these in terms of the capacity of individuals to respond to changing economic circumstances. This effectively defines land managers as socially and ecologically responsible only to the extent that they have the managerial capacities to pursue economically ‘rational’ practices. In concluding, we argue that hybrid practices of governing are indeed evident in NRM in Australia and that the concept of ‘hybrid governance’ requires further attention in understanding how rural spaces are made knowable and shaped as objects of knowledge.     

Being close: The quality of social relationships in a local organic cereal and bread network in Lower Austria

Experience of the drawbacks of a globalised and industrialised food system has generated interest in localised food systems. Local food networks are regarded as more sustainable food provision systems since they are assumed to have high levels of social embeddedness and relations of regard. This paper explores the social relations between food actors and how ‘local’ and ‘organic’ are expressed by detailing how actors describe qualities of their intra-network relationships, how they understand ‘local’ and how they are connected within the food system. A study from the province of Lower Austria in Austria, where organic cereals and bread are produced and marketed, serves to illuminate these issues. Actors agreed that geographical closeness contributed to the social closeness they experienced and that social relationships were a strong reason for being in the network. However, the meaning of ‘local’ was elastic depending on where inputs and consumers could be found. Furthermore, despite strong commitment to organic production methods and the local market, actors faced constraints that made them hybrids between organic and conventional, and between locally focused and globally dependent. Thus, the binary thinking along the local-global and organic-conventional divide does not hold. While it is important to not make a causal link between high quality of social relationships and local food networks, the case described here indicates the possibility of such a link.     

Introduction to stochastic actor-based models for network dynamics

Stochastic actor-based models are models for network dynamics that can represent a wide variety of influences on network change, and allow to estimate parameters expressing such influences, and test corresponding hypotheses. The nodes in the network represent social actors, and the collection of ties represents a social relation. The assumptions posit that the network evolves as a stochastic process ‘driven by the actors’, i.e., the model lends itself especially for representing theories about how actors change their outgoing ties. The probabilities of tie changes are in part endogenously determined, i.e., as a function of the current network structure itself, and in part exogenously, as a function of characteristics of the nodes (‘actor covariates’) and of characteristics of pairs of nodes (‘dyadic covariates’). In an extended form, stochastic actor-based models can be used to analyze longitudinal data on social networks jointly with changing attributes of the actors: dynamics of networks and behavior.     

The social practice of sustainable agriculture under audit discipline: Initial insights from the ARGOS project in New Zealand

One of the most interesting recent developments in global agri-food systems has been the rapid emergence and elaboration of market audit systems claiming environmental qualities or sustainability. In New Zealand, as a strongly export-oriented, high-value food producer, these environmental market audit systems have emerged as an important pathway for producers to potentially move towards more sustainable production. There have, however, been only sporadic and fractured attempts to study the emerging social practice of sustainable agriculture - particularly in terms of the emergence of new audit disciplines in farming. The ARGOS project in New Zealand was established in 2003 as a longitudinal matched panel study of over 100 farms and orchards using different market audit systems (e.g., organic, integrated or GLOBALG.A.P.). This article reports on the results of social research into the social practice of sustainable agriculture in farm households within the ARGOS projects between 2003 and 2009. Results drawn from multiple social research instruments deployed over six years provide an unparalleled level of empirical data on the social practice of sustainable agriculture under audit disciplines. Using 12 criteria identified in prior literature as contributing a significant social dynamic around sustainable agriculture practices in other contexts, the analysis demonstrated that 9 of these 12 dimensions did demonstrate differences in social practices emerging between (or co-constituting) organic, integrated, or conventional audit disciplines. These differences clustered into three main areas: 1) social and learning/knowledge networks and expertise, 2) key elements of farmer subjectivity - particularly in relation to subjective positioning towards the environment and nature, and 3) the role and importance of environmental dynamics within farm management practices and systems. The findings of the project provide a strong challenge to some older framings of the social practice of sustainable agriculture: particularly those that rely on paradigm-driven evaluation of social motivations, strong determinism of sustainable practice driven by coherent farmer identity, or deploying overly categorical interpretations of what it means to be ’organic’ or ’conventional’. The complex patterning of the ARGOS data can only be understood if the social practice of organic, integrated or (even more loosely) conventional production is understood as being co-produced by four dynamics: subjectivity/identity, audit disciplines, industry cultures/structure and time. This reframing of how we might research the social practice of sustainable agriculture opens up important new opportunities for understanding the emergence and impact of new audit disciplines in agriculture.     

An analysis of corporate environmental responsibility on the global corporate Web sites and their dialogic principles

This study investigated how corporations use their Web sites as a way of helping to build corporate environmental responsibility. A content analysis of 2008 Fortune Global corporate Web sites compared environmental concerns and the use of dialogic principles across three regions (i.e., Asia, Europe, and North America). Results show that about 71% of Web sites have a stand-alone environmental menu as a central location for environmental information, and that Europe is the highest, followed by North America and Asia. The environmental concerns of ‘resources/waste management’ and ‘climate changes’ are more commonly highlighted than are ‘ecosystem’ and ‘environmental governance.’ Furthermore, most Web sites do not fully employ dialogic features, regardless of region.     

Learning about fishery management: Evaluation of a contextualized responsive evaluation approach

This article discusses the extent to which a responsive evaluation (RE) approach contributed to learning by stakeholders in a case of high complexity. Fishery management in Grand-Popo, Benin is characterized by ambiguity, that is contrasting views among fishery stakeholders about what should be done, why, how, where, and when to resolve fishery problems like the depletion of fish-stock and absence of income alternatives. It was also characterized by great gaps (mismatches) between interventionists’ plans and actions, despite generations of interventions and evaluations of their effectiveness. The RE approach aimed at facilitating interactions between interventionists and fishing people to stimulate learning and hence reduce the ambiguity and mismatches. In this article, we take distance and evaluate the results of this action research approach. We found that in the interaction some learning indeed occurred. The fishing people learned among others that intervention resources are limited and that they should organize themselves to lobby for and monitor interventions to solve their problems. Interventionists learned that they could share knowledge about their roles and limited resources with fishing people so that the latter could lobby for more resources. Fishing people however, did not learn to adopt more sustainable fishing practices. Also, interventionists did not learn to influence politicians and financial partners themselves for sufficient resources. Both categories of stakeholders developed ideas for how to collaborate to improve fishery management. We conclude that although some single-loop, double-loop and social learning occurred, the learning was limited and reflect on the related challenges for RE in natural resource management.     

Structuring institutional analysis for urban ecosystems: A key to sustainable urban forest management

A decline in urban forest structure and function in the United States jeopardizes the current focus on developing sustainable cities. A number of social dilemmas—for example, free-rider problems—restrict the sustainable production of ecosystem services and the stock of urban trees from which they flow. However, institutions, or the rules, norms, and strategies that affect human decision-making, resolve many such social dilemmas, and thus, institutional analysis is imperative for understanding urban forest management outcomes. Unfortunately, we find that the definition of institutions varies greatly across and within disciplines, and conceptual frameworks in urban forest management and urban ecosystems research often embed institutions as minor variables. Given the significance of institutional analysis to understanding sustainable rural resource management, this paper attempts to bring clarity to defining, conceptually framing, and operationally analyzing institutions in urban settings with a specific focus on sustainable urban forest management. We conclude that urban ecologists and urban forest management researchers could benefit from applying a working definition of institutions that uniquely defines rules, norms, and strategies, by recognizing the nested nature of operational, collective choice, and constitutional institutions, and by applying the Institutional Analysis and Development framework for analysis of urban social-ecological systems (SESs). Such work promises to spur the desired policy-based research agenda of urban forestry and urban ecology and provide cross-disciplinary fertilization of institutional analysis between rural SESs and urban ecosystems.     

A corporate responsibility? The constitution of fly-in,fly-out mining companies as governance partners in remote,mine-affected localities

In some remote parts of Australia, mining companies have positioned themselves as central actors in governing nearby affected communities by espousing notions of ‘voluntary partnerships for sustainability’ between business, government and community. It is argued in this paper that the nature and extent of mining company interventions in nearby communities constitutes a new problematic for these corporate actors. Drawing on research conducted in two remote areas in Australia, this paper undertakes an analytics of government to ask how mining companies have become leading actors in determining the future of local, mine-affected communities. It is suggested that their interventions arise from two processes: industry priorities for securing a ‘social license to operate’ by making a positive contribution to affected communities; and the restructuring of the state which has created an institutional void in these remote localities. As a result, mining companies are ‘filling the gaps’ in local service delivery through a mode of governing that takes the form of patronage rather than partnership. This raises questions about the future viability of these communities once the mines eventually close, and new challenges of governing for corporate actors.     

Ecological embeddedness: An interrogation and refinement of the concept within the context of alternative food networks in the UK

Among their many ‘alternative’ characteristics, food networks that seek to reconfigure the relationship between producers and consumers are understood as having the potential to be beneficial for the rural environment and landscape. One of the ways in which this characteristic has been conceptualised is through the notion of ‘ecological embeddedness’. Although the roots of this concept lie in economic sociology, where the social embeddedness of economic relations has been the focus of interest, agro-food researchers have extended its meaning to suggest that alternative or ‘quality’ food production can also be seen as increasingly embedded in ‘natural’ or ecological processes. However, this paper argues that until now the notion of ecological embeddedness has lacked conceptual clarity. As such, the aim is to interrogate and refine the concept of embeddedness, specifically as it pertains to ecologies within the context of food production on-farm. Ecological embeddedness, it is argued, must encompass more than just recognition of the general influence of the natural environment on economic activity. Specifically, it must reflect a change in the relations between economic actors and the natural environment that produces a benefit to both. The paper also establishes how the concept of ecological embeddedness might be operationalised in research practice as a means of exploring the ecological dimensions of alternative food networks. An illustration of this empirical application is provided. The paper concludes by asserting the value of ecological embeddedness as a concept, in spite of the observed limitations of embeddedness in other contexts and the challenges that are associated with its ecological application.     

Translation sociology and social capital in rural development initiatives. A case study from the Italian Alps

This article analyses the results of a European ‘research and demonstration’ project promoting multifunctional and sustainable agriculture in Alpine regions through a participatory approach. It focuses in particular on initiatives undertaken by a local farmers group in the Italian Alpine area of Val di Sole, the purpose being to draw attention to the role of social dynamics in fostering sustainable rural development in a participatory context. In order to accomplish this objective, two key sociological approaches to the study of rural development, namely social capital and the sociology of translation, are considered. The former focuses on the relational capital available to a group of actors and which can be mobilised in a development initiative. The latter views change in social practices as resulting from a cycle of phases where the problem, its solution, and the identity of the actors are constantly transformed and negotiated. By contrasting the two theoretical approaches in relation to the outcomes of two specific actions implemented in the valley we suggest that the sociology of translation offers a more effective tool with which to capture the complexity of social dynamics involved in a rural development initiative.     

After the ‘Organic Industrial Complex’: An ontological expedition through commercial organic agriculture in New Zealand

This article uses the evolving understandings of commercial organic agriculture within two research programmes in New Zealand to address three problematic claims and associated framings that have underpinned analysis of the political economy of commercial organic agriculture. These three framings are: 1) that recent commercial developments in organic agriculture have become organised around a grand binary of large-scale, corporate, industrialised organic agriculture that is inhabited by pragmatic newcomers to the industry, against a small-scale, local, authentic remnant of the original organic social movement. This grand binary is most popularly recognisable in the claim by author Michael Pollan of the existence of an ‘Organic Industrial Complex’ that is slowly subsuming authentic organic agriculture. This relates to claim 2) that commercialisation creates inevitable pressures by which organic agriculture becomes ‘conventionalised’. Finally, claim 3) positions organic agriculture alone as the only option for enabling improved environmental outcomes in agriculture. The Greening Food and ARGOS research programmes in New Zealand have studied the emergence of commercial forms of organic and other ‘sustainable’ agriculture in the period since 1995. A series of key engagements are highlighted in the unfolding history of these two programmes which demonstrate moments of transition in understandings of commercial organic, particularly in relation to situations of engagements between the research team and wider actors in the organic sector. These key engagements establish a clear sense in which the three major framings around the political economy of organic commercialisation could not explain the unfolding dynamics of the New Zealand organic sector. Rather, engagement with diverse actors enabled a whole new set of theoretical questions that opened up new areas of politics, contestation and elaboration of commercial forms of organic agriculture – particularly around shifts in power to the retail end of the agri-food chain, around new forms of agri-food governance, and around the politics of new audit systems. Within these shifts, the ontology of some of the researchers within these projects underwent parallel transformation. These transformative influences operated in two simultaneous directions. While the engaged research strategy of the two programmes clearly discomforted the researchers’ underlying assumptions for framing the major trajectories of commercial organic development, the presence of the two research programmes also had an important enactive power in the sector by both rendering ‘thinkable’ particular trajectories and economic experiments and also by reinforcing a ‘metric-centric’ tendency in the evolution of global environmental audit systems. Seen in this light, these engagements open up new questions about the research programmes themselves in terms of the emerging politics of what Philip Lowe describes as a more ‘enactive’ rural sociology and help direct attention to an emerging ‘ontological turn’ in the practice and politics of research.     

The political economy of alternative trade: Social and environmental certification in the South African wine industry

Despite recent critical analyses of the nature and impacts of social and environmental certification, the increasingly complex landscape of voluntary, industry and third-party codes and certification processes that have emerged in specific sectors is poorly understood. In particular, little is known about the potential threats posed by an increasingly complex and contested ‘ethical’ landscape in undermining radical initiatives designed to bring about improvements to material and social well-being. In response, this paper explores the current dynamics of social and environmental certification in the South African wine industry. Drawing on fieldwork in the UK and Western Cape, the paper analyses the overlapping and sometimes conflictual processes of social and environmental certification, and the role of key drivers in establishing them within the wine industry. It explores whether attempts to capture a portion of the expanding market for ‘ethical’ wines and the expansion of corporate interests in ‘responsibility’ and ‘ethics’ work to depoliticize the meaning and nature of transformation. The implications of the findings are that, in the absence of legislative requirements to transform the wine industry, social codes and civic conventions are likely to remain significant, but that greater understanding is required of the different meanings and outcomes of transformation and empowerment being deployed within the industry. The paper concludes that a significant problem facing transformation and alternative trade in the wine industry, and more broadly, lies in the growing gap between the abstract ethical discourse of corporate actors, on the one hand, and the moral experience of workers on the other.     

Extracting the commons

This article investigates how resources that are perceived as common are turned into property through different interventions of extractivism, and how this provokes counter-activism from groups and actors who see their rights and living conditions threatened by the practices of extraction. The article looks at how extraction is enacted through three distinct practices: prospecting, enclosure and unbundling, studied through three different cases. The cases involve resources that are material and immaterial, renewable as well as non-renewable, ‘natural’ as well as man-made. Prospecting is exemplified by patenting of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, enclosure is exemplified by debates over copyright expansionism and information commons, and unbundling through conflicts over mining and gas extraction. The article draws on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation with protesters at contested mining sites in Australia and with digital rights activists from across the world who protest against how the expansion of copyright limits public access to culture and information. The article departs from an understanding of ‘commons’ not as an open access resource, but as a resource shared by a group of people, often subjected to particular social norms that regulate how it can be used. Enclosure and extraction are both social processes, dependent on recognising some and downplaying or misrecognising other social relations when it comes to resources and processes of property creation. These processes are always, regardless of the particular resources at stake, cultural in the sense that the uses of the commons are regulated through cultural norms and contracts, but also that they carry profound cultural and social meanings for those who use them. Finally, the commonalities and heterogeneities of these protest movements are analysed as ‘working in common’, where the resistance to extraction in itself represents a process of commoning.     

Developing integrated rural tourism: Actor practices in the English/Welsh border

This paper examines community attitudes and distinctive practices that shape local responses to integrated rural tourism (IRT) development in the lagging rural region of the English/Welsh border area. The focus is on how actors acquire attributes as a result of their relations with others and how these assumed identities are performed in, by and through these relations. The location of this lagging rural region is particularly interesting as it is divided by a national boundary which not only impacts on administrative, planning and tourism marketing structures, but also contributes to the construction of fluid place identities (Murdoch and Pratt, 1997 describe ‘fluid space’ as having ‘no fixed points of reference, no privileged points of view, simply a swirling, viscous, partially stable, partially enclosed movement of social entities’ (p. 64) that may be described as Welsh, English, or a mixture of both. In order to reflect the variety of opinions and concerns in the region, responses were drawn from different actor-groups: local businesses, resource controllers, gatekeepers, institutions, community members and visitors. Results indicate that, while most were in favour of a greater integration of tourism with actors' aspirations, local resources and activities, there was an element of longing for a deux ex machina to put in place real change in the region.     

Structural funds and sustainable development the SQM approach

The question of how to achieve greater levels of sustainable development is intrinsically linked with the discussion concerning new forms of governance. Structural funds have become most influential in promoting sustainable development and appropriate forms of governance across the EU. They have been very important in introducing new innovative forms of co‐ordination in many countries and have encouraged the mobilization of new political actors. Structural Funds can be considered as a most interesting laboratory for the development of new governance patterns, which are urgently needed for coping with accelerated change and increasing complexity. Multi‐level governance in the spirit of subsidiarity will not be possible without flexible objective‐oriented management approaches instead of the rigid attribution of competences. This requires new conceptual approaches, procedures, and instruments. ‘SQM—Sustainable Quality Management®’ is a coherent system for the conception, support, monitoring and evaluation of sustainable development processes. A series of pilot projects in the last five years have shown its potential and utility. The SQM system includes concepts, methods and operational tools that have proved to be applicable and comprehensible in different European cultures. Internet‐based SQM software tools support every step in the policy cycle. Sustainable development is conceived as an overarching principle that governs the management of processes and covers all policy principles postulated by the EU. In the use of a common framework over the whole policy cycle and the coherent implementation of basic principles there is the promise of achieving better orientation towards sustainable development and considerable efficiency gains.     

The interaction between landmine clearance and land rights in Angola: A volatile outcome of non-integrated peacebuilding

The current approach to peacebuilding by the international community is to focus on the priorities thought to be important to recovery, but this occurs in a largely non-integrated way. With these different endeavors largely isolated from each other in planning, analysis, implementation, and measures for success, little is known about how they interact and whether or not the aggregate effect contributes to, or detracts from durable peace. This is especially important for priorities which in some way interact with each other on the ground among a recipient population. Two of these priorities for recovery, landmine clearance and land rights, while taking place on the same lands at the same time, and for the same people, are regarded separately as crucial to postwar recovery, and their interaction has not yet been examined. This article looks at these two priorities for Angola, and finds in their interaction a number of ways in which they detract from durable peace. This is a result of, 1) the role of areas adjacent to mine contaminated locations, 2) land grabbing, 3) the actions and role of the State, 4) the problematic interaction between different sectors involved in recovery, 5) the ongoing return of refugees and internal dislocatees and their (re)settlement, and 6) the lack of awareness of land tenure issues on the part of ‘mine action’ organizations. Subsequent to an examination of these forms of interaction this article looks at possible ways forward, focusing on, 1) the derivation of a form of ‘forced transparency’ as a deterrent to land grabbing, 2) enhancing the utility of ‘land release’ within the mine action community, 3) linkage of the different sectors concerned with mine action and land rights, and 4) the role that donors of mine action can play.