Judy Clark

Knowledges in action: an actor network analysis of a wetland agri-environment scheme

Abstract Agri-environment schemes have been developed by the member states of the European Union over the last 10 years. Under Regulation 2078/92, the UK has supported English Nature in the implementation of a nature conservation scheme for wet grazing land in southern England. This paper explores the different understandings of nature held by farmers and conservationists who are participating in the Wildlife Enhancement Scheme, by drawing on qualitative research completed between 1993 and 1995. Through the application of actor network theory, the analysis compares the role and identity ascribed to farmers by conservationists with the identity that farmers’ construct of themselves. The former construct farmers as technicians, ignorant of the workings of nature, whereas the farmers see themselves as ‘natural conservationists’. The paper explores how nature is translated differently in the worlds of conservation science and agriculture. In the final part of the paper, discussion focuses on the management of the wetland ditches where these sets of translations come together. It reveals that the rigid, scientific prescriptions for management of the conservation value of the ditches are considerably at odds with the more flexible and sensitive practices of farmers themselves.

''I struggled with this money business'': respondents' perspectives on contingent valuation

Abstract In the long-running debates about the validity and legitimacy of contingent valuation (CV), very little research has engaged directly with respondents during or after the survey to explore what individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) figure meant. This paper presents the results of qualitative research with respondents to a CV survey carried out as part of the appraisal of a specific nature conservation policy in the UK. The results show that respondents’ questioned the validity of their WTP figures through discussion of the difficulties they experienced in framing a meaningful reply. Significant difficulties included problems in contextualising what the scheme was and how much it might be worth in both monetary and non-monetary terms; an inability to work out a value for one scheme in isolation from others in other parts of the UK; and feelings that values for nature were not commensurable with monetary valuation. Turning to the legitimacy of CV, participants in the research challenged claims that CV is a democratic process for ensuring that public values are incorporated in policy decisions. Recognizing that hard economic choices have to be made in order to achieve nature conservation goals, participants argued for a decision-making institution where local people could contribute to environmental policy decisions through dialogue with scientists and policy-makers. In the final part of the paper, this project is compared with three studies that have also used qualitative approaches with respondents during and/or after a CV survey. The paper concludes that more context-specific, qualitative research with respondents is needed to explore further the conclusion that CV may not be a good methodology for capturing complex, cultural values for nature and landscape.

Deliberative mapping: a novel analytic-deliberative methodology to support contested science-policy decisions

This paper discusses the methodological development of Deliberative Mapping (DM), a participatory, multi-criteria, option appraisal process that combines a novel approach to the use of quantitative decision analysis techniques with some significant innovations in the field of participatory deliberation. DM is a symmetrical process, engaging “specialists” and “citizens” in the same appraisal process, providing for consistency of framing, mutual inter-linkage and interrogation, and substantial opportunities for face-to-face discussion. Through a detailed case study of organ transplantation options, the paper discusses the steps in DM. The analysis shows that DM is able to elicit and document consensual judgments as well as divergent views by integrating analytic and deliberative components in a transparent, auditable process that creates many opportunities for personal learning, and provides a robust decision-support tool for contested science-policy issues.

Rural Restructuring and the Regulation of Farm Pollution

In this paper the emergence during the 1980s of a water pollution problem associated with intensive livestock production is examined. Farm pollution is socially constructed and is shaped by rural social change. Rural areas are experiencing social and economic restructuring with a resultant shift in emphasis from production to consumption concerns. ‘New’ people are living in the countryside, with ideas about how its resources should be managed that often differ from those with traditional production interests. At the same time, the debates surrounding the privatisation of the water industry opened up the issue of water pollution in the countryside to greater critical scrutiny. It is in this context that pollution from farm ‘wastes’ (termed here ‘farm pollution’) has gone from being a ‘nonproblem’ in the 1970s to an issue of greater public and political concern and regulatory activity since the late 1980s. Based on evidence from a study of dairy farming in Devon, it is argued in this paper that the farm pollution problem and its regulation are as much a function of social change in the countryside as of environmental change in rivers.

Keeping Matter in its Place: Pollution Regulation and the Reconfiguring of Farmers and Farming

In this paper we examine the regulation of agricultural practice to reduce the risks of water pollution in England and Wales. We present case-study material concerning water pollution from farm livestock effluents and from agricultural pesticides, and focus on the ways in which farmers and farming practices are being reconfigured under the banner of a move towards a ‘more sustainable agriculture’. Pollution policies can be seen as attempts not only to ‘stabilise’ nature in the rural environment, but also as a process of social ordering as farmers are recast as responsible environmental managers with newly instrumentalised self-governing properties.

Culture, communication, and the information problem in contingent valuation surveys: a case study of a Wildlife Enhancement Scheme

Contingent valuation (CV) is a technique for providing estimates of the monetary value of public goods which have no market. The authors consider whether the information provided for the hypothetical market enables respondents to express their ‘true’ preference for the ‘good’, or whether their willingness to pay is dependent on the quantity and quality of information provided in the survey. They argue that a cultural perspective in which the CV transaction is viewed as a communicative ‘dialogue-at-a-distance’ between researchers and respondents through the medium of the CV text provides more insight into the encoding and decoding of the ‘good’—in this case an agri-environment policy to enhance nature conservation on an internationally significant wetland in South East England. They argue that, within its own scientific parameters, CV surveys are unable to capture fully all the aspects of the ‘good’ to be valued. The problem is more acute when the ‘good’ represents the uncertain outcomes (in terms of landscape and biodiversity) of a policy. Without a complete specification, which may well be an impossibility for environmental ‘goods’, respondents are able to bring their own readings to their interpretation of the scenario. This means that CV researchers cannot know precisely what ‘good’ respondents were attempting to ‘value’. The authors follow the production of the CV scenario for the valuation of the Pevensey Levels Wildlife Enhancement Scheme; conduct a critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how the linguistic and visual representations inevitably fulfil rhetorical functions; and then present the deliberations of respondents to the CV survey who participated in in-depth discussion groups after completion of the survey.

Reasonable creatures: rights and rationalities in valuing the countryside

Abstract Debate on the economic valuation of the countryside is typically polarized between absolutist critics who would deny it any valid role and equally fervid proponents who see its techniques as the only way of integrating the environment into policy making. Such debate is structured by conflicting notions of rights, responsibilities and values, rather than by consideration of the role of technique in practical policy‐making. This paper attempts to take the debate forward and begins by examining the ways in which rights, responsibilities and values have been historically created. The techniques of economic valuation rest on particular conceptions of these, making them irreducibly political, and at the same time their results are often used to justify political decisions. Yet the proper role of technique ought to be to explore options. Provided that the sort of clarification that economic valuation offers is understood, it may, along with other types of technique, be used to open up the decision makin...

From Policy Insider to Policy Outcast? Comité des Organisations Professionnelles Agricoles, EU Policymaking, and the EU's ‘Agri-Environment’ Regulation

Recent studies of the role of lobby groups in European Union (EU) policymaking have drawn attention to the concept of ‘multilevel governance’ as a powerful explanatory tool in analysing how these organisations exert political influence on EU institutions. One of the longest standing of these groups is the Comité des Organisations Professionnelles Agricoles (COPA). Until the mid-1980s, COPA was regarded as being remarkably successful in influencing the content and direction of the EUs Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), More recently, however, commentators have noted a marked decline in COPAs influence, citing as evidence the organisations abortive attempts to blunt the radical edge of the 1992 reform package of the Common Agricultural Policy. In this paper the authors use Grandes conception of multilevel governance to provide a thorough examination of why COPA carried little influence with the European Commissions Agriculture Directorate, Directorate-General VI (DGVI) during the 1992 reforms. An illustrative case study is presented of a minor though notable element of these reforms, the so-called ‘agri-environment’ regulation, EU 2078/92. In explaining COPAs slight effect on the final text of the regulation, Grandes notion of multilevel governance emphasises the eclectic positions adopted by COPAs constituent farming unions towards the regulation, and the complexities of a negotiating process transacted simultaneously with different EU institutions, each requiring the tailoring of specific lobbying strategies by COPAs secretariat. The authors conclude that the negative outcome of COPAs lobbying resulted not only from disarray among this organisations national policy constituencies, but also from skillful counterlobbying mounted by DGVI to prevent COPA from derailing the delicate CAP reform process.

Agricultural Élites, Agrarian Beliefs, and Their Impact on the Evolution of Agri-Environment Policies: An Examination of the British Experience, 1981–92

Traditionally, agrarian beliefs have been assigned an important place in studies of the formative processes of agricultural policymaking. However, such work has tended to privilege these beliefs with a passive, conditioning, or reactive role in decisionmaking and decision taking. In this paper, we show that these deeply engrained notions also provide the basis for articulating more complex proactive strategies, aimed at advancing agricultural interests. We demonstrate how widely held agrarian beliefs in British society, relating to ‘trusteeship’ by farming of the natural environment, have been deployed by policy élites in the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) as a means of legitimising a suite of agri-environment policies to sectoral constituencies and the general public which are strongly supportive of both bureaucratic and producer group ambitions. We examine the impact of these beliefs on the formation by MAFF of the British negotiating position towards the European Unions ‘agri-environment’ regulation, EU 2078/92.

The Agri-Environment Regulation EU 2078/92: The Role of the European Commission in Policy Shaping and Setting

We examine the role of the European Commission in the formulation and negotiation of a Council regulation on agri-environmental policy (EU 2078/92). We show how this regulation was shaped largely by political opportunism and financial and administrative realities, rather than by stringent environmental considerations and targets, We also reveal how the debate over EU 2078/92 has been dominated by only a few actors at supranational and national levels, and identify the key role played by the European Commission at all stages of the progress of the regulation through the route ways of the European Unions (EU) decisionmaking process. Of further interest is the way in which well-established agricultural policy communities have attempted to keep a tight rein on the development of the regulation in order to prevent this new policy area from being infiltrated by nonagricultural interests. For such interests, the regulation provided an opportunity to penetrate the long-established policy network surrounding agriculture in the EU.