Severine van Bommel

Meeting the ‘Anthropocene’ in the context of intractability and complexity: infusing resilience narratives with intersubjectivity

Insufficient attention has been paid to how concepts of resilience can be operationalised in wicked, contested situations. Within the environmental sciences, the contemporary social-ecological resilience narrative is not geared to examining social dilemmas in ill-defined problem contexts. These conditions require a different resilience narrative, one centred on epistemological and ontological considerations. This paper examines four resilience narratives (engineering, social-ecological, epistemic and intersubjective) in order to stimulate an improved awareness of the possibility of more deliberative choices for research and governance in the resilience domain. We argue that the resilience research community needs to be more cognizant of the diversity of resilience narratives in order to empower and learn from the perspectives and local practices of stakeholders, who will often express narratives better aligned to the wicked situation at hand. Ultimately, the resilience narratives of the research community can be little more than toolkits to support greater understanding of the diversity of people, perspectives and ‘performances’ jointly narrating the ‘real’ stories of our wicked and contested realities.

Forest and Nature Governance

Problems such as deforestation, biodiversity loss and illegal logging have provoked various policy responses that are often referred to as forest and nature governance. In its broadest interpretation, governance is about the many ways in which public and private actors from the state, market and/or civil society govern public issues at multiple scales. Examples range from the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity to national forest programmes. In studies of forest and nature governance the dominant approaches are rational choice and neo-institutionalism. This book takes another perspective. Departing from ‘practice theory’, and building upon scholars like Giddens, Bourdieu, Reckwitz, Schatzki and Callon, it seeks to move beyond established understandings of institutions, actors, and knowledge. In so doing, the book not only presents an innovative conceptual and methodological framework for a practice based approach, but also rich case studies and ethnographies. Examples are participatory forest management in the tropics, REDD policy at global level, European water policy, forest certification and the construction of global biodiversity databases. Taking social practices as the key unit of analysis, this book describes how different practitioners, ranging from local forest managers on the ground to policy makers at the global level, work with trees, forests, biodiversity, wildlife, and so on, and act upon forest policies, environmental discourses, codes of conduct, or scientific insights. It is also about how communities, NGOs, stakeholders, and citizens get involved in forest and nature governance.

Framing climate change: new directions in Dutch and Danish planning strategies

Planning in contemporary societies takes place under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, which stresses the politicised character of planning. Through studies of change in particular framings of planning, induced by the integration of climate change policy issues in the strategic planning of Copenhagen (Denmark) and the Zuidplaspolder (the Netherlands), this paper analyses how climate policies push reframing the basic perceptions and spatial imaginaries of strategic planning, and how this affects planning as a politicised activity. The study shows that reframing socio-spatial imaginaries influences the spatiality of the city/the polder, including a spatial identity, advocates certain solutions, and further enables institutional actors to reframe climate issues strategically to benefit other planning objectives as well as weaving together environmental agendas with economic agendas. However, new framings are challenged by some citizens/actors. At an institutional level, framing of planning may hence serve to relocate tensions and engage citizens and stakeholders in hard transitions, thus revealing implications beyond the discursive.

Forest-people interfaces: from local creativity to global concerns

This book takes the reader on a journey through four major themes that have dominated research on the people-forest interface since the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published its Forestry for Rural Development paper and launched its Programme on Forestry for Local Community Development in 1976. This was the prelude to the FAO VIIIth Forestry Congress entitled ‘Forestry for People’, organised two years later, which drew attention to the role of forests in meeting people’s livelihood needs. These events marked the emergence of social forestry as a new approach to forest management that aimed to increase community participation in the development and management of forest resources (Arnold, 1991; FAO, 1976; Wiersum, 1999). In the 1980s social forestry marked a shift away from an exclusive focus on industrial, timber-oriented forestry to participatory and cooperative management schemes (Colchester et al., 2003). In the same period, the Canadian forester John Bene (Bene et al., 1977) coined the term ‘agroforestry’ for the practice of integrating trees, food crops and/or animals in a combined production system compatible with the cultural practices of the local population. Bene played an important role in the establishment of the International Council for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Nairobi in 1997 (King, 1987). This is now known as the World Agroforestry Centre and has regional offices in India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi and Mali.

The (onto)politics of classifying biocultural diversity: a tale of chaos, order and control

The issue of classification plays a central role in Wiersum’s work on biocultural diversity. The design of classification systems has enabled Wiersum to classify landscapes into natural, cultural and various intermediate categories. These classification systems do not merely mirror the world, but can only be understood in the light of the social and political values and desires they highlight and seek recognition for. In this chapter we employ a performative perspective of classification by analysing the social work that classification systems do in practice: how they influence not only how the world is known, but also how it is acted upon, and how social and material relationships are remade in the process. We conclude that by performing a world that consists of various natural, cultural and mixed categories, Wiersum’s work (1) privileges local/indigenous communities to manage the nature-culture mixtures; (2) creates a nature-culture continuum to allow for coordination across the nature-human divide; and (3) creates a network of scientists and practitioners from diverse disciplines who can arrive at a division of labour in the research into and management of the biological, human and cultural categories that are distinguished.