On environments of not knowing: How some environmental spaces and circulations are made inscrutable

Kroepsch, Adrianne; Clifford, Katherine R.

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.05.009

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…Whether these and other stakeholders remain satisfied with simple explanations is evolving, as corporate claims of conformance with international standards are tested. Kroepsch and Clifford (2021) consider how and why these "inscrutable spaces" are maintained and call for critical scholarship on the phenomenon of "not knowing". Future research could usefully explore the extent to which companies choose to avoid building their organisational capability to engage the messy intricacies of the grievance landscape becomes a key question.…”

Section: Messy Landscapes and Illegibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Owen

Kemp

2023

J Bus Ethics

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Grievance landscapes form in rapidly industrialising contexts where social and environmental impacts are inevitable. This paper focuses on the complex operational and organisational settings in which grievances arise and the industrial pathologies that form around resource development projects. The arguments draw on classic and contemporary literature on “grievance”, “right” and “entitlement”, and the authors’ own sustained engagement with global mining companies and local communities. Our contention is that the grievance landscape is far more critical to understanding environmental, human rights, and mining interactions than the managerial systems that companies construct to signal compliance with voluntary international norms. These managerial systems, or operational-level grievance mechanisms, map the procedural contours of how a local grievance would travel once it is made visible to the company. In practice, however, it is fiction, illegibility and invisibility that dominate. Across the pathologies, the common denominator is the corporate propensity to avoid recognising the legitimacy of a local grievance and the source of its cause.

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Section: Messy Landscapes and Illegibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Owen

Kemp

2023

J Bus Ethics

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“…In other work, Flintham (2014) highlights that the UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) controls a surface area amounting to approximately 1.5 percent of the UK's total land mass (the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence, 2020 Land Holdings report lists this as 1.8 percent), but this area of surface control is just part of the story within ‘a much more extensive use of space which includes infrastructural connections between sites, vast volumes of restricted airspace towering into the troposphere and an almost incalculable number of hazardous events and processes that define and redefine the landscape every day across the UK’ (Flintham, 2011, p. 1, emphasis in original). The expanse of restricted military airspace that shifts in time and volume above the surface of the UK, however, remains unquantified, and in this respect effectively inscrutable (for a related concern rooted in environmental politics, see Kroepsch & Clifford, 2022).…”

Section: Us Militarisation and Spatial Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Revealing vertical geopolitics: Quantifying the volume of militarised restricted airspaces in the USA using GIS

Havlick

Dao

2023

Trans Inst British Geog

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The US military maintains significant control of land and sea territory, both domestically and internationally. Extending vertically, the US military also restricts vast areas of airspace to protect its interests in training, testing, surveillance, and security. In order to convey the multidimensional extent of spatial control maintained by the US Department of Defence, in this paper we critically assess, calculate, and depict the volume of militarised restricted airspaces in the USA. Airspace restrictions vary across days, times, and spatial extent, requiring an analysis and volumetric visualisation that can account for three‐ and four‐dimensional change. Applying this analysis casts the extent and variability of US military spatial control in fuller relief and makes visible new aspects of a vertical geopolitics. The research brings important new insights and methods to bear on little‐examined attributes of US militarisation and engages increasingly relevant questions about militarised airspace and contestable claims on near space.

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“…Giordano (2009) points to the “language of enigma” that casts the liquid as invisible, silent, disordered, unknown and ungoverned. Invisibility is central to the assumption that groundwater is deep water, unconnected to the surface, that inhabits an “inscrutable space” constituted, as Kroepsch and Clifford (2021) explain, by physical, cultural, and political economic factors. However, the invisibility of groundwater only formed into a problem in the modern period.…”

Section: Cultural Groundwaters: Heterogeneity Ubiquity and Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond rules and norms: Heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility of groundwaters

Walsh

2022

WIREs Water

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Over the last 150 years or so engineers, farmers, scientists, and many others around the globe have gained access to the waters that lie underground with drilling technology, pumps and cheap energy. Since the mid-twentieth century, a massive worldwide proliferation of deep wells has redistributed groundwaters away from springs, seeps, wells, and oases, robbing them of the water that supports local sustainable socionatural relations. The idea and social fact of groundwater has emerged in this history, and has three distinguishing features: heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility. The failure to halt depletion has prompted a turn to culture in the hope of governing the liquid sustainably.However, rather than grapple with the complexities and contradictions of heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility, these efforts take a rather thin view of culture-as rules, norms, and institutions to be studied, codified and deployed to address the crisis. This instrumental understanding of culture as a set of traits to be selectively used for arresting depletion has not proven effective, however, compelling us to rethink our cultural, political, and economic engagements with groundwater.

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On environments of not knowing: How some environmental spaces and circulations are made inscrutable

Cited by 15 publications

References 77 publications

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Revealing vertical geopolitics: Quantifying the volume of militarised restricted airspaces in the USA using GIS

Beyond rules and norms: Heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility of groundwaters

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