Power/knowledge and natural resource management: Foucaultian foundations in the analysis of adaptive governance

Abstract

In this paper, we present a conceptual framework extending Foucaultian insights on the relations between power and knowledge to link up with current insights into studies of natural resource management (NRM) and more broadly environmental studies. We classify discourses in NRM according to understandings of socialecological systems and argue that grasping those larger contexts can push NRM in a different direction, forming a base for more informed and inclusive decisionmaking. We then reconstruct the importance of materiality, the physical world, for the functioning of NRM within social-ecological systems. The concept of livelihoods is added to our developing Foucaultian frame, as material/discursive entwinements which structure responses of many stakeholders in NRM. Finally, we present an expansion of Foucaultian NRM into adaptive governance thinking as a logical outcome of basic insights into power/knowledge, developed and contextualized in current NRM and its critical analyses ARTICLE HISTORY

The Innovation Process in Local Development – The Material, Institutional, and Intellectual Infrastructure Shaping and Shaped by Innovation

“…Djanibekov, Van Assche, Boezeman, Villamor, & N. Djanibekov, 2018;Novalia, Brown, Rogers, & Bos, 2018). One reason is the co-evolution of many elements in an innovation or transition pathway, including the co-evolution of the different afore-mentioned types of infrastructure and the co-evolution of different scales in governance (Jedwab, Kerby, & Moradi, 2017;Van Assche, Beunen, Duineveld, & Gruezmacher, 2017). These co-evolutions imply that things happening far away can have an effect on a local innovation context, reshape it, and hence affect the innovation path.…”

The social, the ecological, and the adaptive. Von Bertalanffy's general systems theory and the adaptive governance of social‐ecological systems

“…Such policies need to address issues at multiple scales and require a multilevel and polycentric governance system itself (Folke, Colding, & Berkes, ; Lebel et al, ; Ostrom, ). Adaptive governance ideas took a more prominent place in the resilience paradigm in response to growing concerns over climate change, over the need to make environmental decision making more inclusive, and as an expression of growing awareness of failure of previous governance arrangements and tools for nature conservation and environmental quality (Booher & Innes, ; Plummer & Armitage, ; Van Assche, Beunen, et al, ; Voß & Bornemann, ).…”

The will to knowledge: natural resource management and power/knowledge dynamics

“…If all fish is there is to eat, the material necessity will likely produce fish as central object in many discourses and will probably lead to elaborate institutional frames regulating fishing (Jentoft, 2017). Van Assche et al (2017) bring the concept of livelihoods into the Foucaultian orbit, by presenting these livelihoods as ways to make a living, strongly tied to a particular social-ecological system, with power/knowledge emerging from a unique coupling between the physical and discursive landscapes. Particular features of the landscape, and the place of the resource in that landscape, co-evolve with human organization, and such coupled social-ecological systems enable and sustain specific livelihoods.…”

“…Thirdly, by including the framing concept of social-ecological systems in Foucaultian power/knowledge analysis and recommending the inclusion of such concept of system-in-environment in NRM practices. Analyzing the NRM regime as part of a broader environment, one of coupled discursive and ecological systems, brings the possibility of seeing new linkages between regime and environment and therefore of adaptive needs and possibilities (Van Assche et al, 2017).…”