The Politics of Sewerage: Contested Narratives on Growth, Science, and Nature

Abstract

Relevant actors in environmental resources disputes base their positions on specific assumptions about growth, science, and nature, and construct narratives to support these positions. The contest over the extension of a sewerage system in Ontario, Canada, illustrates this point. A productivist narrative sees sewers as necessary to meet the competitiveness of the city region and a growing demand for housing. It assumes that science can accommodate local resilient ecologies and human bodies. A nature conservation narrative, by contrast, embraces a conception of no or slow growth, locally integrated water management, and vulnerable ecologies and human bodies. It is, however, compromised by a NIMBY bias, an aesthetic focus on nature, and a continued endorsement of regional growth. We conclude that narratives on growth, science, and nature are not given, but socially produced, historically contingent, strategically deployed, internally compromised, embedded in specific power relations, and open to contestation and challenge.This article investigates different visions of growth, science, and nature in the policy formation process, using as a case study the conflict surrounding the extension of a sewer system in one of North America's most rapidly growing regions, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). We accept the basic premise that conceptions of society are socially produced and that specific narratives reveal basic assumptions about growth, place, and nature and the role of science and technology in mediating their interaction. We also point to a politics of claims-making where competing narratives clash and where resolutions both convey biases as well as possible alternatives. The

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