NSCPHD1195 Expertise, Environment and Development

Currently, "the environment" takes a range of representational forms in the academy, applied policy contexts and the media. Concerns are raised about the loss of biodiversity, the irreversibility of climate change, the threat of deforestation and environmental degradation, water supply, the conservation of wildlife, and the futures of energy just to name a few. Common for all those concerns is that what we know about their causes and effects is shaped and defined by what science tells us. However, scientific knowledge about nature always comes from somewhere and is the product of particular visions about the world. To know nature, is to come to terms with how multiple actors and regimes of expertise make and assert knowledge claims about the environment. This contestation about authoritative knowledge is inseparable from the larger institutional landscape of environmental governance, which constitutes the interface we often refer to as the "politics of nature". How boundaries are drawn and crossed between the domains of science and environmental politics is a central theme, which will run through the course. 

In this course we shall draw on a series of interdisciplinary works to explore and come to grips with different ways of knowing the environment such as indigenous ecological knowledge, local knowledge, legal knowledge, economical knowledge, scientific knowledge, etc from a critical perspective. Our point of departure is Political Ecology (PE), which emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s understanding environmental conflicts as the product of larger forces beyond local contexts within a neo-Marxist world systems framework. Today, PE retains its Marxist interest in global power differentials, but has productively borrowed from science and technology studies (STS) when approaching the role of scientific knowledge in the politics revolving around international conservation, development policy, environmental assessments and claims to "natural resources". Of late, a new body of literature intersecting PE and STS have emerged and contributed significantly towards reimagining development and the politics of natures in the global South. This seminar will introduce and draw on key readings from this emergent field.

Major Themes Covered: The "co-production" of natural and social orders; the linear model/deficit model in science-society; the concept of boundary making; political ecology and environmental knowledge; indigenous vs. scientific knowledge; the politics of conservation; participatory forms of forestry and knowledge making; post-coloniality and science studies, environmentalism, ethnographies of bureaucracies governing "nature", etc.