Probing the (in)compatibilities of social theory and policy relevance in Piers Blaikie’s political ecology
Introduction
I had the privilege as a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley of studying with the brilliant cultural ecologist Barney Nietschmann. In one of his seminars we read Roy Rappaport’s (1968) classic, Pigs for the Ancestors. One thing that struck me about this experience was the way that Barney somewhat wistfully recalled the impact that the book’s publication had on his and his fellow graduate students’ thinking. He was in the midst of his doctoral study in geography at Wisconsin when Pigs for the Ancestors appeared. He remembered the sense among the graduate students in anthropology and geography at the time that “this was it”. That is, here was a breakthrough book that crystallized thinking in cultural ecology around a new theoretical perspective on human–environment relations.
Piers Blaikie’s (1985) The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (PESEDC) played a similar role in my and many of my fellow graduate students’ intellectual development. The beginning of my doctoral study in geography coincided with the publication of PESEDC. The book quickly appeared in the seminars of several departments on campus and dog-eared copies passed frequently among graduate students. From my perspective, 1980s Berkeley was an exhilarating time and place and PESEDC along with Jim Scott’s (1985) Weapons of the Weak, to mention one among several other works, were central to the mood. Among the faculty guiding our explorations on these new paths—and doing path-breaking work themselves—were Michael Watts, Louise Fortmann, and Nancy Peluso (then a visiting professor and postdoctoral fellow). A partial review of their seminars’ rosters from that time suggests the far-reaching impact of PESEDC on the development of political ecology at Berkeley. Alex Clapp, Lucy Jarosz, Donald Moore, Joshua Muldavin, Tad Mutersbaugh and Rick Schroeder, among others, have all gone on to make their own important contributions to and critiques of political ecology.
Many ideas in PESEDC influenced the structure of my and others’ subsequent research, but among the most important was Blaikie’s critique of land and resource conservation policy in the global South. Much has transpired in social theory and policy circles since then, and Blaikie has maintained a critical engagement with each. In this paper I trace the development of Blaikie’s ideas about the policy relevance of political ecology, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by the introduction of poststructural social theory into the field. I begin by revisiting his earlier critiques of policy, particularly those aspects that had their greatest influence on my own research approach and agenda, and explore how his thinking on the relationship of theory and policy and academic and development practice has evolved since. I have invented two personas, “early Blaikie” and “late Blaikie”, to facilitate this task. Second, I want to probe some of the challenges that late Blaikie presents for doing political ecology research, to some extent by pitting early Blaikie against late Blaikie and letting them hash it out. Finally, I turn to my own and others’ research and consulting experiences in an examination of the possibilities for reconciling theoretically driven critiques with policy relevant research.
Section snippets
Early Blaikie
One can identify in PESEDC three ideas that were central to Blaikie’s critique of natural resource (specifically, soil conservation) policies in developing countries. First, policies are often made under conditions of scientific uncertainty or where there is a virtual absence of scientific evidence. Under the heading, “Is soil erosion really a problem” (1985: pp. 12–17), Blaikie persuasively catalogs the difficulties in obtaining meaningful empirical data on both the existence of soil loss and
Late Blaikie
Readers may perceive a hint of uneasiness in Blaikie’s efforts to relate his chain of explanation model with what he referred to as a “policy-relevant explanation” of degradation (1989: p. 23). By the mid 1990s, the sense of unease was more palpable as postmodernism raised “haunting thoughts” through its engagement with “the foundations of the natural sciences, policy-making and development studies” (Blaikie, 1996, p. 81). While, yes indeed, we “always knew that our scientific so-called truths
Probing the challenges of late Blaikie
Leaving aside momentarily further questions of what responsibility in practice means and who should take it and in what form, we might ask what early Blaikie would have to say about late Blaikie’s critique of social science in relation to policy. By insisting in PESEDC that the perceptions of policy makers, government officials, and scientists be scrutinized as closely as those of Third World peasants, early Blaikie opened the door to questions of power, knowledge, and ideology as they relate
Critical political ecology and policy relevance
The design of my early research on national parks and wildlife conservation in Tanzania was significantly influenced by early Blaikie’s analysis and critique of soil conservation policies in PESEDC (Neumann, 1992, Neumann, 1998). Specifically, I was interested not only in identifying who gained and who lost in park and wildlife policies, but also in analyzing the politics that generated and were generated by these policies. This effort to analyze the politics in which conservation policies are
Conclusion
This discussion of critical social theory and policy relevance addressed two overarching issues of concern for political ecology. The first is the degree to which adopting a critical social theoretical stance inhibits a dialog with natural scientists. Much of the path-breaking political ecology research cited previously demonstrates that the philosophical terrain of constrained constructivism provides ample space for an engagement between natural and social scientists. As political ecologists,
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