“Ordering the Wild”: How Adaptive Management Is Used to Maintain Nature Like a Postcard

Abstract

In this paper we examine and critique adaptive management (AM) practices for protected areas (PAs), in pursuit of practices that can account for more-than-human relations. Engaging with empirical research from Australian PAs, we reflect on the formation of PAs as “exceptional places” where Nature is implicitly/explicitly to be controlled. We find that AM practices harness the spatial and temporal characteristics of the PAs to deliberatively construct a static and timeless scene, creating a particular vision of Nature. This metaphoric vision is captured “like a postcard.” It reinforces and justifies static protectionism as Nature conservation, arraigning a series of material objects that are meant to assist with maintaining that image: that “reality.” Using sentipensar as an exemplar, we explore and highlight relational and everchanging human-nonhuman engagements to contest the ontological dimensions of a static Nature and ideas of control and power associated with the binaries of Nature and culture.

Keywords:

• Adaptive management
• biodiversity conservation
• Great Barrier Reef
• political ontology
• protected areas
• relationality
• sentipensar

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful with Dr Riccarda Flemmer who provided insights and advice on how to improve this manuscript. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers who with their input and advice made the paper stronger. Thanks to Dr Jonathan Raikes for the time offered to proofread early versions of the manuscript. Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service provided financial and in-kind support for Francisco’s fieldwork.

Ethics approval

This research counts with ethics approval by the Human Research Ethics Committee from the University of the Sunshine Coast. Approval number: S191281.

Notes

1 We use the capital “N” in the singular form of Nature following Latour (1993) and Lorimer (2012) to refer to the understanding of the nonhuman world that manifests through the human/Nature binary.

2 The names of all locations and individuals have been changed to ensure anonymity. Contextual information has also been omitted in order to ensure anonymity of location and participants.

3 Although a common term within the academic literature is non-representational theory, Lorimer (2005) explains the need to frame these bodies of work as more-than-representational to better acknowledge the importance of representation, the affective, the embodied, the experiential, and the discursive.

Additional information

Funding

The Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship supported Francisco’s research.