Power and the material arrangements of a river basin management plan: the case of the Archipelago Sea

ABSTRACT

The drive towards collaborative governance has raised critical questions about the hidden forms of power practised in consensual planning processes. In the field of water governance, the issue has been analysed in terms that treat power as an intrinsic property of actors or planning settings. Alternatively power is located in the discursive means mobilized by the human participants. Drawing from actor-network theory, this paper calls attention to the material arrangements constitutive for the practicing of power in target-driven, consensus-seeking planning. It sets focus on the obligatory passage points and factual closures through which a planning task links, for example, to ecosystems, policy principles and trajectories of governance. In the meantime, some other entities and issues may lose their planning-steering potentiality. As shown by the analysis of a river-basin planning process, the arrangements that end up steering consensus-seeking cannot be treated as merely discursive outputs operating upon a passive non-human reality. Materialities and living processes contribute to the outcome. However, the link is not deterministic. With different means of arrangement, the planning reality can – and, in the studied case, could have – end up different.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• planning
• materiality
• consensus
• water governance

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Hanna Piepponen for her help in computer graphics. We are also very grateful to all interviewees and informants for their time and dedication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This demand is embedded in the model of governance; it is not an explicit regulatory requirement.

2. The first planning period took place in 2006–2009. Due to the temporal focus, we have the opportunity to analyse material arranging that was likely to set the premises for drafting of the river-basin management plans also on the upcoming WFD planning rounds.

3. The coastal region is part of the Kokemäenjoki–Archipelago Sea–Bothnian Sea River Basin District. For all Finnish water basin districts see http://www.ymparisto.fi/en-US/Waters/Protection_of_waters/Planning_and_cooperation_in_river_basin_districts/River_basin_districts.

4. The Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission (HELCOM) is the governing body of the Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea area. For more detail, see www.helcom.fi (accessed 14 January 2016).

5. These comments focused, in addition to the Archipelago Sea, on lakes and rivers of the sub-basin.

6. According to the WFD, the classification into classes of bad, poor, moderate, good or excellent is to happen based on biological elements, used in combination with supportive physic-chemical elements. The incorporation of biological elements was a new, radical feature introduced by the WFD to the ecological assessment of the waters (Borja, Ranasinghe, & Weisberg, 2009; Vuori, Mitikka, & Vuoristo, 2009).

7. For similar results gained in the Netherlands, see Behagel and Turnhout (2011).

8. Kokemäenjoen-Saaristomeren-Selkämeren vesienhoitoalue (2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland [grant number 132368].