Public and Private in Natural Resource Governance. A False Dichotomy?
Public and Private in Natural Resource Governance. A False Dichotomy?, edited by Thomas Sikor, London, UK, Earthscan, 2008, 235 pp., ISBN-13: 978 1 84407 525 6 (hardback)
This edited volume discusses the relations between public and private in resource management. Its main message is that we can no longer think in terms of a dichotomy between public and private. We are witnessing the emergence of various kinds of hybrid institutions which are simultaneously public and private, or neither public nor private. In the first chapter, the editor develops a conceptual framework to capture the new arrangements in resource management. Instead of a dichotomy, we need to think in terms of distinctions and various dimensions. First, this is the distinction between the state as the public sphere and the private sphere of voluntary interaction epitomized by the state. Second, a distinction needs to be recognized between the political community as the public realm and the private as the more particularistic sphere of social life. The third distinction is made between the socially visible and the personal. The socially visible refers to the notion of public we use when we speak about making something public or going public with an issue. What at first instance seem to be hybrids in the classical interpretation of the public and the private, based on clear demarcation lines, may be differently interpreted according to another public/private distinction. State actors may no longer appear public, but act in rather particularistic ways. Market actors may be public in their actions as members of the political community or in the limelight of the socially visible. Following this conceptual thinking, there are multiple publics and many privates and they are relative. The approach is further explicated in 10 empirical analyses from six fields of natural resource management: agri-environment, biodiversity, bioenergy, food quality, and safety, forestry and rural water. Each analysis traces the definitions of public and private in a particular case.
The empirical chapters are grouped around four themes.
Part 1 looks at the publics in resource governance associated with states and political communities. Wollenberg et al. discuss how decentralization in Indonesia's forest sector leads to the emergence of public institutions that are more firmly lodged in political communities. Theesfeld shows how state actors undermine efforts to promote new public institutions rooted in political communities in Bulgaria's water sector. Thiel's chapter on Portugal's water sector shows the move from institutions grounded in local political communities to centralized state agencies. These chapters highlight specific features of the move from government to governance. They confirm the presence of multiple publics in natural resource management in a particular setting at the same time, the dynamics of the publics, and the broader political community as a source of public interests.
Part 2 studies public–private hybrids and expands the scope of analysis to all three distinctions between public and private. Penker analyses various arrangements that developed on the foundations of political communities around the notion of cultural landscapes in Austria. She shows how governance structures have been evolving and converging into new alliances between public and private actors. Ring links biodiversity governance to the economic theory of fiscal federalism and analyses local political communities in Brazilian biodiversity conservation. Kleinschmit and Krott show how the media creates new publics in the sense of socially visible spaces on forestry issues. These case studies indicate how some hybrids combine elements of state and market in new forms of arrangements rooted in political communities and social visibilities. In that way, they demonstrate again the importance of recognizing all three kinds of publics.
Part 3 brings together two case studies of private actors in resource management. Plieninger et al. study bioenergy clusters in Austria and Germany as examples of initiatives of political communities. Roosen looks at the creation of new areas of social visibility related to labeling in markets for safe food in Germany and France. Although most labels are created by private parties, they are also public, as they operate by connecting to political communities. These chapters show that there are many types of privates in natural resource management, and that these are highly heterogeneous.
Part 4 turns from analysis to prescription. Renn develops varieties of risk governance associated with diverse forms of publics rooted in political communities. O'Riordan proposes the principal of ecosystem services to bring together state and market as parts of the broader social community.
Sikor concludes with a chapter discussing property rights to natural resources set in relation to the three kinds of publics identified in the conceptual framework of the book.
This is a very interesting volume for those interested in new forms of natural resource management and their possible interpretations. The title of the book is rather broad and may suggest a wider view of natural resource management, including the regional and global level and connected forms of partnership. As it is, all case studies focus on rather local forms of management. However, the book goes beyond the specificities of the particular policy fields recognizing shared elements and allowing for greater understanding of the dynamics underlying new governance arrangements. It is clearly demonstrated that we need to abandon, if not done already, the idea that public and private are separate entities divided by clearly demarcated boundaries. The book is well-edited, with a conceptual framework introduced in the first synthesis chapter, introductions to each part, chapters that explicitly address aspects of the analytical distinctions, and a closing chapter by the editor in which he looks at the empirical chapters again from an additional perspective. As always with an edited book, some case studies fit better than others. Although the book takes a large variety of case studies, which certainly helps the exploration of the hypothesis about the necessity to develop new dimensions to study public and private in resource management, this is also a weakness. A selection criterion is missing, which brings up two questions that seem to be of importance for further research. The first relates to the choice of countries to study the concepts of public and private. It is debatable to generalize cases from developing, post-communist, and industrialized countries. As they differ in history, socio-economic structure, culture, and ideology, one might also expect that the interpretations of public and private differ. The second relates to the types and characteristics of the natural resource. It is debatable whether generalizations are possible based on such different natural resources as landscapes, biodiversity, and food safety. Here again, there is a need of further research into the resource specific conceptualizations of public and private and new arrangements.
© 2009, Pieter Glasbergen