Science, Data, and the Struggle for Standing in Environmental Governance

Abstract

Here, we explore how people entangled in natural resource conflicts employ and discuss data. We draw on ethnographic research with two cases of conflict: salmon fisheries in Alaska, USA, and agricultural water management in Saskatchewan, Canada. Both cases illustrate how data, through the scientization of environmental governance, can become a means of empowerment and disempowerment: empowering those with access and influence over data and disempowering those without such access. In both locales, people find it necessary to perform their expertise, justify the veracity of their data, and discount the data held by others if they wish to achieve or maintain standing. We call this “datamentality” and draw lessons from these cases for how we can structure environmental governance such that it benefits from robust data and science while meeting the needs of individuals, avoiding or managing power struggles, and protecting the rights of all involved.

Keywords:

• Best available science
• conflict
• data
• governance
• governmentality
• natural resources
• power
• scientization

Notes

1 Despite completing this work a decade ago, we continue to do research on related topics in the region and are aware of no developments that would influence the data or interpretations offered here. In part, this is because the experiences related to us in the research are meaningful and important regardless of when they occurred in the past.

2 Note that here, we understand this respondent to be referring to whether the term was commonly applied in local policy and discourse, not that the word itself was recently coined, given that the word has been used in North American policy since at least the 1950s and its etymology traces back even further (Cowardin 1978).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported Global Water Futures which is funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, and by the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph.