Categories are all around us: Towards more porous, flexible, and negotiable boundaries in conservation-production landscapes

Abstract

Dahlberg, D. 2015. Categories are all around us: Towards more porous, flexible, and negotiable boundaries in conservation-production landscapes. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 00, 00–00. ISSN 0029-1951.

In order to communicate and act in the world we divide it into categories, with boundaries that define belonging and exclusion. Categories take shape through processes influenced by, for example, history, discourses, ecologies, and power relations. Although we intellectually know that categories are social constructs we tend to treat them as if they have an intrinsic reality of their own when we describe and act in any given landscape. This understanding is explored within a political ecology framework through a case study of protected areas in relation to other land uses in Sweden. The study relies primarily on interviews with actors affected by conservation efforts, and highlights that categories are not neutral phenomenon, but have ecological, material and social effects in the landscape. It discusses how the simplification of a complex and dynamic whole into static categories can result in paradoxes with unexpected and sometimes negative effects on rural development and land care arrangements. The study advocates a more flexible understanding and handling of categories – and thus of landscapes – to enhance the potential for multiple landscape values to exist in overlapping, dynamic and paradoxical ways.

Keywords:

• boundaries
• categories
• conservation
• farming
• reserves

Acknowledgements

I thank the landowners, leaseholders, livestock owners, county officials, and others who shared their knowledge and experiences. Special thanks are due to Peter Dahlström, who provided practical help and read an earlier version of this text. Also others have made insightful comments, namely Sara Borgström, J.-O. Helldin, Calle Sanglert, Anders Wästfelt, and two anonymous reviewers. The fieldwork in Öland and Roslagen was conducted with colleagues involved in the HÅLA project, Elisabeth Gräslund-Berg, Katarina Saltzman and Anders Wästfelt, whom I thank for stimulating discussions in and about different landscapes. That fieldwork, as well my own fieldwork in Östergötland and Värmland, was part of a study financed by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish National Heritage Board.

Notes

1. Academic disciplines are examples of relatively static and inflexible categories (Proctor 1998; Cloke & Johnston 2005b).

2. An earlier, shorter and popular science version of this article, written in Swedish, has been published (Dahlberg 2014).

3. The definition was obtained from ‘Ordlista svenska-engelska’, an unpublished Swedish-English wordlist provided by the Swedish National Heritage Board, Stockholm, in September 2010.

4. It is worth noting that the Swedish Environmental Code (Government Offices of Sweden 2015) does not mention cultural values or the cultural landscape in its definition of nature reserves.

5. That is, if we momentarily ignore the effects on the weather caused by anthropogenic climate change.