What’s the story? Creating and sustaining environmental networks

Abstract

Networks have been embraced as appropriate means for environmental governance because of their potential inclusivity, flexibility, resilience, and ability to comprehend multiple values and ways of knowing. Analysis of networks, however, falls short of accounting for the emergence and persistence of these innovative and complex modes of governance, as well as their failures. We offer a framework for using narrative to understand and evaluate networks. We understand networks to be sets of relationships, between humans and also between humans and their environment, that define and guide behaviour. Narrative is a constitutive element of these networks; narrative and network are co-produced. Narrative analysis enables a critical investigation of environmental action and policy that at the same time captures the variety of environmental relationships and associated meanings and emotions that can inspire collaborative behaviour. Using a case study of the development of alternative agriculture in the United States, we provide a methodology for investigating ‘narrative-networks’ that affords deeper explanations of how and why emergent, often informal and unlikely, environmental networks endure over time.

Keywords:

• environmental politics
• narrative
• social network
• non-human
• environmental policy

Acknowledgements

The authors thank their reviewers and the editors of this journal for their constructive feedback and ideas for improvement.

Notes

^1. A 1971 comment from former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz captures a common attitude at the time: ‘We can go back to organic farming if we must – we know how to do it. However, before we move in that direction, someone must decide which 50 million of our people will starve’. Butz, E. 1971. Crisis or challenge? Nation’s Agriculture, July–August: 19.