How can we ever create participation when we are the ones who decide? On natural resource management practice and its readiness for change

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the gap between demands for participatory approaches in natural resource management (NRM) policies and lack of such approaches in the work of environmental authorities. The analysis draws on practice theory, using the case of NRM practice created by Swedish County Administrative Board (CAB) officials. The data originate from officials’ reflections during courses designed to strengthen their participatory and collaborative competences. Based on practice theory, officials are seen as participants of a routinised practice in which their interpretations of their work and roles are socially constructed. The analysis shows that the objective of this practice is to protect nature and mitigate resistance from stakeholders through information. These interpretations have acquired a reified nature, making them taken for granted. This stabilises the practice, maintaining the gap between demands in national policies and their implementation. To enable change in the CAB practice, the objective constructed by officials needs to be reinterpreted to produce a rule of law that can be justified and which concurrently permits stakeholder participation. To achieve changes in NRM officials’ practice, these need to be seen in their institutional context and comprise the whole system, from international/EU auditing levels to Swedish CABs and the officials’ everyday activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Practice theory
• policy practice
• stability-change
• routine
• reification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Lotten Westberg is a researcher at the division of Environmental Communication at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences specialising in research on dialogue, collaboration, learning and related ideas inherent in modern policies on natural resource governance. She had published within interdisciplinary environmental research journals in particular, where she develops empirical work from a practice theoretical perspective.

Dr Cecilia Waldenström is a senior lecturer in rural development at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, specialising in rural policies, agrarian change and learning processes connected to these issues. Her broader research interests include the role of voluntary work and civil society in EU rural policy projects as well as learning in the context of local rural development and in connection to EU rural policy programmes.