The will to knowledge: natural resource management and power/knowledge dynamics

Power/knowledge and natural resource management

Michel Foucault’s sophisticated, detailed, and rich explorations into the entwining of power and knowledge have inspired a tremendous amount of scientific studies in many domains. His ideas fueled, and are still fueling, an extensive body of literature that explores the co-evolution of knowledge production and governance practices, often building on typical Foucaultian concepts such as discourse, governmentality, biopolitics, or genealogy. The Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning has offered a forum for many of these studies (e.g. Coffey & Marston, 2013; Duineveld & Van Assche, 2011; Feindt & Oels, 2005; Griggs & Howarth, 2017; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005; Oels, 2005; Rousselin, 2016; Sharp & Richardson, 2001; Van Assche, Duineveld, Beunen, & Teampau, 2011; Waage & Benediktsson, 2010). This Special Issue draws the attention to Michel Foucault, once again. The aim here is not just to reassert the case for discursive approaches to environmental policy and planning, but rather to investigate the freshness of his insights in power/knowledge dynamics to the study of natural resource management (NRM). We believe that a focus on power/knowledge is key to resolving the paradox that characterizes NRM, where despite a well-developed understanding and broad consensus on how to realize sustainable forms of NRM, there still remains a substantial gap between the promises and the actual realities of NRM.

This Special Issue originates from the idea that the literature about NRM can benefit from studies of knowledge, providing insights in how knowledge evolves, how particular types of knowledge become prevalent over others, and what effect this has. This focus on knowledge follows from the fact that certain types of knowledge, certain ways of constituting and understanding the natural resource, might lead to specific ways of managing or governing it (Van Assche, Beunen, & Duineveld, 2014). These forms of knowledge are reflected in institutional structures, management practices, as well as in the way management practices are monitored and evaluated (Hillier, 2016; Van Assche, Beunen, Duineveld, & Gruzmacher, 2017; Weber, Krogman, Foote, & Rooney, 2017). These forms of knowledge also shape the role and positions of particular actors and stakeholders (Arellano-Yanguas & Bernal-Gómez, 2017; Rap & Wester, 2017). Conversely, actors and the institutional structures in which they operate, influence which forms of knowledge play a pivotal role in natural resource governance (Jentoft, 2017; Weber et al., 2017). The knowledge about the resource itself and about the ways in which it could be managed is therefore co-evolving with actors and institution. Knowledge, as Foucault has repeatedly shown, is entwined with power (Foucault, 1979, 1998, 2003).

The ambition to gain a full, complete and final understanding of NRM (in Foucaultian terms, the ‘will to knowledge’) is thus inextricably linked to a quest for control in NRM (in Foucaultian terms, ‘the will to power’). Together these ambitions drive an ongoing search for novel approaches, different perspectives, and new knowledges, concepts, and promises. Unraveling the inextricable link between power and knowledge in the context of NRM demands for more extensive and in-depth studies toward the ongoing investments in the knowledge infrastructures that foster and enable the quest for control. In this Special Issue, each paper sets out to explore different resources, such as fish (Jentoft, 2017), water (Rap & Wester, 2017), copper and oil (Arellano-Yanguas & Bernal-Gómez, 2017), and wetlands (Weber et al., 2017), different forms of organization, and different aspects of power/knowledge relations and how they play out in governance.

One common thread is the argument for a move from NRM to natural resource governance. This can be seen as a plea for abandoning purely technical approaches to resource management, and a rejection of universally applicable recipes for resource regimes. More participatory forms of governance are thus advisable, as well as a more inclusive attitude toward different forms of expertise and local knowledge, as a path toward more fair and sustainable resource governance (Arellano-Yanguas & Bernal-Gómez, 2017; Rap & Wester, 2017). Yet, there are no magic bullets: each regime creates winners and losers, its own forms of opacity and risk, and its own set of rigidities. Jentoff furthermore argues that sustainable and just forms of governing entails more than getting the institutions right (Ostrom, 1990). Power/knowledge dynamics constantly influence the processes of governing and the performance of institutions, including mediating the relation between actors’ influences on how discourses can be created, institutionalized, and mobilized to advance particular interests, as Arellano-Yanguas and Bernal-Gómez (2017) show in their elaboration on the discourses about partnerships for development. Indeed, many of the contributions in this Issue highlight the need to clarify the benefits and weaknesses of dominant natural resource governance regimes and to question whether the current power/knowledge configurations best deliver sustainable and just outcomes.

The papers

The concept of discourse, as container and engine of both power and knowledge, is crucial in the Foucaultian understanding of natural resource governance. A full appreciation of the discursive construction of all sorts of knowledge (including here a range from geological expertise to feral cats) underlying ideologies of the political economy and concepts of a ‘good’ community, highlights the emergent and contingent nature of governance (c.f. Pottage, 1998; Van Assche, Duineveld, & Beunen, 2014). All knowledge is subjected to the diverse mechanisms of discursive construction, transformation, competition, and migration, which Foucault and his followers have unveiled. The more narratives (as discursive forms) are layered, the harder it becomes to clarify their entanglement, and the more difficult to change the power/knowledge configurations.

When natural resource governance alters pathways of object and subject construction, the entanglement of narratives creates difficulties for establishing alternative forms of governance; as suggested by Hillier in her analysis of ‘cat-construction and reconstruction’ in Australian policies (Hillier, 2016). Weber et al. (2017) in their fine-grained and deeply documented study of evolving wetland governance in Alberta (Canada) also highlight this by showing the multiplicity of forms of neo-liberal discourse, which have emerged to shape an ideologically loaded regional identity.

The Alberta story (Weber et al., 2017), the analysis of the mining sector by Arellano-Yanguas and Bernal-Gómez (2017), as well as the analysis of the discursive and material construction of water management arrangements by Rap and Wester (2017), all show the deep tracks of ideology as narrative, in explaining rigid governance paths and constituting the limits and possibilities of change in NRM. These studies also highlight the links between these narrative rigidities and slowly evolved institutional frameworks (cf. Van Assche, Beunen, et al., 2014). Power/knowledge configurations and institutional structures shape each other over time, and the resistance to progressive change can sometimes be located in institutions or alternative power/knowledge configurations, while elsewhere it might be a product of actors strategizing to keep their interests intact. In most cases, it is likely to be a combination of all three and can be extremely difficult to reveal and disentangle.

Actors are not immune to power/knowledge dynamics. Even the most well-protected, entrenched, dominant, authoritarian, or strategic players are not entirely in control of natural resource governance and of the power/knowledge configurations that benefit them. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, this may be because the entire governance configuration, and everything that happens there, is not completely transparent to these actors. Secondly, as Van Assche et al. and several other contributions (Arellano-Yanguas & Bernal-Gómez, 2017; Jentoft, 2017; Rap & Wester, 2017) show that the weapon of discourse alters its users, therewith shifting their position and influence in governance and relation to others. Thirdly, a particular discourse may simply lose its power at some point, creating space for new ideas, narratives, and ideologies to gain influence and momentum.

The evolution of natural resource governance in a particular society is strongly driven by what is seen as a ‘resource’ and by the way it is (economically) valued. The discursive construction of a resource overrides any supposedly objective economic necessities, except in rare cases. If all fish is there is to eat, the material necessity will likely produce fish as central object in many discourses and will probably lead to elaborate institutional frames regulating fishing (Jentoft, 2017). Van Assche et al. (2017) bring the concept of livelihoods into the Foucaultian orbit, by presenting these livelihoods as ways to make a living, strongly tied to a particular social-ecological system, with power/knowledge emerging from a unique coupling between the physical and discursive landscapes. Particular features of the landscape, and the place of the resource in that landscape, co-evolve with human organization, and such coupled social-ecological systems enable and sustain specific livelihoods. When those livelihoods are threatened, and when those affected are not included in decision-making, the call for participation will be immediate, and the question of social justice and new forms of redistribution asserts itself. If people go hungry, even the most authoritarian regimes tend to collapse.

Natural resource governance attracts conflicts naturally and easily, the more so when people are dependent on one resource or when many users and resources are in close proximity. As Jentoft shows in his story of coastal governance, Rap and Wester in their elaboration on the water users in Mexico, and Arellano-Yanguas and Bernal-Gómez when talking about mining, conflicts tend to lead their own life and can overshadow all other aspects of a natural resource regime or broader governance configuration. Institutional experimentation is often presented as solution to these conflicts, often including new forms of participation. Yet, past experiences of conflict can shape everything that happens in any particular conflict and can affect attempts at reform, as it is translated back in the conflict narratives of the actors (Vries et al., 2015). Along similar lines, the complexity of a place, such as a coastline with many resources and interests attached to it, embedded within many levels of governance, can be a persistent source of opacity, challenges to coordination, or conflicts themselves (Jentoft, 2017). Once actors adopt positions of power, entrench their narratives in institutions, or even institutionalize conflicts, any attempt to shift NRM in a different direction can become extremely difficult, Jentoft persuasively argues.

The adaptive capacity of governance systems

These elaborations bring us to a key theme in current environmental literature which can be further elucidated through a power/knowledge lens: adaptive capacity (Armitage, 2010; Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg, 2005). While not overtly using the concept, all contributors show that NRM needs to be adaptive. It needs to adapt to changing environmental circumstances, and to shifting needs and ideas amongst all those involved. Following the insights explored in this Special Issue we can distinguish three different ways in which NRM can become more adaptive.

Firstly, embedding NRM in broader decision-making arenas (our plea for natural resource governance) already carries a dimension of adaptivity. Secondly, there is an argument for reflexivity, as grasping the narrative and institutional underpinnings of a regime clarifies transformation options. Thirdly, by including the framing concept of social-ecological systems in Foucaultian power/knowledge analysis and recommending the inclusion of such concept of system-in-environment in NRM practices. Analyzing the NRM regime as part of a broader environment, one of coupled discursive and ecological systems, brings the possibility of seeing new linkages between regime and environment and therefore of adaptive needs and possibilities (Van Assche et al., 2017).

Finally, the contributors show us an intriguing diversity in the functioning of power/knowledge in natural resource governance. In Foucaultian fashion, power is appearing as both oppressive and liberating, both revealing and obscuring, and both enabling and impeding. The power to do something, the power to persuade, and the power of discourse over the influencers are not different per se. These powers often presume each other and are all understandable in their functioning and permutations by their coupling in power/knowledge, in discourse.

A more sustainable and just future?

If we want to look critically at existing natural resource regimes, the lens of power/knowledge provides a valuable tool to grasp their sustainability effects, their implications for social justice, or for economic development. Unraveling power/knowledge configurations in current regimes can bring clarity to distributions of benefits and can illuminate the connections between thinking and organizing that are in some ways enabling, in other ways disabling governance adaptation. The conclusions drawn from such an analysis can point to how these connections can be loosened, or indeed, how new connections can be created to produce novel approaches for new forms of organization toward a more sustainable and just future.

Safeguarding democratic contexts for natural resource governance is likely the best embedding strategy for more localized strategies of governance transformation. Conflict can nevertheless be expected in natural resource governance. From a Foucaultian perspective such conflict is neither necessarily positive nor negative as a conflict can just as well undermine good regimes as bad ones. It can be productive and destructive. It can produce new objects, subjects, and institutions for the greater good, as it can keep an unfavorable situation in place (Duineveld & Van Assche, 2011). The various contributors to this Special Issue show that power/knowledge analysis of detailed cases is a very insightful method of linking conflict analysis to a path of improvement, toward policy recommendations and possible transformations. The authors also show that the literature on power/knowledge itself adapted well to changing conceptual landscapes, with new theories being enriched by Foucaultian insights, and power/knowledge analyses developing under the influence of concepts in a variety of theories and disciplines, from Deleuze, to institutional economics, public administration, anthropology, and geography.

Next steps

In brief, this Special Issue shows how the will to power drives the constant production and selection of knowledge, including all kinds of scientific knowledge about natural resources, their embedding in a social-ecological environment, and about the ways in which they can be managed and governed. The different contributions show how this leads to certain discourses becoming dominant at the cost of other understandings, and elaborate on the impact this has on the policies and practices on NRM. This presentation of power/knowledge and NRM is intended as a plea both for the enduring relevance of Foucault’s work for analyzing NRM and for opening up channels between an often critical Foucault-inspired academia, and conceptual currents in broader environmental studies.

Hopefully, this Special Issue inspires researchers working on NRM and environmental governance to scrutinize how the will to power is inextricably coupled with the will to knowledge. This would call for more attention for the production and use of all kinds of knowledge and the effects it has on management and governance. It would also trigger questions about the presumed obviousness of the world and all elements that constitute that world. It would bring attention to the multitude of ontologies that underlie the knowledge of and in social-ecological systems and it would give materiality a place without ignoring the discursive construction of everything in governance. We hope this Special Issue inspires researchers to question the taken-for-granted understandings of the world, of natural resources, of management and governance, and explore how these are created and re-created in the everyday interactions between humans, organizations and discourses and how it gets entrenched in policies and other institutions, that conversely shape the course of events and thus the world as it is known.

There is much to explore and the more one explores, the more will reveal itself underexplored or unnoticed. To structure and reduce the possible research futures we see three promising avenues: firstly, the investigation of material path dependencies in environmental governance. This could include exploring the diversity in effects of the material on both discursive and organizational structures and processes, but also the effects of the interaction between discursive and organizational spheres on amplifying, attenuating, or selecting these different material effects. Secondly, the study of livelihoods as both routes of navigating and modes of construction of social-ecological systems, where a deeper understanding of material effects can lead to new insights into the relation between navigation (of what is there) and construction (modification of what precedes the livelihood). Livelihoods can also be seen as processes, interacting with other processes. Thirdly, we would like to make an argument for a new look at learning processes toward adaptive governance, where a Foucaultian-inspired view on environmental studies, linked to prevalent concepts of social-ecological systems and adaptation might help to disentangle the normative (often ideological) and analytic aspects of the literature on learning and adaptation. It can clarify the relations between concepts such as social learning, transformative learning, organizational learning, and sustainability learning. Indeed, the learning literature importantly observes that changing policy, changing governance configurations toward sustainability and fairness cannot happen without learning, yet power/knowledge perspectives are utterly useful to grasp what learning is and what the effects of the learned could be.