Political Ecology and the Demand for Organizational Ethnography Kenneth I. MacDonald Dept. of Geography and Interdisciplinary Program in International Development Studies University of Toronto at Scarborough 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M1C 1A4 [email protected]
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Acknowledgements: A much shorter version of this paper was presented at the 2002 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in a session entitled “Imagining an Ethnographic Political Ecology”. My thanks to Paige West for organizing that session and to other session participants, particularly the discussant Neil Smith, for valuable comments. Thanks also to the people of Askole and Hushe for their hospitality and their subtle reminders that the exercise of developmentalist power is often fickle, self‐indulgent and fraught with contradictions.
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Abstract Political Ecology has, over the past 15 years, done much to elucidate how relations of power are embedded not simply in the production of nature but also in the structuring of material ecological practice. While much of this research has been based on singular studies of communities, little of it has engaged seriously with questions of the scalar relations of power. In this paper, I argue that a focus on the scalar dimensions of power relations is integral to understanding the role of agency in the ideological production of nature and the material practices that derive from it. Central to understanding these relations is a process of longitudinal research that relies on multi‐scaled and sited ethnography. As communities and environments, localized in space, become increasingly subject to the institutional demands of so‐called global organizations that appeal to the authority of particular disciplinary perspectives (e.g., biological science, economics, etc.) in their production and circulation of knowledge, it becomes necessary to understand the ‘cultures’ of such institutions. This process, however, must start from a long‐term engagement with communities subject to such institutional processes and work outward to comprehend how the globalization of everyday life ‐ taken to mean the subjectivities and material effects produced through, willing or unwilling, participation in ever‐expanding socio‐spatial relations – in such places is tied to the political discursive resources housed in ‘global’ institutions. An understanding of this relation demands an ethnography of such global institutions, yet it is an ethnographic focus on such scalar relations that is absent from Political Ecology. In this paper, I use the example of the interventionist practices of ‘global’ conservation agencies in northern Pakistan to illustrate how an understanding of the processes involved in globalizing everyday life demands ethnographic research within ‘global’ institutions themselves.
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INTRODUCTION
As I began this paper a dispute between academic institutions and government
agencies in both India and the UK came to my attention. At the center of this
dispute is a report produced by two activist scholars ‐ employed by the
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and the
Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex (IDS) ‐ based on a
method, citizen juries, meant to illicit ‘public participation’ in a broad‐based
development project planned for the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (Pimbert
and Wakeford 2002). The report is directly critical of a U.K. government agency
(Department for International Development (DFID)) and accuses it of failing to
adequately consult the individuals – mostly farmers ‐ who will be most directly
affected by its actions. The Head of DFID’s India office responded, not
surprisingly, with assertions that the claims of the academics were unfounded,
but also sought to undermine the credibility of the report by questioning the
integrity of the methodology used by the authors, and a request to have the
report removed from public circulation and taken off the IIED website. The
directors of the institutions that employ the academics, presumably prompted by
DFID to take a stand, adopted a middle ground – they claim to appreciate the
report but also question the integrity of the methodology. Both of these critiques
center on questions that highlight a positivist epistemology as a standard for the
assessment of knowledge and truth claims:
Our conclusion is that the presentation of the Prajateerpu report does not reflect a sufficiently ʹprecautionary ʹ approach, that the results should have been presented as promising but requiring replication, further verification and additional independent validation. (Bezanson and Cross 2003; 27).
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Aside from the substantive claims of different parties to the dispute, what should
be of interest to ‘political ecologists’ in exchanges like these, is the need to
understand the vested stakes that give rise to such disputes. Far from simply a
disagreement over appropriate means and checks on the production of
knowledge, these conflicts can tell us much about the deployment of power
within and between institutions and organizations, the use of technology to
present an image of (self?) interested dialogue, the contested production of
meaning within inequitable power relations, and the ideological mechanisms
through which distant institutions attempt to shape situated human‐
environment relations. However, while insights can be gleaned by reading
accounts of conflicts such as the ‘Prajateerpu affair’ and by analyzing relevant
project documents, we cannot really begin to approach an understanding of the
institutional practices of power which differentially affect people’s lives and
environments unless we have access to the institutions themselves – access that
allows us to glean from those whispered conversations in the canteen, the formal
declarations in official meetings, and the strategic board room chats in which
letters responding to conflicts like Prajateerpu are negotiated and drafted. At this
point in the history of political ecology ‐ if we are sincere in realizing the implicit
potential of political ecology to expose the relationships between power and
nature‐society relations ‐ it is these sites of power that need to be accessed.
Within Anthropology and Geography, the two disciplines that most
clearly lay claim to the study of political ecology, many researchers have some
experience with these relations at particular spatial scales – usually a village or
‘community’. They have lived in communities, albeit from situated positions ‐
not always of their own choosing, and they have witnessed operations of power.
They may have seen how the alleged and potential benefits of development
projects are captured and channeled by local elites before they reach the intended
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beneficiaries, often with the consent of many in the community, and revealed
how the intervention of external agencies is used to legitimate ideological
domination at a local scale. In these spaces of direct and regular interaction, the
ever‐changing workings of power, initially hidden, are gradually revealed over
time. It is possible for a long‐term observer to witness the processes through
which external agencies/institutions gain access to communities, read their
documents and recognize that what is documented in official reports to donors
or collaborating agencies is not what is happening “on the ground”. And
through such analysis the politics that underlie discrepancies between how
interventionist agencies describe their operations and how intervention actually
transpires become clear.1 This understanding develops, largely on the basis of
observation, from a particular standpoint ‐ usually as a gendered, classed and
raced ‘participant/observer’ situated within a village or some like‐community.
But this is a limited perspective for it fails to offer insight from a different and, at
this point, a perhaps more important position – that of a participant/observer
situated within an institution that occupies a super‐ordinate position within the
power relations that bind situated communities, and ‘environments’ to the
distant organizations that act upon them. It is the importance of such work, in
the context of contributing to a political ecology better able to address questions
of the relations between agency and scale that I address in this paper.
The motivation for this paper emerges from a concern that Political
Ecology requires a new kind of empirical information in order to better
comprehend how operations of power structure place‐specific relations between
people and ‘nature’. Political Ecology, since its emergence, has incorporated
diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to produce an understanding
of the mechanisms through which relations of power structure continually
shifting nature‐society relations (Bryant and Bailley 1997, Robbins 2004). But
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many of us who “do” political ecology have failed to appropriately consider the
question of the scale of those power relations in understanding how human‐
environment relations constituted as ‘local’ actually encompass trans‐local
relations and processes to give rise to what we might call trans‐local ecologies.
By trans‐local ecologies I refer to material human‐environment relations that
emerge through the spatial reach of transnational organizations and capital into
the everyday social and ecological relations of communities previously removed,
to varying degrees, from those forces. In this paper, I argue that a focus on the
scalar dimensions of power relations is integral to understanding the role of
agency in the ideological production of nature and the material practices that
derive from it. Central to understanding these relations is a process of
longitudinal research that relies on multi‐scaled and sited ethnography (Marcus
1998). As communities and environments, localized in space, become
increasingly subject to the institutional demands of so‐called ‘global’
organizations, often referred to as INGOs (international non‐governmental
organizations) that appeal to the authority of particular disciplinary perspectives
(e.g., biological science, economics, etc.) in their production and circulation of
knowledge, it becomes necessary to understand the ‘cultures’ of such
organizations (Lewis 2003, Lewis et al. 2003). This process, however, must start
from a long‐term engagement with communities subject to such organizational
processes and work outward to comprehend how the ‘globalization of everyday
life’ ‐ taken to mean the subjectivities and material effects produced through,
willing or unwilling, participation in ever‐expanding socio‐spatial relations – in
such places is tied to the political discursive resources housed in organizations
that may represent themselves as ‘global’, but are more accurately
transnational2. Marcus (1998; 120) has noted that a concern with such
understanding has obvious methodological implications as it:
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inevitably pushes the entire research program of the single ethnographic project into the challenges and promises of a multi‐sited space and trajectory—a trajectory that encourages the ethnographer literally to move to other sites that are powerfully registered in the local knowledge of an originating locus of fieldwork.
Accordingly, an understanding of this relation demands an ethnographic
approach to the study of such global organizations, yet it is this aspect of
understanding scalar relations of power that is absent from much work in
Political Ecology and Geography in general (cf., Rankin 2003). In this paper, I
use the example of the interventionist practices of ‘global’ conservation
organizations operating in northern Pakistan to illustrate how an understanding
of the processes involved in globalizing everyday life and bringing localized
human‐environmental relations within the sphere of authority of distant
organizations demands ethnographic research within ‘global’ organizations
themselves.
BACKGROUND: CREATING TRANS‐LOCAL ECOLOGIES
The term trans‐local ecologies implies a relation of scale. For something to
be trans‐local is for an object or set of relations to have moved beyond or
transcended boundaries, real or imagined, that define it as local. To some extent,
this is an illusion. Few hard and fast boundaries separate one locale from
another. Perhaps some of the most durable, however, are social boundaries that
delimit who may or may not belong to a community (Barth 2000, Cohen 2000).
Though these have, to some extent, become more permeable within the socio‐
economic relations of late capitalist societies, they still resonate strongly in small‐
scale agricultural societies around the world where survival continues to depend
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upon gaining access to resources that exist beyond the reach of state control.
Such is the case in northern Pakistan, where I first began thinking about the
concept of trans‐local ecologies. The Karakoram mountain communities that I
have worked in are very much “local” in the sense that I have outlined above.
Membership is typically through marriage or birth and, while infrequent out‐
migration occurs, in‐migration does not. Land throughout the mountain range is
strictly delimited as belonging to particular communities, and few non‐
community members (exceptions include state representatives, local political
elites, and military personnel) can gain access to “local” community controlled
resources. Human‐environmental relations historically have been beyond the
regularized influence of extra‐local institutions such as state departments of
forestry, wildlife, or agriculture. Certainly these relations have been historically
structured by institutional concerns – say the need to pay taxes or tribute, or the
resource demands of political elites or colonial officials ‐ but direct intervention
on the part of these institutional actors was rare and where it did occur was
based on exacting what could be claimed out of the extant productivity of
human‐environment interactions rather than altering those interactions
themselves. Where alteration was attempted (e.g., state sanctions on subsistence
hunting) these were, more often than not, ignored locally as the reach of state
surveillance did not breach the social boundaries of ‘the village’. These same
communities, however, have long been trans‐local in a number of ways. For
decades, they supply porter labour for mountaineering expeditions, and have
come to acquire significance within the global mountaineering and mountain
tourism ‘community’ as that ‘community’ has invested stakes of identity and
capital in ‘conquering’ high peaks (MacDonald 1998). This significance and the
interaction it entails impact localized human‐environment relations in a number
of ways, but again this is indirect and unplanned ‘intervention’. More recently,
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however, localized human‐environment relations have become the object of
knowledge and action for transnational development and conservation
organizations, which explicitly strive to alter localized human‐environment
relations in particularized ways that satisfy institutional agendas. Particular
among these are IUCN‐The World Conservation Union (IUCN), and the World
Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). While the interventions enacted by these
agencies vary from place to place around the world, the bases for intervention
and the goals of intervention, as read through mediating texts, share particular
commonalities. I discuss these below, but first, I want to outline the particular
project that led me to think about translocal ecologies and the need for
organizational ethnographies. In doing so I hope to illustrate a set of
methodological points, primary among these: that effective institutional
ethnography is an avowedly political project arising from an awareness of and
experience with a more localized and particularized understanding of human‐
environment relations; and, that it is best viewed as one stage in a larger
intellectual project that seeks to understand the formation of trans‐local
ecologies.
The Localized Project
The village of Hushe, a small community of about 100 households lies at
the head of one of the outermost valleys of mountainous northeast Pakistan. As
part of an agro‐pastoral society Hushe controls access to lands and resources in
much of the uninhabited regions that extend north east from the village toward
the Chinese and Indian borders. In 1996, IUCN approached leaders in Hushe
with a plan meant to conserve the officially endangered stock of Himalayan Ibex
(capra ibex sibirica), a wild mountain goat, native to the region. The plan, in line
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with the market ideology of many contemporary conservation initiatives, was
essentially a “cash for wildlife” swap. Based on ill‐grounded assumptions that
village‐based hunting was responsible for an assumed but undemonstrated
decline in ibex numbers, IUCN offered to generate cash for the village by selling
a limited number of hunting permits to foreign hunters in exchange for an
agreement from village leaders that villagers would discontinue hunting ibex for
subsistence purposes. The project, accepted by village leaders, carried with it a
number of unexpected, or at least unstated, outcomes. The capitalization of what
had been a symbolic commodity, ibex, set in motion a new shift in the localized
meaning of “nature” (MacDonald 2004). It redefined what had been an
important symbolic and social activity (hunting) into, at least on the part of some
proponents of the project, a crime against the community rather than the state. It
also inserted tensions within an admittedly fragmenting social structure; allowed
some villagers ‐ those with access to capital resources ‐ to capture and distribute
the benefits of the project in particularized ways; strained long‐standing
reciprocal relations between Hushe and neighbouring villages; and created the
incentive for directing changes in ecological practice that would encourage the
containment of what is essentially a fugitive resource, ibex (MacDonald 2005).
While these localized outcomes can partially be explained through an absence of
careful social and ecological research by the institutional proponents of the
project, much more of the explanation can be read through the texts of project
documents that, at least superficially, provide insight into the conceptual
apparatus used in project formulation. Read as a map of social relations and the
ideological representations that influence them, the project proposal navigates
away from the particularized and localized context of Hushe to broader scales of
social knowledge and geographical position (Government of Pakistan n.d.,
Ahmed & Hussain 1998).
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The project in Hushe came about as part of a wider $6 million Global
Environment Facility (GEF) initiative entitled “Maintaining Biodiversity in
Pakistan with Rural Development” that linked three transnational NGOs ‐ The
Global Environment Facility (GEF); IUCN; and the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP) – with the government of Pakistan (GoP). As the
implementing agency, IUCN‐Pakistan was responsible for helping villages to
prepare “Village Biodiversity Management Plans” in an effort to link the
objectives of biodiversity protection with those of rural community development.
The aim of this project was to “demonstrate how conservation of Pakistan’s
biodiversity [could] be enhanced by providing rural villages with the technical
skills to manage wild species and habitats for sustainable use and to assess the
effectiveness of rural village management of natural resources” (Government of
Pakistan n.d.; 2). This objective falls within a wider GEF/UNDP interest “to test
and perfect a new approach in conserving biodiversity, replicable both nationally
and internationally” (Government of Pakistan n.d.; 2). These statements deploy
meaning‐laden terms such as biodiversity and development, but they also point
toward a strategic goal of normative environmental management based on
several apparent assumptions. Within the logic of this project, rural villagers, to
be able to manage wildlife effectively, need to be subjected to and adopt
technical practices and standards that satisfy externally defined goals of
effectiveness and efficiency. The divide here is as much epistemological and
ontological as it is material. Constructs such as ‘rural villagers’, ‘community’,
‘biodiversity’ and ‘development’ are taken to be singular, cohesive, and
uncontested entities. As such, there is no need to address any differentiation
internal to these terms, nor to question their ideological roots. This strategy is
typical of the labeling practices deployed in the exercise of development (and
many other forms of bureaucratic management) (Escobar 1995, Brosius et al.
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1998). The statements, however, also contain understandings of a material
divide reminiscent of earlier development ideologies within which institutional
worldviews and related agendas external to the objectified ‘community’ set
objectives to which ‘the community’ must contribute. The community is seen not
to be contributing to those objectives because of a lack of suitable knowledge,
skills, or technology. Consequently those ‘assets’ need be transferred to ‘the
community’ in order to satisfy institutional objectives. This is a classic ‘expert’‐
‘practitioner’ dichotomy. In this case, ‘experts’ situated in global organizations –
organizations that represent themselves as entities concerned with global
problems, and are part of a network of institutions that connect specific nodes
around the world – determine what localized adjustments must be accomplished
to meet institutional objectives and set the parameters under which
‘communities’ and other organizations will adjust. If we take the Hushe case as
an example, we can see that the logic is not quite this simple. IUCN ‘experts’, in
a particularly Weberian manner, realized that incentives could be used to
encourage appropriate adjustment and took advantage of a desire for cash that
could be used to acquire the stuff of modernization (conveniently packaged in
the concept of “rural development”) to provide an incentive for villagers to
modify ecological practice – i.e., to refrain from hunting. Though not wholly
successful, the capacity to get villagers to obey an authority that had no internal
legitimacy (IUCN), relied on the use of ‘booty’. It leveraged the vast inequities
between villagers and relatively wealthy foreign hunters to acquire access to
what, within local ideologies of nature, had been thought of as ‘local’ property.
However, the foreign market for hunting exotic game, which provided the
‘booty’, was deployed in the name of something with much more global
significance – the protection of biodiversity.
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Biodiversity and the Spatial Extension of Organizational Ecology
As an organization, IUCN has established the protection of global
biodiversity as its raison d’etre. The “mission statement” of the organization
spells it out clearly3:
To influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable. A common vision, a single mission, the diverse needs of its vast constituencies and dedication to the conservation of biological diversity drive the worldʹs oldest and largest global conservation body.
This goal of biodiversity protection and the role of IUCN – “the world’s oldest
and largest global conservation body” – rely on an appeal to a global image of an
interconnected web of life. It is this appeal, and the assertion that transnational
organizations know best how to co‐ordinate responses to an environment
understood as such, that are used to claim wildlife, like the Himalayan Ibex, as
global property. In effect, it is the appeal to the “global” significance of
individual species and localized environments that is used to deterritorialize
those species their habitats from their historical interaction with human
communities (Jamison 1996). It is also this appeal that legitimates the
intervention of transnational conservation organizations that set about
restructuring human‐environment relations and reterritorializing them in
modified, but “planned”, forms (Luke 1999). That transnational organizations
have over the past 30 years increasingly gained greater influence over shaping
the policies and practices which regulate human‐environmental relations has, to
some extent, become a truism (Taylor and Buttel 1992, Frank et al. 1999). It is
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fairly clear that in many situations, despite localized efforts at resistance, the
ability to direct environmental use is being distanced from those who live with
the immediate consequences (Flitner 1999, Zerner 2000). This is not to portray
some norm of equality in access, decision‐making, vulnerability or benefit in
those places. It is merely to say that, even taking account of inequitable power
relations at a micro‐scale, decision‐making has often ‘jumped scale’ so that, in
line with Giddens’ (1990) formulation of distanciation, decisions that seek to
govern localized and particularized human‐environment relations are
increasingly being made in organizations distant from those locales and in the
absence of an appreciation of context.
In the case of environmental decision‐making, including ‘policy‐making’,
‘planning’ and implementation, a realm or regime of distanced practice has
developed over the past 150 or so years emerging out of colonial era
administrations or private elite organizations which have subsequently evolved
into contemporary transnational environmental organizations (Young 1994,
Goldman 2003, Vogler 2003, Adams 2004). The ability of organizations to
exercise this spatial and governmental “sphere of authority” has much to do with
the rise of environmentalism as a political force over the same time period, but,
as the emergence of the field of environmental (in)justice has taught us, a
concern with the environmental consequences of action has never been divorced
from the subject positionality of those acting. Value judgments regarding the
knowledge and capacity of actors have always factored into considerations of the
source and significance of environmental impact4. Certainly in the case of
Hushe, the representation of an incapable local population is used to try
legitimate the intervention of IUCN, an agency that effectively uses a discourse
of global ecology to accumulate political power. But at root access to Hushe is
structured through inequity: a desire on the part of at least some villagers for
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cash to satisfy the long promised benefits of ‘development’, and the ability of the
institution to provide access to this cash. Absent this leverage of ‘booty’, it is
unclear how intervention would have been facilitated in Hushe. Similar relations
of inequity can be seen to facilitate state sanction of IUCN activities. Given that
the government of Pakistan assumes sovereign jurisdiction over all
environmental resources contained within its borders, IUCN cannot operate in
Pakistan without the sanction of the state. But in many cases, the government is
pleased to have IUCN assume responsibility for implementing environmental
programs. Indeed, the Pakistan National Conservation Policy, a document that
guides internal environmental research and policy formation was written largely
by representatives of, or consultants hired, by IUCN, WWF, and the Canadian
International Development Agency (CIDA) (Government of Pakistan 1992).
Some of the reasons for this willingness to cede authority are fairly
straightforward. It allows a fiscally beleaguered state to shift a financial burden
onto an NGO, which in turn contributes to its ability, for example, to meet the
public spending reduction demands of International Monetary Fund dictates,
and help satisfy the cost of debt servicing, or devote fiscal resources to more
immediate concerns of the state (cf. Steinberg 2003). All of this can be
accomplished without ceding the legal authority to curtail NGO activities where
they are seen to contradict or conflict with state interests.
The extension of transnational conservation interests in northern Pakistan
described above is not an isolated example and is directly related to the
production, and circulation, of a discourse of global ecology. This discourse
emphasizes the protection of biodiversity, but it is very much grounded in the
legitimating value of science and the ontological status of ecology that
incorporates distinct political environments into a global commons (Taylor &
Buttel 1992, Takacs 1996). The dominance of ‘global ecology’ has come about in
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part through the power of transnational organizations to produce and circulate
knowledge, and their control over access to funding that local governments can
use to pursue developmentalist goals (Goldman 2001). This network of power
sets up conditions through which a discourse of global ecology wends its way
into national level institutions and emanates from them through regional and
local level nodes until it takes on a material reality in the form of specific projects
in very localized environments. While a discourse of global ecology can be seen
as emerging from the cultural politics of environmentalism in the 1960s, the
institutional processes employed by transnational environmental organizations
has a much longer history and an important part of any organizational
ethnography must be to recognize the historical continuities that have
contributed to the spatial expansion of such organizations and the ideological
domination they exercise.5 This is a contested history at best, but IUCN, for
example, is not an organization that emerged out of the ‘new’ environmentalism
of the post‐Apollo age. Rather, it traces its institutional roots to 1948, and can be
genealogically connected to the imperialist environmental concerns of the Society
for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire (Adams 2004). This
organization was founded in 1903 by a small group of big‐game hunters who
sought to promote the establishment of wildlife preserves in Africa and Asia.
Ironically, this historical pedigree tends to give groups like IUCN‐The World
Conservation Union more credibility than some more recent organizations
tinged by the radical environmental politics of the 1960s. Not unlike
corporations which spawn subsidiary organizations for reasons of accounting or
specialization, NGOs engage in similar practices. IUCN for example maintains
42 regional and country offices in addition to its headquarters near Geneva, and
has given rise to a number of direct descendants such as WWF (which has
become an ersatz competitor).
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IUCN has developed as an institution as it has effectively pushed for an
acceptance of transnationalism and the legitimacy of supra‐national institutions
in dealing with problems similarly constructed as global. It has extended its
spatial reach from purely colonial possessions outward to more and more of the
globe. Its ability to do this has been strategically facilitated by association with
other transnational or supranational institutions such as various United Nations
organizations. In doing so, it has become what Rosen (2000) calls a center of
calculation and accumulation. In using these terms, Rosen means to describe
organizations, not simply as hierarchies, but as sites (often multiple sites) where
selective knowledge is accumulated and action designed. From, these sites,
knowledge and action flow to distant places.6 This flow, while not necessarily
unidirectional or dominating as some, like Escobar (1995) or Smith (1999), assert,
demands a response from those distant places. We can imagine this response as
taking different forms. Individuals or social groups may resist categorization;
they may accommodate, but manipulate, assigned labels (cf. Butz 2002). But the
demand is persistent ‐ to rationalize and then modify situated knowledge or
practice within ideological boundaries of understanding subscribed to by
transnational organizations like IUCN. Of course, this is not what necessarily
happens.7 Often there is little correspondence between demand and reply but a
reply there must be and it occurs within and through a network of ‘local’ power
relations that is increasingly connected to these organizations operating at a
distance.
This organizational demand and localized response delineate a network of
relations that stretch across space to connect distant organizations and their
ideational underpinnings with localized and particularized social and ecological
communities. Based on regular longitudinal fieldwork, it is fairly
straightforward to map these power relations to some extent. The project I have
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described above, for example, creates a network of relations that connects the
interests and political projects of some Hushe residents, high in the central
Karakoram, with the institutional agenda of the project partners in Islamabad,
Geneva, Washington and New York. At the outset of the project, IUCN had
already established a country office in Pakistan and was in the midst of
establishing regional offices in the north of the country. Largely on a whim,
representatives from IUCN visited the village, designated it as an appropriate
project site and established contact with individuals in positions of power within
the village. Simultaneously contact was made with government officials in the
district headquarters. The intensity and resiliency of connections between village
households and installed local leaders vary, typically along lines of fictive and
filial kinship. Connections between village leaders and regional elites, however,
are more complex and are affected by such factors as membership in regional
political parties, kinship ties, patronage demands, and access demands on the
part of local political elites (that would, for example, allow them to continue to
hunt while villagers are subject to a moratorium). Moving away from the village
and into the main administrative centre of Skardu, an increasing number of
actors enter the picture: connections are established between local IUCN staff
and local political elites. In this relationship, local staff find themselves relatively
powerless in relation to political elites (e.g., vulnerable to bureaucratic stalling,
sanctions on their activities based on differing interpretations of cultural
appropriateness). They also find themselves tied into relations with more senior
IUCN staff from the major offices in Islamabad and Karachi and with foreign
consultants who have direct connections to the head offices of the major donors.
To some extent, these sites of interface, sites where knowledge and action ‐ as
they flow from the center of the organization outward ‐ can be translated or
ideologically delimited, are observable, depending, of course, on issues of access.
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But the ease of observation rapidly decays as we move away from the situated
locale of project ‘implementation’ and toward the intellectual centers of the
organizations that structure terms of reference and reporting criteria the project
must satisfy. As we move away from the localized site of the project, the subject
of observation becomes increasingly nebulous and difficult to bring into focus.
This is where the invisibility of rule begins to take shape, not simply for
observers, but also for those who reside in the more localized webs of power.
The connections go on, of course, but it is not so easy to observe and map out
power relations as we move away from the localized context of the village
toward the organization(s) responsible for implementing the project.
The connections that I have sketched above express the physical and social
distance between the actors, but each set of actors exist similarly in locales that
can be studied much as we study ‘the community’. Working from within a
village like Hushe, I can only guess at the broader context within which an
organization like IUCN operates, and hence the network of relations into which
they invisibly situate villages like Hushe. From this standpoint, my
understanding of the ramifications of organizational intervention stops at a
particular point – generally the borders of the village, perhaps extending to the
regional market town. But when we realize that those borders are porous, that
situated individuals are connected to others across much greater reaches of time
and space, the borders of the village (or the ecosystem for that matter) as the
bounds of study become less helpful in understanding how local material
ecological relations are increasingly shaped by agendas formed at a significant
spatial and ideological distance (cf., Sundberg 1998).
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ORGANIZATIONS AND THE PRODUCTION OF SCALE
What is important in addressing the connections involved in modifying
localized human‐environmental practice is understanding how organizational
actors engage in the production of scale and rely on the authority attached to the
image of ‘global’ as a means of gaining access to particularized spaces. If we
accept Rosen’s definition of organizations as instruments for the attainment of
goals and instruments of power underlain and mediated by cultural and
ideational processes, we can begin to appreciate how the concept of scale is both
an instrument in that accumulation and a basis for the formulation and
attainment of goals (Smith 1992, Jones 1998). Bruno Latour’s (1987, 1999) work
offers insights into understanding the effects of producing scale. These center
mostly on mechanisms of abstraction and representation used by organizational
actors and the ways in which these mechanisms, derived from disciplinary
knowledge, provide the possibility for re‐definition and degrees of certainty. In
addressing questions of scale, Latour implicitly asks what it is that allows the
passage from conditions of ignorance to certainty among organizational actors.
He locates one answer in the capacity of organizational actors to reference to pre‐
existing modes of categorizing knowledge, what others might call labeling
practices. In relation to the project I am dealing with in Pakistan, for example, it
is clear that an agency like IUCN has a categorical ‘map’ that guides their
passage from ignorance to certainty in understanding the ‘place’ they will work
upon. This accumulation of produced knowledge is revealed in part through the
apparent absence of the need to conduct local research prior to project
formulation or the development of goals.8 Some of this ‘absence’ can be written
off to the simple capacity of the organization to intervene based on a history of
privileged position, and often backed by the coercive power of the state. More
significant though is their subscription to a set of ontological objects that are
21
taken to be universally natural and thus not open to question (biodiversity,
ecology, wildlife, community). These may vary by context but nonetheless serve
as vessels for the organization of knowledge. It is these objects that provide a
frame of certainty that allows organizations like IUCN to operate universally.
But in doing so, often for reasons of administrative expediency, transnational
organizations tend to annihilate context. ‘Community’, for example, a
categorical object common to many ‘conservation‐as‐development’ projects, is
typically treated as a monolithic entity with little attention paid to the very real
tensions and divergent interests that operate to structure proximal social
relations in particular ways (Brosius et al. 1998, MacDonald 2001). The
institutional perspective on community, however, is delimited by the
institutional agendas reflected in project goals or objectives, formed at a distance
from the communities to be affected by those goals. Project documents certainly
represent the village under consideration, but they do so selectively. Only those
objects of concern that are of interest to the organizational actor (according to
their pre‐set filters) make it into policy, project documents, and implementation
plans. This process of selectivity is directly related to an engagement in
institutional tasks that are deeply embedded in scales of knowledge production
and consequent action.
A spatial and social distance from objects of study characterizes the
activity of many transnational organizations and allows them to exercise the
power of scale. This is not an accidental gap, for distance, or what is often
benignly labeled as an ‘objective perspective’, Latour reminds us, allows the
operation of a unifying ‘gaze’ which can consult diverse examples and submit
them to comparison. And, it is this facility for consultation, comparison and
unity/conformity under a single organizational gaze that facilitates the emerging
prevalence of dominating notions such as “best practice” or “capacity‐building” ‐
22
the application of a managerial logic that annihilates context. In the act of
comparison, the observer/practitioner can disassemble and re‐assemble the
elements of observation – “the facts” – in ways that allow a shift in the context of
the original observations. They can turn interpretations into facts through a
process of vetting and categorizing. All of this amounts to what Latour (1999)
calls oversight ‐ a practice which means domination by sight – at once looking at
things from above (or beyond) and selectively accommodating or ignoring them.
The capacity for oversight, of course, implies the ability to ‘look’ from a distance
that allows the observer to take in a wide view. In the case of ‘global’
organizations, the ‘gaze’ is one that incorporates a ‘world’ of knowledge.
Under such a gaze, as ‘conservation‐as‐development’ projects are
developed and implemented, situated communities often find themselves and
their ecological practices detached, separated, preserved (if we take preservation
to imply an interpreted condition of stasis) classified, and tagged (for certain
ends) by organizational practices. They are represented in terms of their
relevance to criteria set by the organization and subsequently classified as a
particular type of community relative to the goals of the project. People and the
situated environments that surround them are described and re‐assembled in
organizational reports, and in the imagination of those who produce and
consume those texts, according to the principles and goals of the
observer/practitioner and the organization they represent. As understandings of
‘community’ flow through systems of communication to distant organizations,
we can think of the social relations that affect that community as having scale,
what Cox (1998) calls spaces of engagement9. And just as two‐dimensional
representations of place sacrifice detail for area, so too are the details of
‘community’ sacrificed in processes of abstraction that allow comparability
between communities and facilitate the application of a managerial logic.
23
In this move ‐ this abstraction – organizational actors are not simply
jumping from a material community to a representation of community, they are
replacing a dynamic entity composed of continuous and multiple socio‐
ecological interactions with a discrete unity locatable in space through x/y co‐
ordinates, and represented by fixed boundaries. Here then, an inequitable
relation which is temporally liminal and spatially marginal (i.e., the relation
between organizational actors operating in centers of accumulation and
calculation, and villagers) strips ‘community’ of context and creates a
homogeneity in which individuals are conceptually removed from a social
structure which is unseen or ignored by those intervening in it and inserts them
en masse into a new social structure created out of the institution’s cognitive
resources which include historical ideological representations of people and
place that position local communities as incapable of managing localized
ecosystems and situating them both as the source of the ecological ‘problem’,
and, with appropriate alterations in local ideologies of nature, elements of the
‘solution’ (cf. Rosen 1991). This is neatly phrased in the project proposal referred
to above:
Government agencies have a very limited capacity to enforce wildlife laws, making it virtually impossible to control rural people’s use of wild resources – especially when they need these resources to meet their subsistence requirements. The problem will become more acute with increasing human population if mechanisms are not provided for rural people to acquire the technical skills to manage wild resources. An alternative approach is needed that involves rural people in the solution rather than considering them the cause. (Government of Pakistan n.d.; 23)
My main point here is that organizations not only act on scale (i.e., distant
organizations act on localized environments), but that they actively produce the
24
connections that allow this action by taking advantage of inequity and their
privileged access to the material resources that facilitate the production,
accumulation and circulation of knowledge. In the case of organizations that
position and represent themselves as ‘global’, this provides them with the
capacity and the authority to act globally on local spaces. It is this increasing
ability to act from a distance that highlights the importance of studying
organizations as they produce the networks of interactions – the spaces of
engagement – that allow them to operate trans‐locally. As these transnational
organizations use inequity and the emergence of globalizing discourses to help
them represent and gain access to ‘localized’ environments, and as they strive to
implement normative, standardized practice, an appreciation of context, in all its
complexity, is increasingly deemed irrelevant at best and as an obstruction at
worst.10 That these same objects of knowledge – communities – cannot or do
not identify themselves as trans‐local entities is in part a question of identity
politics but also a function of inequities in access to the resources that allow
organizations like IUCN to claim trans‐local authority. Scales of operation, or
‘spheres of authority’, are, then, inequitable phenomenon grounded in a history
of inequitable power relations.
The combined operation of the interests I have described here is not
simply a form of innocuous intervention. Rather, it can be seen as a new form of
domination that has accompanied the rise of environmentalism. Luke has
referred to this as green governmentality which has been coincident with the
ways in which “the environment, particularly the goals of its protection, has
become a key theme of many political operations, economic interventions and
ideological campaigns to raise public standards of collective morality, personal
responsibility and collective vigor” (Luke 1999, 122). This green governmentality,
however, relies on a discourse that “tells us that today’s allegedly unsustainable
25
environments need to be disassembled, recombined and subjected to the
disciplinary designs of expert management”. (Luke 1999, 142) The example
discussed above is but one case among many where assertions of
unsustainability and a discourse of global ecology are used as the lever through
which to enter a community in order to apply expert designs to a local
environment. The goal here is to redirect a set of spatially contextualized human‐
environment relations to fulfill the ends of new scripts; in this case the script of
biodiversity protection and the transnational managerial and administrative
directives that accompany it. For this redirection to occur, however, existing
means of policing ecological spaces must be constructed as ineffective. Old
modes of domination must be replaced. New instrumental rationalities need to
be put in place. And it is the capitalization of nature and consequent attempts to
instill a ‘new set of environmental values’ through projects such as “Maintaining
Biodiversity in Pakistan with Rural Community Development”, that subjects
local ecologies to normalized global management procedures.
ORGANIZATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY: AIMS AND APPROACH
While ethnographic methods have been used to highlight the mechanisms
through which localized ecologies become subject to global environmental
management strategies, there is less understanding of how such practices have
become the standard operating mechanism of organizations involved in the field
of environment and development. In practice, we actually know little about such
transnational organizations and their functioning. This is not to say that there
are no studies of these organizations but that such studies are usually focused on
‘improving’ managerial practice to better serve the agenda of the organization or
they are textual/discursive analyses of documents produced by these
26
organizations. Often these textual analyses are combined with, or stem from,
ethnographic work in communities subject to intervention but rarely have the
facilities of the organization been the site of ethnographic observation. In my
own case, village level ethnography has revealed the unfolding of the
conservation project in the community, the impact on human‐environment
relations, and the ways in which villagers negotiated the tensions produced by
the conservation project. Textual analysis of project documents has revealed the
ways in which ontological concepts such as wildlife, ecology, and community
were adopted and used rhetorically to legitimate certain practices of
intervention. The insights developed through this approach helped to bring into
focus the ideological underpinnings of the project and opened it to criticism, but
did little to help me understand the organizational processes that allow for the
reproduction of such projects, the production of knowledge that surrounds these
concepts, the everyday processes and interactions through which the project
developed in the offices of the sponsoring organizations, and the ideological and
material pressures that act upon the organizations to structure their mode of
operation and produce what we might consider a habitus.
Organizations, however, cannot be simply taken to be nebulous creations
devoid of the relations that exist in other realms of life. To understand the
connections between communities that are subject to conservation interventions,
there is a need to understand the social structure and relations of the
organizations and institutions that produce the knowledge of concepts,
conditions and place that are used to legitimate interventions geared toward
achieving specific ends. As important as texts are in the process of mediating
practice and exposing the discursive configurations that underlie conservation
practice, they do not contribute much to analysing the social relations through
which the tensions involved in conservation and development practice are
27
negotiated. Who consorts with whom, who listens to whom, how does protocol
affect the power of one’s speech, how is alternative knowledge received, what
social rules govern interaction within the physical locale of the institution, how is
dissent or contradiction dealt with? These are only some of the questions that
need to be addressed if understandings of the political ecology of place are to be
extended to encompass the full scale of social relations that affect local ecological
conditions. Much work is done that seeks to understand the impacts of policy
and practice, but very little focuses on the mechanisms underlying the
production of policy and practice. In particular, there is a need to uncover the
structure, philosophies and practices of organizations; how operational concepts
like biodiversity, conservation and development are conceptualized by
organizational actors; how specific communities, as the targets of projects, are
conceptualized within organizations; but more importantly how actors within
the organization embody a socialized subjectivity that produces an ontological
complicity with the objectified knowledge accumulated within the organization.
Accomplishing this requires understanding the social structure of organizations
as if it were a ‘community’, in the traditional sense, in order to gain an
understanding of the way that power influences material practice and,
consequently, ecological interactions in specific places. A particular empirical
focus here must be the practices of domination and discipline aimed at
generating consent and conformity within organizations that may
simultaneously generate strategies of resistance or accommodation from
organizational actors.
Organizational ethnography, however, especially when motivated by a
politics of field experience, implies more than simply coming to an
understanding of the organizational domain. It implies knowing ‘the subject’
from a new geographical and epistemological standpoint – that of the distant set
28
of agents (organizations) that choose to act upon ‘the subject’. This reveals a
particular view of organizations as sites where meaning is assigned to ideas,
values, and beliefs. This is what makes ethnography so suitable for the study of
organizations, for it sees beyond the conventional rationalist understanding of
institutions and organizations to apply a perspective aimed at exploring how the
social meaning system of the members of an organization is created and
recreated. In this sense, then, organizational ethnography is not so much a study
of institutional mechanisms as it is an exploration of the organizational culture
that underlies those mechanisms. For underneath the surface of seemingly
objective processes of, say, “sustainability”, “self‐reliance” or “capacity
building”, lie meaning‐laden concepts, symbols, systems of morality, and
practical tasks oriented to value‐based goals that operate to the disadvantage of
particular sets of people, many of whom are meant to benefit from the
application of such processes. And these people, like many villagers in Hushe,
who may well be adept at monitoring and negotiating meaning in face‐to‐face
interaction, suffer an erosion of political entitlement when the conceptual and
symbolic grounds for negotiation are obscured by either the appearance of
bureaucratic neutrality or when those grounds retreat behind the walls of
organizations, like IUCN, that operate at a distance. If organizations can ‘jump
scale’ to affect the village, in many situations, it is not quite so easy for villagers
to “jump scale” and affect the institution.11 Ethnography, then, rather than
treating organizations as rational and replete with ‘objective’ facts, offers an
interpretive approach through which to understand organizations as sites for
constructing meaning (Wright 1994).
29
Conceptualizing Organizational Social Structure
Unlike social forms like family or kin groups, organizations have an
instrumental purpose which is the basis of their identity:
They must define the world that they work on before they can set to work. Their engagement with the world involves a basic repertoire that begins with naming/identifying/defining, then proceeds to involving the phenomena defined in the ‘work’ that they exist to do. (Pulman‐Jones 2001:117)
This points us toward two specific considerations if we are to understand the
operations of organizations: the production and operation of rules; and the
ordering of managerial tasks that seek to implement processes and practices of
control. Rules have a particular place in organizational culture. As Hirsch and
Gellner (2001) note, organizations all have specific, consciously established rules;
a division of labour; and aims that involve acting on or changing everyday life.
Rules, then, are not independent of context. The meaning of a rule can be
obtained only in context, where rules are consulted to interpret what is perceived
as intentional action. Within organizations, rules and managerial tasks of
domination and control come together to place boundaries around
organizational culture and to mobilize action around a self‐referential set of
meaning, institutional strategies, including goals, and the actions they produce.
Rather than seeing these rules and goals as socially constructed, however,
organizations often represent them as universal and natural in a way that
contributes to the legitimacy of organizational actors and aims. Yet it is this
rationalism that leads to the exclusion of alternative perspectives and voices (e.g.,
MacDonald 1995). To understand how and why alternative perspectives either
30
fail to access organizations in any substantive way, or are given token
consideration when they are brought within their purview, the mechanisms
through which universalism and naturalism are produced within these same
organizations must be analyzed. This is, again, context specific and has much to
do with the rule structure in place within any particular organization. Any
analysis cannot start from the assumption that all organizations engage in the
same normalizing practices for these are specific to the ideational aims of the
institution. But they can approach their formation by paying attention to the
ideological and material boundaries that are erected around an organization in
negotiation with other institutional actors.
Just as field researchers would pay attention to who is moving through a
village they are studying, paying attention to whom and what is moving through
an institution, where they are from and the purpose of their visit can provide
insight into the wider context in which organizations operate. This
understanding is significant for it is this wider context which legitimates the aims
organizations pursue and sets limits to the ways in which they operate. It is in
this wider context that we can locate a dialectical relation (among say IUCN,
WWF, UNDP, GEF) oriented toward the production of consent to believe and
participate in the ‘ecological realities’ that are agreed upon by these ‘big‐picture’
players (Rosen 2000). This dialectical relation, and its association with the need
for funding, the demands of donors and capitalist markets, political competition
for resources, the need to demonstrate results through measurable indices, all
influence the ideological and practical orientations of, and tell us much about the
functioning of boundaries around and within, organizations.12
It is those boundaries and their relative impenetrability that make
organizations ‘foreign’ for non‐members. The rules, practices, social structure,
social organization, dominant discourses, identity structures that occur within
31
those bounds and their interaction with worlds beyond remain largely
unstudied.13 As a result, we know little about the practices in organizations that
resist or prevent the decentralization of control, or the mechanisms that impede
the incorporation of knowledge or practice originating from outside the
organizations normative frame of reference. Yet it is within those worlds and
bounded relations that agendas are set, policies determined, classifications
generated, practice formulated and instructions disseminated for how human‐
environment relations are to be structured. Of course this is not a determining
process but if political ecology is to understand the way in which power relations
affect material environmental processes, by ignoring the culture of organizations
that claim responsibility for some aspect of ‘global ecology’, it is missing one
large component in understanding how those power relations are structured.
While the current rhetoric of transnational environmental organizations focuses
on building ‘self‐reliance’ and ‘sustainability’, through ‘capacity building’ and
providing monetary incentives to accord with externally set managerial goals,
there is a risk of overlooking the specific cultural, political and historical contexts
in which such rhetoric has emerged, and the development of specific processes,
such as environmental education programs, through which it circulates to
psychologically and materially affect human‐environment relations.
CONCLUSION: CHALLENGES TO CONDUCTING INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY
My main point in this paper has been to stress that a focus on the scalar
dimensions of power relations is integral to understanding the role of agency in
the ideological production of nature and the material practices that derive from
it. Central to understanding these relations is a process of longitudinal research
32
that relies on multi‐scaled and sited ethnography. As communities and
environments, localized in space, become increasingly subject to the institutional
demands of so‐called global organizations that appeal to the authority of
particular disciplinary perspectives (e.g., biological science, economics, etc.) in
their production and circulation of knowledge, it becomes necessary to
understand the ‘cultures’ of such organizations. To be focused, this must start
from a long‐term engagement with communities subject to such institutional
processes and work outward to comprehend how the globalization of everyday
life ‐ taken to mean the subjectivities and material effects produced through,
willing or unwilling, participation in ever‐expanding socio‐spatial relations – in
such places is tied to the political discursive resources, social relations, and
material practices housed in ‘global’ organizations (Boli & Thomas 1999). An
understanding of this relation demands ethnographies of such organizations.
For it is only from inside such organizations that we can hope to witness and
comprehend the relations and mechanisms that imaginatively bring into being
the communities and environments upon which they act. In the case of political
ecology, we can begin to appreciate how relations of power within bureaucratic
organizations influence the formulation of environmental policy and practice.
And treating an organization as a community vested with ‘culture’ means that
we can bring the same analytic foci to their study as we do to other communities
and begin to expose how the privileging of standpoint operates to affect
decisions regarding the viability of projects, the validity of information, and the
mechanisms of moulding localized human‐environment relations.
While organizational ethnography does seem to be a growing area of
study, even in fields such as political ecology, which claims an explicit mandate
to understand the culture or at least the mechanisms of power, examples of
organizational ethnography are few. The reasons for this are not really difficult
33
to discern and raise issues that are not often faced on conventional fieldwork.14
There are many reasons why understanding the web of power relations as it
moves away from localized sites of action is difficult. One relates to the historic
gaze of ethnographic fieldwork which has been on the ‘local’. The allegiances
and interests of fieldwork in Anthropology and Geography have lead to a focus
on the more localized, the more particular, the more exotic, and there has been
little encouragement to apply the same ethnographic gaze to what are, after all,
local sites in our own institutional backyard. Organizations are not considered
‘foreign’ to us and consequently we assume an understanding that we do not
really have. Or we assume that organizations do not ‘demand’ the same degree
of understanding as say the communities that many of us have worked within.
Much of the reason, of course, can be found in the privileged position held by
researchers in the places they have studied. Often it is that privilege that has
provided access to the site, and access to the knowledge that gets translated into
text, or it conveys the possibility of instrumental gain to those granting the
access. Privilege and instrumentality, however, often fade when studying
organizations. If anything, organizations challenge the privileged status of the
ethnographer. This often translates into a discomfort in confronting power where
it resides. Ethnographic researchers lose the benefit of race, or of status
bestowed by relative wealth or education. In many cases they confront ‘research
subjects’ who are better off and hold similar educational status. In these
situations, ethnographers lose the instrumentality that helps gain access to the
‘study site’. It is unlikely that they will be as instrumentally valuable to an
organization as they have been in more conventional ‘field sites’.
Access to information is another obstacle. Within organizations,
information takes on a guarded quality and the application of ethnographic
methods within organizations must contend with the fact that organizations are
34
practiced in the management and control of information. Such organizations
have highly evolved mechanisms for filtering and regulating flows of
information in order to legitimate chosen courses of action. In these settings,
information is rarely regarded as a ‘public good’. More importantly, information
is often part of an actor’s private endowment and a source and instrument of
power in negotiating one’s position within an organization. All of this means
that there can be significant resistance to observing and recording the sorts of
everyday practice in which ethnographers are interested. (Mosse 2001).
Perhaps the greatest challenge here, however, is the challenge to desire.
The history of political ecology is one which has focused on the material
ecological effects of power relations in operation, not as a matter of chance, in
particularly ‘fascinating’ locales. Studying the organizations that underlie these
power relations, means a move into a more obscure world where social relations
do not seem so clear cut, and where ‘the land’ is not so much in evidence.
Overcoming the desire to be ‘on the ground’ or ‘at the heart of it’ relies on
developing a perspective that sees organizations as crucial sites for the
structuring of knowledge and social relations in ways that are central to
understanding the political and cultural dimensions of ecological modifications
in a world where small localized communities cannot insulate themselves from
the reach of transnational organizations.
My concerns regarding the study of organizations are not new, nor are my
thoughts regarding the value of such study. Many of these resemble what Nader
(1972) articulated when she called for anthropologists to study the “culture of
power”. By this she meant the ways in which hierarchies that govern our lives
remain invisible; how their distancing mechanisms operate; the cultural
constraints felt by members of organizations; and the ways in which ‘clients’ are
manipulated. It is here that I think the value of organizational ethnography lies.
35
It not only allows a critical examination of the forms of social organization that
coordinate local worlds and practices, but it opens to view discursive
configurations that legitimate this coordination. More than that, it provides a
vantage point from which to observe the mechanisms and processes through
which competing discursive formations within organizations are reconciled,
allowing a dominant discourse to emerge. It exposes to view the relations and
practices of domination that are central to an explanation of how people –
differently positioned – contest the meaning of a situation, and how they use
economic and institutional resources to dominate the material outcome of that
contest (Asad 1979). It allows an examination of the rationalizing practices used
by individuals within organizations to legitimate their structures of knowledge,
their actions, and the specific mechanisms that are the instruments of action.
This is fruitful ground for political ecology, for if we recognize that institutional
power and agency have a direct affect on the ideological production of nature, on
human‐environment relations, and on ecological ‘reality’ then we need to
understand the connections that flow out of organizations to bring ‘communities’
into hierarchies of authority that are invisible to them. We need to situate
political ecological context at the multiple intersections of communities that exist
in asymmetrical relations of power with organizational actors. Historically a
study of only one ‘side’ of this relation has been allowed or encouraged – the
subordinate community, the village. But, if we understand ‘ecological reality’ to
be a product of this interaction (forced though it often is) surely we need to study
dominant ‘communities’ (organizations) as much and probably more than ‘local’
communities.
36
37
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1 For example, the need of agencies to satisfy the requirements of donors who ‘don’t understand’ the ‘reality’ of the context in which the agency is working. Just as individuals tell those in power ‘what they want to hear’, agencies tell donors or benefactors ‘what they want to hear’. “It is a pervasive problem that those with power are told what they are believed to want to hear and are vulnerable to rejecting bad news. ‘All power deceives’.” Chambers (http://www.iied.org/agri/e_forum/evidence.html). 2 The distinction between global and transnational is needed to challenge the attempt by such organizations to appeal to a naturalized universalism in the pursuit of their institutional agendas. Referring to them as transnational recognizes their spatial sphere of operations but also signifies their accommodation of, and role in propagating, transnational ideologies (eg., Haas 1992) 3 The ideological implications of textual mechanisms such as “mission statements” are discussed below. 4 It is in these judgments that we can locate much of the current emphasis on knowledge transfer, capacity building, and “best practice” within environment and development institutions that operate in much of the so‐called ‘third world’. 5 IUCN for example currently claims 78 states, 112 government agencies, 735 NGOs, 35 affiliates, and some 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries as members of the organization 6 Using IUCN as an example, we can consider it to be a site of accumulated knowledge incorporating a diverse subject matter related to issues of conservation. Of course this material is selected and archived according to particular ideologies of environment, nature and
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conservation, and we must recognize that IUCN is also subject to the ‘authority’ of associated institutions and their handlers such as UNDP UNEP, UNESCO, GEF, all of whom Rosen would call ‘big picture’ players aimed at achieving and managing consent. 7 Though the language of ecologism becomes the lingua franca of the dialogue and imposes upon the excluded community the need to learn and apply that language, if nothing else. Hence, the expansion of ‘environmental education’ programs developed, emplaced, and sponsored by international conservation organizations (see IUCN’s Commission on Education and Communication). 8 In the case of ICUN’s project in Hushe, for example, no research was undertaken to validate the assumed decline in ibex numbers, no research was undertaken to gain an appreciation of localized social structure or social relations, and no research was undertaken to understand the material and symbolic significance of wildlife within the community. 9 Cox distinguishes between spaces of dependence – relatively fixed arenas in which individuals are embedded by the work of everyday live – and spaces of engagement – those sets of relations that extend beyond spaces of dependence to construct dynamic networks of exchange, association and politics. 10 Again, these are goals established by organizations, presumably arising from the need to control and direct efforts in an efficient way and from the demand for standardization and centralization that makes results uniformly comprehensible by other participating institutions. 11 For a notable exception see Butz 2002. 12 As Raymond Williams (1974) reminds us, cultural forms such as organizations and institutions do not stand alone. They are tools that can be used in a variety of ways. What is important is to understand how and why they are used in particular circumstances as well as to understand who uses them and under what conditions. 13 Exceptions to this statement are merging, many focused on the production of knowledge. They are still, however, few and far between and hampered by a lack of access that forces a reliance on ex‐employees, consultants, texts and haphazard observation as sources of information (e.g., Barnett & Finnemore 2004, Jeanreaud 2002, Goldman 2001, Davies 2000, Markowitz 2001, Fox 1998, Harper 1998) 14 These include gaining access to sites of power, issues of interviewing elites, often an inversion of privilege and instrumentality, and issues of research contracts and liability, among others.
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