Between Scylla and Charybdis: Environmental governance and illegibility in the American West

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must navigate the Strait of Messina between two great hazards: the six-headed monster Scylla on one side, and the whirlpool Charybdis on the other. This conceit here guides a critical engagement with scientific knowledge and state power, grounded in the positionality and practices of government agents charged with the management of controversial species and processes in the American West. Based in ethnographic and archival research on wolf-livestock conflict and public lands grazing in Central Idaho, I relate how agents with the U.S. Forest Service and Idaho Department of Fish and Game navigate conditions not of their own choosing. Sailing the “choppy seas” of complex systems and multiple-use mandates, with the “whirlpool” of cuts to capacity on one side and the “monster” of political controversy and litigation on the other, agents appear to collect less or more ambiguous information on their charges, resulting in a partial “blindness” or illegibility. Although a rational adaptation to unrealistic expectations, this ignorance is not bliss but rather symptom and source of dysfunction, limiting agents’ ability to carry out monitoring, collaboration, and effectively conduct on-the-ground management. Understanding patterns of illegibility requires that we attend both to broader contextual pressures and situated motivations. In so doing, we might account for the seeming disconnect between agencies’ stated aims and practices, complicate traditional assumptions of evidence-based scientific management and analyses of bureaucratic rationality and state power, and make sense of the apparent dysfunction around environmental governance in the American West today

Innovation and New Path Creation: The Role of Niche Environments in the Development of the Wind Power Industry in Germany and the UK

This paper seeks to explore the issues of innovation and new path creation in the UK and Germany, illustrated through the case of the modern wind power industry. Taking an evolutionary perspective drawing on path dependence theory, the paper examines the role of niche environments in the creation of new economic pathways. The research finds that new economic pathways are more likely to develop in places where niche conditions provide receptive environments for innovations to flourish. The policy implications of the research include the importance of supporting niche environments that encourage growth in new sectors and the need for financial support to bring innovations to market, to encourage the development of new economic pathways

The systemic implications of constructive alignment of higher education level learning outcomes and employer or professional body based competency frameworks

The past 50 years has seen the development of schemes in higher education, employment and professional work that either identify what people should know and/or what they should be able to do with what they have learned and experienced. Within higher education this is usually equated with the learning outcomes students are expected to achieve at the end of studying a course, module or qualification and increasingly the teaching, learning and assessment strategies of those courses, modules or qualifications are being designed to align with those learning outcomes. In employment, there has been the emergence of job and role specifications setting out the knowledge and skills required of incumbent and recruits alike. Where professional bodies confer (often statutorily recognised) status in employment sectors they also increasingly set out their expectations of members through competency frameworks. This paper explores the varied relationships between these three means of measuring knowledge and skills within people including the nature of the knowledge and skills being measured as well as the specificity of the knowledge and skills being measured, using the case study of environmental management in the UK. It then argues that there needs to be a more constructive alignment between these three forms of measurement, achieved through a dynamic conversation between all concerned, but also that such alignment needs both to recognise the importance of less tangible ‘systems thinking’ abilities alongside the more tangible ‘technical’ and ‘managerial’ abilities and that some abilities emerge from the trajectories of praxis and cannot readily be specified as an outcome in advance

Is resilience a normative concept?

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for systems of interest (primarily social systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged

Transformation in a changing climate: a research agenda

The concept of transformation in relation to climate and other global change is increasingly receiving attention. The concept provides important opportunities to help examine how rapid and fundamental change to address contemporary global challenges can be facilitated. This paper contributes to discussions about transformation by providing a social science, arts and humanities perspective to open up discussion and set out a research agenda about what it means to transform and the dimensions, limitations and possibilities for transformation. Key focal areas include: (1) change theories, (2) knowing whether transformation has occurred or is occurring; (3) knowledge production and use; (4), governance; (5) how dimensions of social justice inform transformation; (6) the limits of human nature; (7) the role of the utopian impulse; (8) working with the present to create new futures; and (9) human consciousness. In addition to presenting a set of research questions around these themes the paper highlights that much deeper engagement with complex social processes is required; that there are vast opportunities for social science, humanities and the arts to engage more directly with the climate challenge; that there is a need for a massive upscaling of efforts to understand and shape desired forms of change; and that, in addition to helping answer important questions about how to facilitate change, a key role of the social sciences, humanities and the arts in addressing climate change is to critique current societal patterns and to open up new thinking. Through such critique and by being more explicit about what is meant by transformation, greater opportunities will be provided for opening up a dialogue about change, possible futures and about what it means to re-shape the way in which people live