A critical social theory perspective on informational ... › upload_mm › e › d › d › 14805226-47d4-4dbd-bf7… · Ritvo 1987 The Platypus and the Mermaid, and other figments

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A critical social theory perspective on

informational governance

Esther Turnhout

Associate Professor, Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group

Wageningen University, [email protected]

ET Info-gov workshop 17 Oct. 2013

Informational governance A governance theory:

• Resources of government have become displaced and distributed.....multi-level, internationalization, markets, private actors, participation.....etc.....including knowledge and information

• Normative theory in the sense that ideal types (theoretical/analytical framework) are contrasted with empirical reality by means of analysis

• Explicitly normative and evaluative: assessing how informational governance systems contribute, or not, to good governance criteria (transparency, legitimacy, accountability, democracy etc)


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Theories of knowledge • What is knowledge, what counts as scientific and good

knowledge, how do we know things

– Epistemology, philosophy of science • What is taken to be knowledge, how are facts produced,

how is authority of knowledge established, what is the role of social factors (networks, interests, values etc) in science, how is science demarcated from non science in practice

– Sociology of science and knowledge • What does knowledge do and what kinds of effects does it

produce in practice

– Critical social and political theory


Foucault on critique

• To demonstrate how things which appear most evident are in fact fragile and that they

rest upon particular circumstances which have nothing necessary or definitive about

them.

• Critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of

pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged,

unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.


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Economics is at work within economies in a way that is at odds with the

widespread conception of science as an activity whose sole purpose is to

observe and study, that is to know the world. The issue that needs to be

tackled in relation to economies and economics is not just about ‘knowing the

world, accurately or not. It is also about producing it. It is not (only) about

economics being right or “wrong” but (also, and perhaps more important)

about it being “able” or “unable” to transform the world.

MacKenzie et al, 2007, Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics



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• those that belong to the Emperor • embalmed ones • those that are trained • suckling pigs • mermaids • fabulous ones • stray dogs • those included in the present classification • those that tremble as if they were mad • innumerable ones • those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush • others • those that have just broken a flower vase • those that from a long way off look like flies

Borges ‘A certain Chinese Encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’

Foucault, 1972, The order of things

Classification of animals


Counting and classification

• Counting implies categorization • Identifying not just any differences, but the differences that make a difference

according to a specific cultural context

• Bootstrapping: categories co-evolve together with the items that are put into them

• Bowker and Star, 2000, Sorting things out • Stone, 2001, Policy Paradox


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Ritvo 1987 The Platypus and the Mermaid, and other figments of the classifying imagination


Coproduction

• What the restoration polity and experimental science had in common was

a form of life. The practices involved in the generation and justification of

proper knowledge were part of the settlement and protection of a certain

kind of social order (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, Leviathan and the air

pump).

• The ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and

society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it

(Jasanoff 2004, states of knowledge)


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Technocratic discourse in science society relations

• Knowledge production is related to the (projected) information needs of prospective users

– Evidence-based policy – Monitoring and reporting infrastructures

• Science delivers knowledge in terms that are scientifically, politically, and/or socially relevant to facilitate steering and desired social and natural orders

• This is nothing new: Scott 1998 Seeing like a state, Porter, 1995 Trust in numbers....etc...

Counting and knowing Rational decisions


Carbon Sink


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• Because different human beings will observe its patterns, choosing to accentuate some while

deciding at the same time to ignore others, Nature's meanings always will be multiple and

unfixed. Before technologies turn its matter and energy into products, Nature already is

transformed discursively into "natural resources." And, once it is rendered intelligible through

these discursive processes, it can be used to legitimize almost anything (Luke, 1995)

• Ecosystem services, like all resources, can be defined as fungible commodities only through a

process of assessment, measurement and negotiation between capitalists, scientists and

regulators concerning value. If we do not attend to the particular constitution of each

resource commodity, we are left to think that capital grapples directly with material nature.

(Robertson 2012)

• Also see Gupta et al 2012, COSUST, Turnhout et al. 2013 Conservation Letters


• Knowledge is not inherently benign, does not always serve nature and society, and can even cause harm

• Forsyth 2003 Critical political ecology, the politics of environmental science


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Only what is counted counts……


• Picture a powerful biodiversity database .Two points emerge. First is that

the database itself will ultimately shape the world in its image: it will be

performative. If we are only saving what we are counting, and if our counts

are skewed in many different ways, then we are creating a new world in

which those counts become more and more normalized. The second point

is that once this effort has been made, there is (at present) no possible

reverse engineering - recreating a lost species. (Bowker 2002)


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Power knowledge/governmentality

• Knowledge creates fields of visibility

• But it can only do so by obscuring and exclusion

• Constituencies and environments are rendered knowable and governable

• Knowledge disciplines subjects but also invites self disciplining (the conduct of conduct)

• Foucault, discipline and punishment, the archaeology of

knowledge, the birth of biopolitics, governmentality.....


• Making people write things down, and the nature of things people are

made to write down, is itself a kind of government of them, urging them to

think about and note certain aspect of their activities according to certain

norms (Rose and Miller 2010)

• The IPCC depicts the world’s major forested regions as ‘empty’ spaces,

available for carbon management. In order to economically benefit from

global institutions, the “local” must accept its construction as compliant,

homogeneous and safe, which is to say, absent. Once erased from

representation within scientific, economic and policy discourses, local and

indigenous communities can be effortlessly re-enrolled as ‘stakeholders’.

(Fogel 2004)


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Ontological politics

• A politics that has to do with the way in which problems are framed,

bodies are shaped, lives are pushed and pulled into one shape or another

(Mol, 2002)

• And the issue of ontological politics, about what is or could be made more

real, is all the more pointed since every time we make reality claims in

science we are helping to make some reality or other more or less real. In a

world where everything is performative, everything has consequences,

there is, as Donna Haraway indicates, no innocence (Law and Urry 2004)


Knowledge is not neutral

or innocent

It is much more than an

(imperfect) mirror of

nature

It does work and has

consequences


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Maps did not successfully represent […] the society they depicted, nor were

they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the

official observer. They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were

maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality

they depicted to be remade in their image

Scott, 1998, Seeing like a State


A set of data structures and information retrieval models are set up so that

a particular, skewed view of the world can easily be represented. Thus, the

world that is explored scientifically becomes more and more closely tied to

the world that can be represented by one’s

theories and in one’s databases:

and this world is ever more readily

recognized as the real world

Bowker, 2005, Memory practices in the sciences


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By looking at the way in which the European CORINE Biotopes classes are

readapted and modified in the implementation of the EU Habitats and Species

Directive at UK level, we will see the fantasy of unity coming into contact with

the pragmatism, concern and agency of local actors. [...] Classifications have

the potential to be highly 'performative', reflecting back the conditions of their

making in future manifestations in policy, or other forms of use. However,

despite this performative potential, any such performances may, in fact, be

much less predictable and ordered than a simple reflection of the context of a

classification's making. It is difficult to anticipate the new layers of debate

that might occur as a classification travels (Waterton 2002)


A performative perspective on knowledge

• The measures used come to substitute what they represent

• They constitute the object of governance

• Research on categories, databases, standards, maps, statistics, performance indicators, monitoring reporting and verification, accounting, transparency infrastructures....etc...

Three dimensions (from Behagel and Turnhout in prep.)

• Convergence: knowledge and the world itself become more and more aligned

• Politics: knowledge itself becomes a site of political action

• Contingency: knowledge produces unpredictable effects


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Thank you, questions?


Documents

A critical social theory perspective on informational ... › upload_mm › e › d › d › 14805226-47d4-4dbd-bf7… · Ritvo 1987 The Platypus and the Mermaid, and other figments