Changing Environments or Changing Views?

A Political Ecology for Developing Countries

Author(s): PIERS BLAIKIE
Source: Geography, Vol. 80, No. 3 (July 1995), pp. 203-214
Published by: Geographical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40572665
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Changing
Environments or
Changing Views?
A Political Ecology for
Developing Countries
PIERS BLAIKIE
ABSTRACT: Landscapes and environments are
perceived and interpreted from many different
and contested points of view which reflect the
particular experience, culture and values of the
viewer. A more Hnteractionist' approach to the
study of society and environment has recently
gained acceptance and converges with other
developments in the social sciences (actor-
orientated approaches, structure and agency
issues and the sociology of scientific knowledge).
In the place of scientific 'truths' about the
environment, discourses allow a critical
evaluation of different versions of environmental
issues. Appeals to better and more environmental
science, better law and governance and to the
logic of the market, in order to re-establish
certainty and order in global management, are
only partly successful. They, too, are vulnerable
to the same evaluation. The author calls for a
more politically aware understanding of the
plurality of points of view regarding the
environment, for 'environmental brokerage' and
the opening up of spaces for negotiation between
different parties.
Landscapes and optics
LET US IMAGINE a patch of land somewhere in
the tropics. We notice certain elements and not
others, we classify flora in a certain way, we infer
process and bring normative ideas about what
should be happening there. We overlook some
things (but only through our lens - lenses occlude
and obscure as well as clarify), while others hold
our focus. What we are doing is interpreting the
landscape with the experiential, technical, cultural
and value-laden means at our disposal. Likewise,
in more general terms, our views on the
environment and environmental issues and
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problems, either global or local, are identified,
interpreted and given meaning by us as
individuals. In other words, we are constructing VOLUME 80(3)
our landscape or environment in a social manner. PAGES 203-214
Of course, we materially change our environment
too, often with results which we judge to be
damaging to society or our idea of nature. Here I
will focus on the social construction of
environmental change.
Thus we have no option but to view our
landscape or environment through our own optic. Geography 1995
We cannot, as it were, peer over the top of our
spectacles to see what is really happening. This is
not to say that there is not a 'real world', real
physical changes out there independent of our
gaze. Of course the physical world exists and
changes independently of human consciousness,
but we have to experience and interpret it in
various individual and shared ways.
Social and natural
sciences
All this has been recognised for a long time, but
its implications for how we understand the
environment and tackle 'environmental issues' are
both liberating and problematic. This changing
view represents a seismic shift in the social
sciences over the past 20 years, and has altered
the optic through which we look at the
environment - and the way that we look at each
overlooking at the environment. Here I refer to
the way in which the scientific understanding of
the environment is now no longer accepted
uncritically, but in which scientists too have
become a subject in our landscape. In terms of
the standard disciplinary frameworks of
geomorphology, ecology and pedology, for
example, we must be prepared to accommodate
other non-technical optics and the views they
produce too.
This shift may be identified as one from a
structural to an interactionist way of studying
and understanding society and environment, and
is illustrated schematically in Fig. 1.
In the left column describing a structural
approach, reality can be understood and
empirically verified and explained by models of
causal connections which generate hypotheses
deductively which can then be tested, often by
quantitative means. It is assumed that there is an
objective world whose essence can be reliably
measured by different observers with the same
results. Such a paradigm used to be dominant in 203
the social sciences. In the natural sciences this

GEOGRAPHY
APOLITICAL
ECOLOGY FOR
DEVELOPING
COUNTRIES
Geography 0 1995
Fig. 1. Structural and interactionist approaches to society and
environment.
remains so (although in some fields of study in a
modified form). The social sciences however have
significantly shifted towards a more interactionist
mode in which there is not an objective reality,
but many subjective ones which are provided by
different people who see their 'real' landscape in
their own ways. By the act of viewing our
environment we interact with it and bring to our
view our own social construction. Many social
sciences, particularly sociology and politics, have
substantially re-negotiated their own
epistemologies along these lines. Even economics
and quantitative human geography have been
affected by the challenging but worrying shifts of
ground under their feet. Within geography, part
of this change has been negotiated, but part still
reveals a fault line, between phenomenology and
post-modern interpretations of space and society
on the one hand and quantitative modelling,
computer applications and physical geography on
the other. However, within sociology,
development studies and to some extent in
geography too, new and much wider vistas of
environment and society are being created.
I will take three examples of recent
publications and use a brief description of each to
illustrate broader approaches. First, Giddens
(1982, 1984) has facilitated a side-stepping of the
impasse of the 1960s to early 1980s between
structural and determinist explanations on the one
hand and voluntarist and individualist
explanations of human behaviour on the other.
His approach acknowledges that while structures
of power and pre-attentive patterns of behaviour
concerning space and time are profoundly
important in explaining human behaviour, people
in their daily lives try to make sense of these
204 structures in a partial way through recursive
learning and experience. They struggle with these
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individually interpreted structures and the
outcomes are often unintended. Indeed, peoples'
day-to-day actions actually constitute these
structures - we vote, we travel to work, but still
contribute to harmful emissions into the
atmosphere by taking our car to that work. But
our actions also change these physical and social
structures. Giddens, therefore, suggests a more
interactive relationship between structure and
agency, in which notions of knowledgeability,
capability and recursive practice are important.
This approach helps us to understand for
example, why rational appeals by scientists to
change our habits and practices in the name of
environmental conservation may fall upon deaf
ears. People may be locked into a particular
spatial structure of work and residence and a
linking transportation system which makes it
difficult for individuals to respond to
environmentalists' demands. Nevertheless, they
may struggle with them and respond in other
ways which may seem irrational, but can be
understood in the context of their attempts to
interpret and handle the structures in which they
play their part. Til keep my second car, thank you
very much ... but on second thoughts, I'll take out
a subscription for Greenpeace'. This approach
also helps us to understand how farmers may
knowingly cause land degradation, or logging
contractors exceed the maximum rate of
sustainable cut in the tropical forests of West
Africa or South-east Asia.
My second example comes from other
converging work more wholly in the
development field, N. and A. Long's edited
volume, Battlefields of Knowledge (1992). As the
title suggests, its focus is on the social
construction of and the plurality of knowledge(s)
specifically in the development process. Here, a
development activity brings together a cast of
actors, each of whom has 'projects' or sets of
objectives which they seek to achieve by various
strategies. The stage on which the actors perform
(i.e. enter into social relations) is what the editors
call the 'development interface'. Hence, local
people, government servants, politicians,
scientists and development experts each have
their 'projects' which they pursue by persuading
others through appeals to reason, science,
democracy, self-interest, and through coercion,
evasion or struggle. Thus, a government servant -
let us say an agricultural extension agent - may
be intent on keeping her job through target
chasing for the number of farmers contacted or
area of land protected by terraces; a young
woman in a farming household may be intent on
evading the inevitable demands for labour which
terraces will make if the project is adopted by the The main point is that development agents
GEOGRAPHY
community; and a large-scale farmer who is themselves are subject to analysis too - they are
worried that terrace-building will push up the part of the solution but may also be part of the A POLITICAL

price of agricultural labour may therefore oppose problem. Thus, to revisit our landscape of the ECOLOGY FOR

the terraces using science to support his claim. imagination, it is not just the landscape but the DEVELOPING
The cartoon (Fig. 2) gives the government view viewer and the optic - not just the physical COUNTRIES
on soil and water conservation in Kenya. The processes and changes in our environment but
farmers' own sets of objectives are assumed to how different people construct them socially -
agree with or at least be acquiescent to those of which now become an inclusive field of study,
the government. The landscape of the imagination with which we
To take a longer example; a local customs started must be inhabited by the people who Geography 1995

officer stationed at a remote airport in a relate to it.

developing country is responsible for monitoring The third recent thrust in the study of society
the export of live species listed in one of the and environment can be illustrated by the book
annexes of the Convention for Trade in Social Theory and the Global Environment edited
Endangered Species (CITES). He experiences the by Michael Redclift and Ted Benton. Here the
'biodiversity issue' in a most contingent and focus is on what they call the 'production of
indirect manner, although at the same time his environmental change' - not only real physical
performance of his duty is actually quite changes, but the contested ways in which they
important to biodiversity conservation. His daily are experienced, selected and given meaning,
life revolves around managing on a meagre, post- Various writers have stressed the globalisation of
structural adjustment, government salary. He has environmental change. This refers both to the
the task of distinguishing between different physical processes of global interdependence and
species of parrot, for example, for which he does global systems as well as the globalisation of
not have the training or personal commitment. discourses about it. In this book, again a diverse
His own project is about survival - paying school cast of actors appears - international scientists,
fees and affording some minimal luxuries which development experts, transnational companies,
his salary does not give him. Therefore, his indigenous forest dwellers, Green movements
project may be served better by extracting from the North, farmers the world over - each
bureaucratic rents and allowing through for bringing their own experience, culture and
export all manner of trophies and live rare species understanding to the social construction of the
threatened with extinction. It is only by visiting environment, and to their material transformation
his life world that a basis for understanding this of it.
actor in the 'development interface' can be These converging strands of social science
created. invite us to take on a perplexing world of

rf^^^T^ m^mZ 3"3 MANY FARMS ARE UNKNOWINGLY

lin CfflEMn ' *-^~ LOSING SOIL FftOMTNEI* CROPLAND
'^W W W P#fH#t# AND PAOT/ftES, AN0 WIU FACE
j>

almrffft * ' 3 *V^*Y farm can employ soil

I ^0B^ ^OUCNlUl* I IXftlSJl/coHSERVATION METHODS TO
( ^g^^^^ PAftMPOe. 1 / SAVr THF SOIL, ANO AT SAME
^- ^ ^9^PFUT<uJftit / fl T!Mr increase caop yields
P7 ^ . ^^TZ> Y- / / // Ll V ESTOC SwtCAH ftANiSH *'

I / '^9k' A I xlvs^y^' 'CATCHMENT AfiHiOACH' AN J I

205

Fig. 2. The official view of conservation in Kenya.

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 contested and plural understandings, and to merely as successfully packaged and promoted
GEOGRAPHY
question more carefully why certain aspects 'knowledge claims'.
APOLITICAL become an issue at all, and how environmental Many of these changes of approach to the
ECOLOGY FOR and social problems are set up and framed. environment may not be to our liking. Natural
DEVELOPING
COUNTRIES Science -+ Discourse scientific method has served well, may be
Numbers -> Narratives understandably worried by the spectre of a band
<.,,,., of post-modern social science shock troopers
Facts - 'Knowledge <.,,,., claims | m^g ^ way ^^ ^ lineg of defen troopers
Fig. 3. science and discourses. MY own perspective is that the distinction is
Geography 1995 deepening as environmental and social sciences
Figure 3 indicates three stereotypical diverge; that there are tensions, but these can be
distinctions which highlight the main changes I constructively debated,
am talking about. Scientific interpretations of the
environment are increasingly seen as only one
form of 'truth', and are drawn into discourses Contested tefTdiVl
about the environment and development -

scientific interpretations cannot be taken deus ex

machina and remain unexamined. The second With these new optics, let us go back to
pair refer to the uneasy frontier between imagining the landscape, the same one with
objectivist understandings of the environment and which each of us began. Let us again imagine a
social behaviour (often based on measurement patch of land somewhere in the tropics or sub-
and quantitative modelling) and subjective and tropics. Let the mind's eye rove around this
plural accounts of experiences as 'truth', often landscape and then start to become aware of the
based on narrative. The last pair refers to facts, optic being used. Now ask yourself what this land
which are seen not as hard and immutable, but is for and how it may be best used. Normative

Fig. 4. A Nepalese environment. What does it mean? How should it be used?

206

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criteria behind your judgement will have to be
invoked and called into question. How may these
differ from other concerned actors? Figure 4 is an
example of a landscape (actually in west-central
Nepal). Some normative questions arise about
how this landscape should be used.
From the list in Fig. 5, you can see how
different people may have different views of this
landscape and how they may enter into
discourses about it (ways of speaking and clusters
of other non-verbal practices).
A patch of land somewhere in the
tropics ...
How can it be described and by whom?
Ideal site for tourist lodge
- tour operators, entrepreneurs
Reserve of endangered species of birds
- scientists, hunters, nature lovers
State forest
- bureaucrats, lumber contractors
Agricultural land
- local farmers
Forest for indigenous subsistence
- forest dwellers
Fig. 5. Some alternative views and their protagonists.
By 'discourse' I mean both speaking
(involving symbols and meaning) and action
(involving material transformation of society and
environment). Both are inextricably entwined in
the making of landscape. There can be a wide
variety of ways by which discourses about any
environment can be entered into. Figure 6
suggests some examples which apply generally.
oral testimonies
religious ceremony and ritual
agricultural practice
scientific research papers
multi-lateral projects
NGO activities
World Bank documents
Fig. 6. Forms of discourse.
A listing of this sort does not, however, put
the various actors into the play of social relations
- and this is the next step. For example, taking
the second item on this list (that of religious
ceremony and ritual), how do ideas about the
sacred grove in West Africa contradict those of
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charcoal burners in the same region? What role
does the government servant who issues charcoal GEOGRAPHY
burning permits play in determining the use to APOLITICAL
which forested land is put? What are the ECOLOGY FOR
conservation ethics of the World Bank-funded DEVELOPING
NGO which is operating in the area, and how COUNTRIES
successfully does it implement their ethics? There
is a political economic arena in which various
people pursue their 'projects' with very unequal
access to power in which to pack their own
particular knowledge claim and to enrol others Geography 1995
into their own project.
Local dramas, global
issues
Let us take a more detailed example of contested
meanings and struggles over material resources,
together with their implications for environmental
management. It illustrates in detail the cast of
actors involved in the Lwangwa National Park in
Zambia (Abel and Blaikie, 1986), and their
interests in various components of the National
Park, bach cell in the matrix (Fig. 7) represents in
a very brief, economistic and reductionist way the
daily lives of these actors and their projects. Note
that in this case scientists are actors just as much
as the local hunter cultivators. The authors of this
study attempted an ingenious solution to the
conflicts which surrounded the meaning and
practice of this National Park - but in retrospect,
a doomed one. The ecologist of the team (Nick
Abel), who had spent four years as game warden
in this Park, evolved a land-use plan which would
give most actors most of what they wanted. It
involved a variant of shifting cultivation in very
large land-use blocks over a period of 20 years. It
also involved the culling of elephant and the
licensing of some limited wild game hunting. The
ecological outcome would maximise biodiversity,
conserve rare and endangered species, provide
plenty of flagship species for tourists to
photograph and would provide meat and land for
the local hunter-cultivators - a neat scientific
solution for a political tangle. This study was
finished eight years ago. This rational and
scientific solution appealed to reason and the
ability of different actors to negotiate mutually
beneficial outcomes on a level playing field, but it
could not provide the politics for this to happen.
Some hope! Nonetheless, it illustrates the
analytical approach which I am developing here
- plural truths and interests; actors in their daily
lives; and actors coming together in social 207
relations of unequal power.
 GEOGRAPHY
Group Position in Source of power Interests and aims Means to reach
APOLITICAL political economy aims
ECOLOGY FOR
DEVELOPING Hunter- marginalised, limited but source of meat, stealth and
COUNTRIES cultivators excluded through chiefs land for cultivation poaching

Safari hunters expatriate-staffed astute informal rights to hunt vehicles, guns

small companies negotiations in park local knowledge

Geography 1995
Conservation networked lack of informed conservation of lobbying,
groups with top opinion in some species publications,
Zambia officials, Zambia international
influential postings networking

Bureaucratic control state part of dominant ad hoc agreements, legislation,

bourgeoisie apparatus, alliance foreign exchange budget allocation
access to capital

Scientists access to highest science as development of publications,

positions of power legitimacy 'rational policies' individual
access to power

Fig. 7. Interest groups, national parks and wildlife policy in Lwangwa National Park, Zambia.

Global environmental Furthermore, the way in which the forecasting has

concerns
Let us now change our lens and focal length, and
move to more global environmental concerns and
ask the question about how we know we have
environmental problems (Taylor and Bttel,
1992). The issue of global warming may be a
scientifically recognised fact but it is also a social
construction. It is worth asking how the global
environmental and political concerns of the
Brundtland Commission (1987) have now been
reprocessed with some new scientific information
into a massive computer-intensive climatic
simulation exercise (Wynne, 1994). Therefore our
optic must not only concentrate on what the
scientists tell us about global warming (this is
important enough and no one else is in a position
to tell us) but also on the way in which this
environmental issue has been socially produced.
The Brundtland Commission, for all its North-
centred perspective, framed the global problem in
terms of poverty, North-South relations and
environmental crisis. However we find at the
present time that the framing and content of the
global crisis has become narrowly technical in
208 conception and is preoccupied with the purely
environmental concerns of climatic forecasting.
been carried out using immensely complex and
sophisticated weather-forecasting models, with all
their technical shortcomings for predicting longer
term climatic change, also has been shaped by
the culture and institutions of scientific
endeavour. As such, it has excluded many other
alternative ways of framing these global issues,
different methods and different and more explicit
ethical and political issues.
The global issue of biodiversity erosion also
should invite us both to take the scientific
evidence seriously and at the same time to
question its technical basis and its political use.
Biodiversity is primarily conceived by biologists
and ecologists as a global issue where extinction
of species is conceived at this scale, although it
may also have specific regional and local aspects
such as endemism and landraces (Wilson, 1988).
However, the scientific formulation of the term
rests upon extremely shaky data and is
operationalised in terms of all manner of value
judgements. The high profile of flagship species
in the global conservation agenda (e.g. giant
panda, tiger and blue whale) means that their
protectors may be able to tap funds from the
public of the North with a preference for large or
cuddly symbols, but may contradict alternative
views of biodiversity held by other parties.
International conservation institutions may thus

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be able to put these funds so freely given for
symbolic conservation reasons to more
sophisticated but less appealing ends. However,
these priorities of northern NGOs often have
repercussions for other parties. The Inuit for
example, hunt certain species of whales on a
subsistence basis but have been limited by tiny
quotas imposed by the International Whaling
Commission under great pressure from the
international environmental NGOs of the North.
Biodiversity may be understood by forest
dwellers in the South as a list of species needed
for a diversification of diet, medicinal purposes,
construction materials, dyeing, etc. They know
when their habitat is being destroyed and their
own interpretation of biodiversity is being
eroded. However, their criteria will be quite
different from a prospecting transnational
company looking for medicinal compounds. Only
by acknowledging multiple views, understanding
the politics of how actors present their views and
pursue their projects, can current scientific and
conservation thinking be literally brought down
to earth. International conservation paradigms
float around venues in exotic locations (local to
the locals), and are used in the daily projects of
promotion, politics and bureaucratic manoevrings
by academics and by policy- and image-makers
the world over. I am not dismissing them as
worthless in a glib, neo-populist wave of the
hand. They are essential tools in global
environmental management, but it is helpful to
reflect 'where they are coming from' and to realise
that they will have to be negotiated with others if
they are not to remain on paper only.
Finally, let us take the example of land
degradation. Like other words in the lexicon of
environmental management such as 'pollution'
and 'erosion', the word 'degradation' is involved
with normative connotations. Degradation implies
a scientific and cultural view of a set of biological
and physical processes which are interpreted on
the basis of implicit views about how the
environment should be used in terms of specific
management objectives. Again the three-step
approach developed here - (a) multiple views;
(b) actors in their daily lives; and (c) social
relations on a playing field anything but level -
helps to make sense of the confusion. The case of
colonial conservation policy in anglophone Africa
is a case in point. It is possible to identify strong
culturally defined normative statements about
nature and about agriculture which derive from
European experience. Many European settlers felt
that they had escaped a trammelled and abused
nature in Europe and that this was their chance to
become custodians of a new Eden (see, for
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example, how early colonial conservation views
GEOGRAPHY
were formed, Grove, 1990). Admittedly, the fact
that Africans had cultivated and modified Eden for A POLITICAL
2,000 years before the arrival of a white person ECOLOGY FOR
would have been difficult to comprehend. DEVELOPING
However, it did lead to the exclusion of Africans COUNTRIES
from National Parks and from hunting wildlife
(Marks, 1984). With regard to agriculture too,
normative notions of the application of capital to
land in the form of drainage, levelling, terracing
and de-stoning, together with the orderly planting Geography 1995
of crops, did not find any correspondence with
observed African agricultural technologies.
Experimental data from the United States were
imported to provide the scientific legitimation that
erosion was occurring and could be cured by
modifying the two principle variables used in
predicting erosion - declivity of slope and length
of slope. The most familiar way of modifying
these was the construction of the bench terrace -
immensely labour-intensive in a labour-scarce
agricultural economy, and often technically
inappropriate. It was not until the 1950s that
further erosion research revealed the neglected
aspect of erosion as rain splash and ground cover.
Of course, many African agricultural systems had
long since been adapted to provide ground cover
through mulching, intercropping and varying
planting times, and were technically appropriate
and sophisticated.
These three examples illustrate the same
points on a global scale. So far this lecture has
stressed uncertainty, discord and unresolved
outcomes. Let us now briefly look at appeals to
three sources of possible salvation which may
lead us out of the post-structural quagmire to
firmer ground. (Notice my inadvertent value
judgement in that metaphor. When I last used it,
I was gently reminded by a Professor of
Geography that it implied an unfavourable view
of wetlands. I leave it in here purposefully to
illustrate the power of symbols in environmental
discourse!). These three sources are:
Environmental Science
Law and Order
The Market
Environmental science
Taking into account many of the uncertainties
which have arisen from current environmental
research and also the way in which continuing
research has helped to resolve many of these
issues, it may be reasonable to suggest that our
uncertainties about environmental problems may 209
be reduced by 'more of the same'. After all,
 scientific research reduced technical uncertainty
GEOGRAPHY
in the nick of time during the negotiations on the
A POLITICAL reduction of the products harmful to the ozone
ECOLOGY FOR layer (the Vienna and Montreal Protocols). It was
DEVELOPING environmental research that identified the
COUNTRIES increasing possibility of global warming. There
are constant calls for better data. Again, a
prominent but anonymous conservationist was
reported as saying about biodiversity 'they'll kill
me for saying this ... but the lack of data worries
Geography 1995 me. I am absolutely sure we're right, but a gut
feeling isn't much backup when you're asking
people all over the world to change their lives
completely' (Science, 1991, p. 736). And now we
have a Biodiversity Convention, still immersed in
a seemingly arcane bureaucratic, political and
technical wrangle, but one which would benefit
from more biological research. In the field of land
degradation too, 'statistics are seldom in the right
form, are hard to come by and even harder to
believe let alone interpret' (UN Conference on
Desertification 1977, quoted in Blaikie, 1985, p.
15).
Such a case is a strong one, but it does not
reduce the prior case for studying the way in
which science identifies and frames so-called
'environmental' problems, and the way in which
science relates to opinion formation and policy-
making. The conventional view is that science
produces objective truth and provides a rational
non-political basis for policy making. In other
words, it is a matter of 'truth talking to power'.
Politicians have found that 'science' is an
indispensable tool for rationalising policies - in
the name of reason - and neatly de-politicising
the issue at hand altogether. However, this role
for science has come under increasing criticism. It
falsely separates facts from knowledge claims and
values. It reduces the passage of scientific
information to policy makers as uni-linear, in
which scientific information is accepted
unproblematically. Finally, science is seen as
being promoted in a set of autonomous
institutions, independent of the powers that turn
to it and use it. The aphorism invented by
Thompson and Warburton (1986), 'the institutions
are the facts', is an appealing one but may have
toxic side-effects if played with by more
conventional natural scientists. Let me take two
examples.
The overstocking controversy in colonial and
post-colonial Africa is a well known one, and it
illustrates well how science identified a particular
problem and framed it in a particular way. It was
long thought by colonial administrators that most
210 African pastoralists consistently overstocked their
range, which had become degraded. Reports of
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mobile dune systems, patches of bare ground
near watering points, decline in perennial species
and increase in aromatic species, and bush
encroachment have been commonplace for over
50 years. Colonial scientists based in what was
then Southern Rhodesia and elsewhere set up a
series of experiments to test the carrying capacity
of the range and the different soil and rainfall
regimes. They fenced off paddocks in different
parts of the country, measured the percentage of
bare ground, indicator species, annual species,
etc. and then subjected the range to different
stocking densities and measured the results over
a number of years.
They produced some fairly precise measures
of cattle condition and the ecological responses to
different cattle densities. The policies were then
accepted by the colonial authorities and
compulsory de-stocking for African pastoralists
was instigated. However, the way in which the
problem was framed scientifically derived from
the institutional characteristics of the research
effort. It depended upon scientists living around a
research station who could make fixed
measurements every few weeks. It assumed that
the density of cattle through time was constant.
And finally, the experimental design derived from
conventional agricultural experimentation. The
trouble was that the actual life of pastoralists and
the movement and density of cattle were quite
different from that which the experimental design
implicitly assumed. Pastoralists flee aridity; they
take their cattle where the rain and grass are.
Therefore very high densities of cattle occur for
short periods of time. In short, the experimental
design mis-specified the space-time patterns of
resource use pursued by real-life pastoralists. Also
the experiment did not simulate pastoralists' local
knowledge and herding skills. The institutions are
the facts? The moral is not 'no more research', but
'more research with negotiated problem
identification and research frameworks'.
The second example concerns the nature of
the environmental crisis in the Himalayan region.
Here there occurred 'contradictory certainties'
produced by different scientific interpretations of
what was happening. Very briefly, one seemingly
impregnable set of scientific facts suddenly
capsized like an iceberg in summer, to be
replaced by another set of mutually reinforcing
scientific facts. Up until about 1985 the set of
scientific facts gave us a picture of rapid
deforestation, expansion of agricultural land
driven by population growth, greatly accelerated
erosion with enhanced sedimentation and
flooding downstream. If visual confirmation was
needed all you had to do was to drive to the edge
of the Kathmandu valley, park your aid mission
Land Cruiser at the car park and look west. No
trees and plenty of landslides.
In direct contradiction to this conventional
view, Carson (1985) and others suggested that
most of the larger landslides were not primarily
caused by human action at all but by very rapid
orogenesis and river downcutting. Slope
instabilities near such rivers combined with
frequent earthquakes associated with mountain
building, together with a naturally highly erosive
climatic regime, were responsible for the more
spectacular landslides. Most of the sedimentation
reaching rivers came from this source of mass
wasting and not from agriculture at all.
Furthermore, a more neo-populist view of
Himalayan farmers as knowledgeable and
capable conservers of soil, rather than ignorant
and predatory resource wasters, was being
established in development thinking during the
1980s, and tended to replace a jaundiced with a
rosy view of human agency. What do we believe
now? Will this iceberg capsize next summer too?
Both these examples are not recounted to
under-rate the results of past research nor to
suggest the futility of further research. Indeed the
Royal Geographical Society has sponsored the
Likhu Watershed Study in Nepal which after three
years of careful natural science research has
clarified many outstanding uncertainties on the
natural science agenda. The difficult issue is how
this study clarifies the nature of the socio-
environmental crisis of the region. These
examples serve to show that an accountable,
negotiated and politically astute agenda for
environmental research should build upon
previous research.
Law and order
A direct and common-sense approach to dissent,
confusion and political machination in
environmental matters is to call for recourse to
law and order. Effective global environmental
management needs well drafted and implemented
environmental laws at the national and
international level, and indeed they must remain
one of the main tools managing the global
commons. There have been 50 multilateral
accords since the UN Conference on the Human
Environment in Stockholm in 1972, and now
there are over 900, with others coming out of
UNCED in 1992. Some of the best known are the
Biodiversity Convention, the Climatic Change
Convention, the Vienna and Montreal Protocols
concerning protection of the ozone layer, the
Dumping Convention dealing with marine
pollution, CITES (the Convention for Trade in
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Endangered Species) and the World Heritage
GEOGRAPHY
Convention. They have had a mixed level of
success, but any premature dismissal must A POLITICAL
acknowledge that the establishment of new ECOLOGY FOR
norms of environmental practice will take many DEVELOPING
years to establish, particularly where there are no COUNTRIES
penalties for defaulting (as is the case with many).
The Montreal Protocol is held up as a
successful example of a multilateral accord.
Scientific information managed to reduce
uncertainty at a critical time in negotiations, but it Geography 1995
was the relatively easy task of persuading a small
number of producers to change their technology
and of being able to finance it through the Global
Environmental Fund which also contributed. The
case of CITES is completely different. Here is a
series of lists or annexes of species compiled by
scientists, which is based upon extraordinarily
partial data and a set of value judgements. It is
also predicated on the notion that the
preservation of individual species is more feasible
than the protection of habitat. It also limited itself
to the trade in species, rather than their capture
and extirpation for other reasons (e.g. for direct
consumption). The choice of species in CITES
does of course reflect the present state of
scientific research and the mainly euro-centric
view of nature and conservation. However, how
our perplexed and underpaid conservation
officer, whom I introduced earlier, is to cope with
such a bureaucratic list, was never considered by
those who drafted this treaty which had codified
a set of unmediated prejudices from the scientific
community. It is easy to criticise and to forget the
restrictions under which the CITES secretariat
work. For the public of the North, elephants
should be preserved as an endangered species,
but for many Africans they are a nuisance. Of
course our view should prevail, shouldn't it? If it
should, there will be scientific arguments to
legitimate our claim, but if pressed against
counter claims, surely a forum for negotiation and
compensation should be a pre-requisite. If this is
not available, CITES will remain a forlorn
international initiative, at a time when the
extinction of species and their habitats still
continues apace.
The Ten Point Plan to Save The Earth
Summit, put forward by Greenpeace International
and allies at UNCED, is a radical and forthright
document. Of the ten points, half imply
international legal instruments, together with
national enabling legislation. The other five
address fundamental inequalities in North-South
relations. The law seems to be one of the
inevitable tools for environmental management. 211
However, to be effective it requires the
 capabilities of the state to enact the necessary
GEOGRAPHY
legislation nationally - collecting international
A POLITICAL signatories is the easy part - and then for each
ECOLOGY FOR state to implement it. Many nation states cannot
DEVELOPING do this, particularly states whose legitimacy has
COUNTRIES been seriously undermined, as in sub-Saharan
Africa. The republics of the former Soviet Union
too are finding it as difficult as any to comply with
environmental international accords. Legal
instruments will remain essential, but they too
Geography 1995 must respect customary rights to resources that
the state may want to overwrite by exclusion, or
to sell out to transnational companies. Like
natural science, law-making too can be a top-
down statist activity.
The market
In what has been called a period of 'market
triumphalism' (Peet and Watts, 1993), the logic of
the market has renewed its claims to rationality,
particularly at these times of global recession, a
re-vitalised neo-classical economics and structural
adjustment. The tools of neo-classical economics
have been developed to extend into
environmental decision-making. It is an exciting
and intellectually challenging enterprise, and has
promised to introduce rigour and a sense of value
(in all senses) into perceived environmental
problems and proposed solutions. Particular
applications are being debated at this moment in
terms of 'green accounting', and the concepts of
'joint implementation' and 'incremental costs' in
the context of how to calculate the costs of
reducing global warming and how to decide who
actually bears them. These debates may seem
extraordinarily arcane to the non-initiated, and
one may still unashamedly pause for a breath of
fresh air outside the burgeoning bureaucratic
apparatus which has been created to deal with
these technical-but-political issues.
Neo-classical economics offers a candidate to
those who are looking for an a-political
rationality, but it is of course deeply ideological
from its very core. It assumes that the
environment is a commodity, which must be
valued as such. While this may seem philistine to
some, economists would argue that only by doing
so can frequent undervaluation of the
environment, leading to overuse and degradation,
be avoided. However, it remains an open
question how far the environment should be
valued in this way, and what the ethical
implications are of doing so.
The application of economics to biodiversity
is, for example, an intellectually intriguing subject
212 and well worth expending effort on the pursuit of
one's own academic project, but also prey to
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deep problems both metaphysical and practical
(Brown and Moran, 1993). Let us alight briefly
(and perhaps unfairly) upon one example - not
that it should be taken to damn environmental
economics, but to demonstrate that it too will be
subject to uncertainty, incapability and political
manipulation. The example is the way in which
the value of biodiversity can be calculated, These
values comprise a number of different values,
which include among others:
i) Consumptive use values (those placed on
products which are consumed directly
without recourse to the market). These
products include a wide array of resources
including wild animals, fish, fibres, resins,
medicinal herbs, fruit, fungi, dyes, etc., many
of which have recreational, cultural and
religious significance. The calibration of these
is very problematic but some solutions have
been debated.
ii) Indirect instrumental use values, which
include a wide range of ecological functions
and services of ecosystems, such as, for
example, the maintenance of hydrological
regimes, wild species forming the genetic
resource for breeding new domesticates, and
wild pollinators for domestic crops. It does
not require much technical knowledge or
imagination to see how difficult it is to make
even a sensible guess at their monetary value.
iii) Non-instrumental intrinsic value, which refers
to the intrinsic value of species, quite
independent of humans and their monetary
valuation. This is a specifically non-
anthropocentric measure, and one which
therefore eludes even the most ingenious
economist.
These are just some of the many dangers in
a virtual minefield through which environmental
economists have to tread. It is not that the journey
is not worth making, but that it may not take us
anywhere near as far as the promised land of
certainty, total rationality and an unassailable
basis for environmental policy-making.
Conclusion
The environment is socially constructed because
what we notice, interpret and give meaning to
comes from our direct experience and our
cultural repertoire (value systems, traditions,
religions, educational contents, etc.). Any
environment conceived of and experienced at the
local, regional, national and international level is
the focus of a wide cast of actors who will bring
to it a variety of constructions. In so doing they
enter into discourses, not only about the
environment narrowly defined by natural
scientist, but about symbolic as well as physical
aspects of it that reach into our daily cultural and
productive lives - our lives in speaking and
practising. Different views circulate, and actors
will attempt to enrol others into their projects by
any means at their disposal. The political playing
field has gradients which derive from structures of
power at all levels. Such a standpoint, that
encompasses both the environment and those
who interpret and modify it, leads to an
acknowledgement of multiple views. Appeals to
better environmental science, to law and order
and the logic of the market will be able to press
their cases, but they too are subject to the same
plurality.
Where might we go from here?
1. Natural science and the social construction of
the environment. Academic and scientific
institutions produce framings and facts which
reflect their cultures, and their system of rewards
for professional excellence. Many of these are
judged by a narrow disciplinary set of criteria, and
exclude interdisciplinary perspectives across and
even within the natural and social science divide.
Geography, which should be well placed to
bridge this, has often been studied and taught by
human and physical geographers who have not
succeeded in really understanding how the 'other
half of geography works. The cross-pollination
which a political ecological perspective would
give to environment has only been discussed over
the past few years, let alone practised. Also, a
reaching out from international research
institutions to other parties in developing
countries such as politicians, farmers, NGOs,
churches, chambers of commerce, trade unions,
grassroots movements, local schools and
universities seems very difficult since the
institutional links are seldom in place, but without
them, geographers in the North will continue to
pursue their own narrow 'projects' with a myopic
and blinkered lens.
2. Coping with uncertainty. While more good
environmental research will reduce technical
uncertainty, alternative interpretations and
agendas in the field of environmental
management will always serve to make policy-
making a political activity, where partial scientific
knowledge is selectively enrolled to legitimate
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competing projects. Policy-making in the
GEOGRAPHY
environmental field is still predicated upon
precise quantitative measurement without any A POLITICAL
significant margin of uncertainty. Indeed, ECOLOGY FOR
authority and legitimacy depend upon the DEVELOPING
number of decimal places whereas orders of COUNTRIES
magnitude are all we can be fairly certain about.
There remains the tension between a new
environmental economics which has brought
some overdue rigour into thinking about the
global environment, and the unknowability of Geography 1995
costs and benefits of degradation and
conservation even within several orders of
magnitude. It is policy-making itself at all levels
which will have to adapt - and not consider it
best practice to specify in a project document
every benefit and cost - down to the cost of the
last litre of fuel for the project vehicle in year 20
of the project life. We simply will not know, the
quantitative answers to much more important
questions. Additional qualitative criteria will have
to be considered explicitly. The 'precautionary
principle' is one recent attempt to politicise and
normalise our level of ignorance about the
technical aspects of some environmental issues,
but it still has some way to go to be accepted by
those who do not like the causes to which it has
been linked.
3. Environmental brokerage and opening up
spaces. Environmental policy making at any level
- from the World Bank, through national
Ministries of Agriculture to Village Forest
Committees - will favour some at the expense of
others (see Ekins, 1993, for a critique of global
institutions). But it will have to be negotiated so
that losers are prepared to put up with losing or
to be compensated for the implementation of
someone else's environmental agenda. This is
especially true when there are large numbers of
people involved who will simply break the law if
deprived of what they understand to be their
rights, as in the case of many protected areas in
developing countries. At the international level
too, familiar North-South political issues are
already being negotiated in the wake of Agenda
21 agreed at the UNCED, and it is becoming clear
that the North can only negotiate its
environmental agenda successfully with some
important concessions regarding funding, trade
agreements, transfer of technology and property
rights over biological resources. In our landscape,
with which we began, the acknowledgment of
diverse parties, their interpretations and their
projects, allows a space for negotiation, often on
issues far removed from environmental agendas. 213
Perhaps that is no bad thing, either.

GEOGRAPHY References
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Piers Blaikie is Professor in the School of Development
Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4
7TJ. This is the text of the Tripartitle Lecture, delivered
at the Annual Conference of the GA in Lancaster on 10
April 1995, at the joint invitation of the Geographical
Association, Royal Geographical Society and the
Institute of British Geographers.

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