Ontologies of Environmental Governance - II

Abstract

Environmental governance as practiced today spans diverse arenas of engagement, policy agendas, governance scales, and actor groups. Such governance regimes, however, operate in an increasingly neoliberal world that not only defines problem and solution spaces in particular terms but closes off avenues for envisioning possible alternatives. This panel is aimed both at interrogating the ontological assumptions behind current environmental governance arrangements and, more critically, asking how ontological scholarship can contribute to reconceptualizing the theory, practice, and very concept of environmental governance. Along with anthropology and geography, STS has been crucial to unpacking an understanding of reality that de-centers the human, breaks apart dominant dualisms, and takes assemblages of humans and non-humans seriously (Blaser 2009, 2014; Jensen 2017; Mol 1999). This can be seen in contributions ranging from Latour’s parliament of things (1991) to Haraway’s Chthulucene (2016) to Tsing’s explorations of patchiness, eruption, freedom, and ruin (2015). We welcome a range of theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic case study-based papers that analyze the ontological politics and political ontologies of environmental governance as practiced today or envisioned for the future. Potential questions to focus on include:
•What would environmental governance look like “otherwise”?
•How can we reconceive the practice and discourse of land, water, climate, or biodiversity governance?
•In a political moment characterized as “post-truth,” how can ontological engagement guard against non-reflexive neoliberal entrenchment?
•What methods can ontological scholarship innovate to imagine governance scales, actors, and relationships differently and advance new conceptions of environmental governance?

Chair

• Walker DePuy, University of Georgia

Individual Presentations

• An Ontology of Degradation: Thinking Degradation Through the “Life of a Lake” - Suneel Kumar, Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia

• A Sea in Spite of a Lake - Jennifer Lee Johnson, Purdue University

• Thinking Biodiversity “Otherwise:” What an “Ecology of Selves” Might Mean for Sustainable Environmental Governance - Walker DePuy, University of Georgia

• Global Territorial Governance: A Multi-Scale Analysis of Indigenous Ontologies in a Pan-Amazonian Climate Initiative - Sylvia Rocio Cifuentes, University of California, Santa Barbara

Session Organizers

• Jacob Weger, University of Georgia

• Suneel Kumar, Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia