Multistakeholder Collaboration as Symbolic Marketplace and Pedagogic Practice

Abstract

This article focuses on the role of power in multistakeholder collaboration. It considers this form of organization from a nontraditional, Bourdieun perspective, which has the authors focus on the how of power and on the role of language in the constitution and the exclusion of voice. A case study—a collaboration convened by a scientific task force to resolve an environmental conflict in Canada’s Banff National Park—is introduced, and this is read off against a number of Bourdieu’s concepts, namely capital, field, habitus, and misrecognition, doxa, and symbolic violence. Through such a reading, the article offers insights into elements of both surface and deep-structure power. The article, by focusing on a science-driven, environmental multi-stakeholder collaboration, also challenges common-sense constructions of the environment and raises concerns over the presumed neutrality or nonpolitical nature of both scientific and economic discourse.