Abstract
New technologies have increasingly featured in environmental conservation conflicts. We examined the deployment of imaging devices such as sonar equipment and cameras to survey the Fal estuary in Cornwall, UK. Due to heavy use of these waters, there have been several disputes coalescing around protected marine features, including the estuary’s rare maerl beds. A comparison of two cases, scallop dredging and docks development, showed technical instruments being deployed to produce information about the marine environment as evidence to inform decision-making. The use of imaging devices stimulated political action and was regarded as a move away from emotion-based decision-making towards desired objectivity. Simultaneously, however, the process of deploying these devices was challenged and there was recognition that the resultant information could be used to construct the estuary as a politically charged space. Thus, rather than clarifying and resolving contentious issues, technological interventions generated new baselines for knowledge contestation and amplified ongoing battles for credibility and authority.
Highlights
The complex and inherently social dimensions of environmental conservation are more pronounced in conflict situations, where fundamental contestation among the agendas and values of multiple groups of human actors complicates decision-making processes (Marshall et al 2007; White et al 2009; Redpath et al 2015)
Rather than weighing up the technical efficacy of technological interventions, we focus on the perceptions and social dynamics emerging from discourses surrounding the techno-scientific production of evidence in order to better understand the varied uses, socio-political underpinnings, and impacts of new devices featuring in environmental conservation conflicts
Our research revealed a landscape of considerable complexity, where technologically-mediated knowledge production and interpretation were intrinsically bound up with the political, so that the use of evidence-producing devices was simultaneously effectual and problematic in managing the course of conflicts
Summary
The complex and inherently social dimensions of environmental conservation are more pronounced in conflict situations, where fundamental contestation among the agendas and values of multiple groups of human actors complicates decision-making processes (Marshall et al 2007; White et al 2009; Redpath et al 2015). The use of technologies may be a means of privileging scientific-rational (Lidskog and Sundqvist 2004; Lidskog 2008), ‘neopositivist’ (Fischer 2000), and technological fix perspectives (Huesemann and Huesemann 2011), wherein techno-scientific methods are seen as the only valid modes of eliciting ‘truth’ or achieving ‘progress.’ Further, the deployment of these technologies has been understood as justifying the autonomy of those possessing technocratic expertise and increasing their influence in decision-making processes (Nelkin 1975), which have been shown to result in distinctions between fact and value (Latour 2004), between experience and emotion (Milton 2002; Fazey et al 2006), between objectivity and subjectivity (Duckett et al 2015), between qualitative and quantitative knowledge (Carolan 2006; Adams and Sandbrook 2013), between scientific and traditional/ indigenous knowledge (Briggs 2005; Watson-Verran and Turnbull 2005; Nadasdy 2011), and between experts and laypersons (Nelkin 1975; Wynne 1996; Fischer 2000) While these divisions have been critiqued by the authors and others, they have proven durable as social discourses in shaping and defining issues. This is where we’ve ended with projects costing a lot more money, taking a lot longer in time to put forward and to achieve when it comes to development, predominantly because of that legislation that’s there protecting the environment.^
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