Rethinking Knowledge and Power: The Local and the Global

Abstract

Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. Edited by Sheila Jasanoff, Marybeth Long Martello. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 376 pp., $67.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-10103-3), $27.00 paper (ISBN: 0-262-60059-5). As the watchword for the new millennium, globalization is both valorized and vilified (Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Friedman 2000). In either case, it is rarely denaturalized and recognized for the plethora of socially constructed processes that it is. The contributors to Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance seek to address this omission—and much more—in the context of environmental governance. Rather than dichotomizing the local and the global, this book demonstrates that both are essentially contested, dialectically constituting each other, and deployable in multiple arenas as rhetorical strategies. Most important, the authors of the thirteen case studies contained in the volume generate surprising insights from their unifying premise: that the generation, communication, and diffusion of knowledge is an eminently political project. Thus, Earthly Politics stands as an important antidote to two trends in international studies: the polarization that has occurred around the phenomenon of globalization, and the epistemological bias that privileges the supposedly objective neutrality of science over other ways of knowing. The book accomplishes this by importing significant insights and methodologies from other fields. International relations has been referred to as “the borrowing discipline.” Historically, international relations borrowed much from economics; more recently, the constructivist turn has been inspired by imports from sociology and philosophy of science. Earthly Politics advances the constructivist research agenda by drawing from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies. How we understand environmental problems, the editors and contributors believe, shapes how we manage these problems. Yet, our understandings can never be divorced from discursive and cultural influences, an insight that is key to both the constructivist turn and postmodern influences in international relations theory (Katzenstein 1996; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996). The interdisciplinary orientation of Earthly Politics comes not only from an epistemological commitment of editors …