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Public Lecture: Do People Matter in Social Scientific Analyses of Environmental Politics?

Dr. Arun Agrawal, University of Michigan
Tuesday, 3 April  5.10 pm
Archway 2 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago, Dunedin

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This lecture will examine whether and how people matter in social scientific analyses of environmental change and politics. At one level, even posing the question about whether people matter in social scientific studies of the environment is preposterous. Surely, social scientific writings focusing upon women, peasants, communities, farmers, the indigenous, the poor, or the elite are centrally concerned with people and their interests -- in stark contrast to models of climate change, equations representing biogeochemical cycles, and simulations describing agent behavior. This paper, however, advances the argument that in fact the typical strategies involved in building social-scientific arguments center around schematized and categorical representations of groups rather than around those who inhabit such schemes or categories. The paper draws from the larger literature on authority, access, and property to suggest that social-scientific analyses of the environment are concerned about people primarily as exemplars of particular theoretical arguments or as representatives of categories around which to construct structural analyses of the environment, not as persons with their own lives that respond in different and unpredictable fashion to environmental changes and politics. The goal and effect of using people as examples to illustrate theoretical positions -- individually or as category members -- is to lend a given analysis the ability to explain and predict, and thereby abstract from the messiness and unpredictability that is typically the nature of social interactions. The paper ends by suggesting that greater attention to the practices of those who inhabit the categories upon which social scientists focus and to the ways in which people change in relation to environmental changes is necessary if people are to matter more in social analyses of environmental changes.

About the speaker

Dr. Arun Agrawal is the Associate Professor of Natural Resources & Environment at the University of Michigan. He holds degrees from Duke University, the Indian Institute of Management and Delhi University and has held teaching positions at Yale University and McGill University. His research and teaching emphases are on the politics of international development, institutional change and environmental conservation in South Asia primarily, though recent projects include other developing countries in Africa and Latin America. He has written extensively on 1) indigenous knowledge, 2) community-based conservation, 3) common property, 4) population and resources, and 5) environmental identities. Recent interests include the decentralization of environmental policy (especially forestry and wildlife), and the emergence of environment as a subject of human concern.

Recent Publications by Agrawal

Books

2005. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and Political Subjects (Duke University Press; forthcoming from Oxford University Press for South Asia dist.); rpt. 2006.

1999. Decentralization in Nepal: A Comparative Perspective. San  Francisco: ICS Press.

Edited Collections

2005. The Future of Nomadic Agro-Pastoralism in South Asia. Special issue, Nomadic Peoples (with Vasant Saberwal).

2003. (coedited with K. Sivaramakrishnan) Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of
Development. Stanford University Press. (Also published jointly by Oxford University Press, New Delhi in Spring 2003).

2002. Indigenous Knowledge. Invited editor of a Special Issue of International Social Science Journal (September 173). (Published in English, French, and Spanish by UNESCO).

2001. Communities and the Environment: Ethnicity, Gender, and the State in Community-Based Conservation. Rutgers University Press (With Clark Gibson).

2000. Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations and Rule in India. Duke University Press (With K. Sivaramakrishnan). (Also published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi as Social Nature: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India).

Articles in Refereed Publications

Forthcoming (2007): Decentralization/Recentralization: How National Governments Maintain Control over Forest Resources. World Development (with Anne Larson and Jesse Ribot).

Forthcoming (2006): Political Science and Conservation Biology: The Dialog of the Deaf? Conservation Biology. (with Elinor Ostrom)

Forthcoming (2006): Environmental Governance. Annual Review of Environment and Resources. (with Maria Carmen Lemos)

2006. Explaining Success on the Commons: Community Forest Governance in the Indian Himalaya. World Development. (with Ashwini Chhatre)

2005. Decentralization and participation: The governance of common pool resources in Nepal's Terai. World Development 33(7): 1101-14 (with Krishna Gupta).

2005. Environmentality: Community, intimate government and environmental subjects in Kumaon, India. Current Anthropology 46(2), April 2005 (Substantially shortened version in French published in July 2005 as Communautés, gouvernement rapproché et sujets de l’environnement au Kumaon, Inde. Anthropologie et Societe. 29(2):

2003. Sustainable Governance of Common-Pool Resources: Context, Methods, Politics. Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 243-62