Environmental governance: Broadening ontological spaces for a more livable world

Abstract

This paper contributes to global debates on environmental governance by drawing on recent ontological scholarship to ask: What would it mean to ontologically engage the concept of environmental governance? By examining the ontological underpinnings of three environmental governance domains (land, water, biodiversity), we find that dominant contemporary environmental governance concepts and policy instruments are grounded in a modernist ontology which actively shapes the world, making certain aspects and relationships visible while invisibilizing others. We then survey ethnographic and other literature to highlight how such categories and their relations have been conceived otherwise and the implications of breaking out of a modernist ontology for environmental governance. Lastly, we argue that answering our opening question requires confronting the coloniality woven into the environmental governance project and consider how to instead embrace ontological pluralism in practice. In particular, we examine what taking seriously the right to self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) could mean for acknowledging Indigenous ontologies as systems of governance in their own right; what challenges and opportunities exist for recognizing and translating ontologies across socio-legal regimes; and how embracing the dynamism and hybridity of ontologies might complicate or advance struggles for material and cognitive justice.

Environmental Law and the Unsustainability of Sustainable Development: A Tale of Disenchantment and of Hope

“…the role and place of human-non-human interconnections, while creating a space for the enactment of new ontological categories (DePuy et al 2022). This is necessary to guide our 'world-views; conceptions about people and the way they interact; ethical frameworks and values; assumptions about what exists and what does not exist; and the paths to knowledge and objectivity' (Villalba 2013(Villalba , p. 1430.…”

“…But there seems to be some agreement on its potential, at least conceptually, to influence environmental law and governance in the longer term by providing an opportunity to dissolve modernist dualisms, and to promote more expansive ways of seeing, being, caring and knowing that can redefine sociality and relationality in a decentered, all-inclusive and non-hierarchical 'ecological' space (e.g. DePuy et al 2022). We believe that buen vivir can guide, to some extent, the type of radical reconfiguration of ('Western') environmental law that is being called for 10 ; if not fully in practice (yet), then at least in theory.…”

Making space for plural ontologies in fisheries governance: Ireland’s disobedient offshore islands

“…In other words, political ontology asks us to consider the pluriverse as a possibility, to pay attention to how different worlds emerge (a process described as "worlding" by Blaser (2014)) and to critically examine what happens when they meet each other (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018). The attention paid by critical scholars to the social and political dimensions of knowledge construction, and the framings and cultural understandings of environmental phenomena, have laid bare the ways in which powerful interests are supported through the privileging of certain ontologies in producing policyrelevant environmental knowledge (Sullivan 2017) and the technocratic-scientific, apolitical and ahistorical terms in which environmental governance tends to be framed (DePuy et al 2021). As the empirical data in this paper tell a story of the privileging of certain fisheries worlds to the detriment of others, my ontological analysis is informed by political, historical and socio-cultural contexts and engages with the practical and political challenges involved in embracing ontological pluralism in fisheries governance.…”

“…As the empirical data in this paper tell a story of the privileging of certain fisheries worlds to the detriment of others, my ontological analysis is informed by political, historical and socio-cultural contexts and engages with the practical and political challenges involved in embracing ontological pluralism in fisheries governance. DePuy et al (2021) have recently engaged ontologically with the concept of environmental governance in the context of land, water and biodiversity. While ontological considerations are evident in some critical scholarship on fisheries management and governance (Olson 2010;A.…”

“…Following Boucquey et al (2016) and Blaser (2009b), I show how the stories that depict the performance of multiple ontologies reveal the ontological assumptions underpinning Irish fisheries governance approaches. Probing these ontological assumptions provides insights into how, despite attempts to account for the worlds of small-scale fisheries in Irish fisheries management approaches and policy instruments, the dominant world enacted by those practices and instruments risks subordinating the small-scale fisheries worlds by continuing to reduce these worlds to its own (Blaser 2009b), and, in the process, rendering them invisible (DePuy et al 2021).…”