Everyday experiences of post-politicising processes in rural freshwater management

Abstract

There has been a burgeoning of geography literature that draws on post-politics to make sense of trends in Western liberal democracies. This body of literature argues that consensus is constructed around capitalism, and spaces for dissensus are closed off. However, critiques have focused on the state-centric and totalising nature of some of this literature. This article adds nuance and depth to explorations of post-politicising processes. I do this through an empirical case study that demonstrates how dissensus is disavowed through the construction of community, and highlights gendered and classed experiences of this disavowal. In exploring a rural community in Aotearoa New Zealand engaged in catchment-based decision making, I draw on Nancian critical community scholarship to analyse how neoliberal and rural discourses defined belonging. Boundaries, and who could access the catchment committee, were shaped by expectations of economic consumption, spatial membership, gendered behavioural norms and class. The policing of these boundaries became increasingly antagonistic to the point of threats of violence. Accounts by those who experienced this policing demonstrate the embodied and largely banal nature of post-politicising processes. And yet, this case study illustrates how efforts to depoliticise are entangled with politicisation and raises questions about how change unfolds.

Ronan Paddison on public space and the post-political

“…Arguably, then, Paddison's intervention can be said to have prefigured some of the later work that has sought to add geographical and political nuance to the exploration of post-politicization and postdemocratization. Indeed, similar modes of enquiry can be discerned in work that has sought to unpack the different modes and tactics of de-politicization at play in different geographical contexts (Van Puymbroeck and Oosterlynck, 2014) or to trace the actually existing geographies of post-politicization (Raco and Lin, 2012) by exploring the situated and contingent armature of tactics that are mobilized to silence political disagreement (see, for example, Baeten, 2009;Thomas, 2017). And the same goes for accounts that have sought to document and analyze the always contingent and contested unfolding of processes of post-democratization and the uneven geographies in and through which these operate (see, for example, Doucette and Koo, 2016;Karaliotas, 2019).…”

Contesting deep sea oil: Politicisation–depoliticisation–repoliticisation

“…In particular, in the sub-sections below, we focus on legislative changes and the framings of activists and dissenting actions in the media. While there is a lot of literature that argues that spaces for genuine politics have been closed, there is a need for more studies of the actual labour of depoliticisation and its entanglement with politicising actions (Darling, 2014; Featherstone, 2013; Thomas, 2017). If we understand the work that maintains and perpetuates postpolitical processes, then more can be done to challenge them.…”