Introduction

Abstract

Landscapes surrounding protracted resource conflicts have played host to a wide range of experiments in science-based governance designed with many different goals in mind. Organizers have sought to mollify resistance to extractive projects by inviting skeptical residents into participatory forums, or by attempting to depoliticize the ecological effects of these projects through technical media. Researchers have leveraged government and corporate funds for “conflict resolution” to generate new tools for land-based activism. However, many of these experiments have found prolonged and unruly afterlives amid government downsizing. In rural northwest British Columbia, many White and Indigenous researchers involved in these initiatives have seen their own roles as neighbors, experts, and kin change. Yet together, these people and projects have persisted. Exploring how research and researchers have remade one another after the War in the Woods, this book raises new questions about the entangled afterlives of conflict and science-based governance.