Article
Reference
How Regional Is Regional Environmental Governance?
DEBARBIEUX, Bernard
Abstract
One of the most striking features of the work of scientists specialized in regional environmental governance is the huge diversity of ways they refer to the notion of region. In this academic subfield, “regionality” refers to different orders of reality (ontology), and regions have a heterogeneous status in the production of knowledge (epistemology). While such a diversity of uses and meanings illustrates the rich potential of a regional scope in environmental governance analysis, scholars' ontological and epistemological stances must be made more explicit. The objective of this commentary is to elaborate this suggestion and to illustrate it on the basis of the articles published in this special issue.
DEBARBIEUX, Bernard. How Regional Is Regional Environmental Governance? Global Environmental Politics, 2012, vol. 12, no. 3, p. 119-126
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How Regional Is Regional Environmental Governance?
Bernard Debarbieux, University of Geneva
Published in Global Environmental Politics, August 2012, Vol. 12, No. 3, Pages 119-‐126
Abstract:
One of the most striking features of the work of scientists specialized in regional environmental governance is the huge diversity of ways they refer to the notion of region. In this academic subfield, “regionality” refers to different orders of reality (ontology), and regions have a heterogeneous status in the production of knowledge (epistemology). While such a diversity of uses and meanings illustrates the rich potential of a regional scope in environmental governance analysis, scholars' ontological and epistemological stances must be made more explicit. The objective of this commentary is to elaborate this suggestion and to illustrate it on the basis of the articles published in this special issue.
Many geographers, political scientists, and other social scientists share a common interest in regional environmental governance (REG).1 However, though they share a common interest for a special kind of spatial entities – supranational or transnational ones – one of the most striking features of the work of such analysts is the huge diversity of the ways they refer to the notion of region itself. Are the regions they refer to really of the same kind?
The same observation can be made after reading the articles in this special issue. All of them have been written by political scientists specializing in international relations. Together they prove how rich and relevant this academic subfield is, producing a real added value for the analysis of environmental governance, which has so far mainly been done at other levels.
They also demonstrate how useful a multilevel approach is, REG being hard to conceive without taking into account national and global levels of decision-‐making and organization.
Therefore, the research gathered here provides an excellent argument for those who want to state that the rise of REG instruments and practices deserves academic attention.
Yet this shared quality goes along with a manifest diversity: beyond the evident diversity in the geographical focus of these articles (South and Southeast Asia, European Alps, North American Great Lakes, etc.) lies a more significant one—namely the diversity in social, political, and legal entities under study (international treaties or agreements, supranational entities, social mobilization, etc.), and an even more decisive one—fundamental heterogeneity in the ontological and epistemological status of the notions of region and regionality. In simpler terms, regionality refers to different orders of reality (ontology), and regions have a heterogeneous status in the production of knowledge (epistemology).
The authors of this special issue refer to regional entities of very different kinds. Some refer to natural regions (such as the Alps for Balsiger, the Mekong River basin for Elliott, the Indus
1 Balsiger and Debarbieux 2011; Balsiger and VanDeveer 2010; Debarbieux 2009.
River basin for Matthew, the Great Lakes water basin for Klinke), which seem to indicate that the regions exist prior to any attempt to set up institutionalized governance at this level.
Some are supranational organizations (such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Elliott’s paper, the European Union in Balsiger’s), and have developed a more-‐or-‐less ambitious agenda for dealing with environmental issues. Some are decentralized affiliates of global organizations (regional centers of the Basel and Stockholm Conventions in Selin’s paper). Some (eg, Klinke) are social configurations shaped by collective mobilization or public participation, if not collective identities; and some combine different kinds of regions or regional entities. Balsiger’s and Elliott’s papers, for example, focus on the will or capacity of regional organizations to take into account environmental issues at the level of natural entities that are defined according to natural scientific knowledge (such as watersheds and mountain ranges).2
Such ontological and epistemological variety in the term region illustrates the potential for adopting a regional point of view in environmental governance analysis. It is part of the internal diversity of what deserves to be seen as a specific subfield of knowledge. But the notions of region and regionality remain vague, which is somehow paradoxical for a research field that explicitly refers to these terms. We may guess that in most cases, if not in all, regions are socially constructed, but we could expect to know more about the constructions themselves, as well as how regionality as such is constructed.
In my view, making explicit the ontological and epistemological basis of REG analysis is not a matter of definition. Geographers know how time-‐consuming and fruitless have been attempts to precisely define the term region. We can survive quite well with the simple idea that a region is a spatial entity at a particular level, even if we regret the lack of academic consensus on whether that level is subnational, supranational, or transnational. The question, What is a region? (environmental/eco/etc.) merely requires an arbitrary consensus. Another question, How is a region? deserves much more attention, because it forces us to make explicit the ontological status of a regional entity. This second question points at a region’s mode of existence and determines what can be said about it by REG analysis. In other words, as this commentary will explain, answering the how question highlights the way REG analysis is made and justified.
The following paragraphs discuss some issues related to the ontological or epistemological status of regionality in REG analysis. This perspective owes a lot to vigorous debates that have taken place in some academic domains during the last three decades, especially in the so-‐called politics of scale, new regional geography, and political ecology domains.3 It will suggest that political science, international relations, and geography have much to learn from one another around their shared interest in regionality.
Regional Scope Versus Scope of Regionality
There is a major difference between the concept of regional scope, such as the one adopted in this issue by Matthew’s analysis of South Asia, and that of scope of regionality used by
2 Balsiger, this issue; Elliott, this issue; Klinke, this issue; Matthew, this issue; Selin, this issue.
3 Brenner 2001; Neumann 2009; Paasi 1991.
other authors in this issue, such as Elliott when she refers to Southeast Asia. Regional scope refers to a kind of epistemic and methodological artifact used to spatially frame the area of analysis. Many papers analyzing environmental governance with an ad hoc spatial focus (Central Europe, Southern Africa, etc.) proceed in this way. Elliott, for instance, questions the will and ability of a regional institution—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—to tackle environmental issues, notably watershed management. For her and similar writers, regionality is not an element of an epistemic posture, but a component of an ontological statement; it refers to regional entities (the overall territory of ASEAN member states, watersheds, and some others), which are considered part of the reality itself.
Is Regionality a Feature of Ontological Subjectivity or Objectivity?
To what kind of reality does this second kind of paper refer? When Elliott and Balsiger examine the way ASEAN and the EU cope with environmental issues, they point at regional institutions and organizations. Following philosophers such as John R. Searle4 (1995), both can be said to be ontologically subjective: the existence of institutions and organizations such as ASEAN and EU, but also the Alpine Convention or the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, requires some degree of intersubjectivity, trust, and legitimacy. From this point of view, there is a difference between these entities and the regional centers of the Basel and Stockholm conventions examined by Selin. These regional centers are organizations whose corresponding institutions (both conventions) are specifically global.
Comparatively, the Alps (Balsiger), the Great Lakes water basin (Klinke), the Mekong River basin (Elliott), and the Himalayas (Matthew) have what Searle calls ontological objectivity.
Their mode of existence (the kind of reality these entities refer to) does not depend on individuals or societies.
Are Environmental Regions Parts of the Objective World?
However, we need to be very precise about what objectivity means. Does ontological objectivity refer to a set of entities (such as natural regions) and statements related to them (such as causal relations between water flow and forest cover) that belong to the real world?
This highly realist posture has been undermined by history-‐of-‐science studies and challenged by epistemic constructivism. Scholars of history of science5 have shown that natural areas have been conceived and defined in very different ways through time. Since the early twentieth century, proponents of epistemic constructivism6 have shown that entities defined by scientific knowledge cannot pretend to be the pieces that comprise the real world. These entities are scientific conventions that provide efficient models of observed reality. They are entities of knowledge rather than of reality itself. Following such a constructivist epistemology, it is no use to build on the idea that some natural areas/entities could preexist any process of objectification. Natural areas are not entities to be recognized
4 Searle 1995.
5 Eg, Debarbieux 2008; Jardine et al. 1996.
6 Eg, Bachelard 2001; Watzlawick 1984
or uncovered by scientific processes; they are the intentional output of the differentiation of the Earth’s surface and of a scale-‐making process aiming at greater intelligibility.
Ignoring or Questioning Social Ontologies
REG analysis can reasonably ignore the above comments if it sticks to a formal analysis of, let’s say, institutional arrangements, policy-‐making, or bilateral treaties. Thus it can take for granted entities (national territories, natural areas, supranational institutions, etc.) referred to by social actors, as do most social actors themselves. This is the dominant posture in this special issue.
But REG analysis could also build on these inputs and question the very nature of and relations between the various ontologies at work in regionalized social worlds. In a recent work devoted to mountain regions and policies, I have tried to follow how and when mountain ranges—as conventionally defined and conceived by natural scientists—have been used for grounding collective identities, public policies, and politics.7 This has happened only thanks to the growing confidence in scientific knowledge and a growing social demand for a nature-‐based vision of the world and of environmental management. Therefore, a decisive question for such analysis is to determine how social actors seize scientific knowledge and translate scientific ontologies into social ontologies. Pierre Livet and Ruwen Ogien say, “to ask questions of ontology, is simply to wonder what king of entities are convoked when someone talks about something, describes and explain a phenomenon and (…) what operations are made possible on these entities, what transformations make possible to from one to another.”8 But scientific ontologies and social ontologies are of a different kind, motivated by different intentionalities, and produced according to different processes.
Therefore, REG analysis, when referring to the spatial entities of the world of environmental governance, faces an alternative: either refer to taken-‐for-‐granted ontologies (regional organizations, conventional entities of natural scientists, imagined regional communities, etc.); or analyze how these regional entities are built or reinforced in the various ontologies at play, how these ontologies interact, and how these factors eventually lead to various kinds of environmental governance.
Is the Study of Regionality Itself a Social Issue?
The above commentaries invite us to pay specific attention to the social and political modalities and implications of the tendency of modern societies to conflate scientific and social ontologies. One fascinating example is the notion of ecoregions used by WWF. The term is officially implied to be borrowed from scientific knowledge: “An ecoregion is defined as a large area of land or water that contains a geographically distinct assemblage of natural communities that (a) share a large majority of their species and ecological dynamics; (b)
7 Debarbieux and Rudaz 2010.
8 Livet and Ogien 2000, 15. My translation of the original in French: « se poser des questions d’ontologie, c’est simplement se demander quel est le type d’entités que l’on convoque lorsque l’on parle de quelque chose, que l’on décrit un phénomène et qu’on l’explique et (…) quelles opérations sont possibles sur ces entités, quelles transformations permettent de passer de l’une à l’autre »
share similar environmental conditions, and (c) interact ecologically in ways that are critical for their long-‐term persistence.” 9 But in fact WWF also uses the concept of ecoregion as a systematic tool for organizing political action on a regional basis. This conflation reveals an interesting normative conception of the spatial frame of action, which refers to imagined nature as a driving force for shaping policies.
The examples discussed in this commentary also invite REG analysts to pay attention to how regional ontologies are put on stage, disputed, or negotiated, and thus constitute a decisive element of consensus building or conflict in environmental governance. Arturo Escobar provides an example of how different actors can adopt a common reference to a biogeographical area in Colombia usually called Pacifico biogeografico. Whereas global NGOs are motivated by biodiversity conservation in this region, local people (predominantly descendants of slaves) seize on the same spatial entity for demanding official recognition because of their role in ecosystem stewardship).10 Klinke’s analysis of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement illustrates how stakeholders reach consensus on a spatial entity and the environmental threats and solutions that pertain to this entity.
On the other hand, Balsiger’s paper displays how the identification of a regional entity to be selected for environmental governance can be controversial because of divergent interests and visions of regional issues; a narrow delineation of the Alps as defined by the Alpine Convention, promoted by environmental associations and national ministries of environment, is being challenged by a larger delineation, that of a macroregional strategy promoted by subnational political entities (länder, provinces, cantons, etc.).
Such convergences or controversies remind us to consider the lessons emerging from the academic study of the so-‐called politics of scale, which suggest that scale “is not simply an external fact awaiting discovery but a way of framing conceptions of reality” and that “the politics of scale may often take the form of contending ‘framings’.”11 This should be kept in mind in REG analysis: ecoregional entities invoked by various stakeholders are also ways of framing geographical and natural reality, and can be objects of potential controversy when stakeholders do not share the same mode of framing.
Is Region a Category of Knowledge or of Social Practice?
The diversity of conceptions of regionality that underlies REG analysis leads to a final set of questions: Is regionality a category of knowledge, and if so, what kind of knowledge? Or is it conceived as a category of social practice? Most papers in REG analysis do not provide clear answers to this, probably because regionality is paradoxically not at the very heart of their focus.
In this domain, regional geography has experienced a dramatic shift since the 1980s. The notion of region, central in the discipline’s vocabulary since the early decades of the twentieth century, used to be conceived as a category of objectivist scientific knowledge.
The so-‐called new regional geography (NRG), as well as earlier publications such as by
9 World Wildlife Fund 2012.
10 Escobar 2001.
11 Delaney and Leitner 1997, 95.
Armand Frémont and Wilbur Zelinsky, made their own the constructivist turn of the time, even though their reference to regions as a category of social practice, i.e. of social and practical ontology, was only implicit.12 One of the most quoted NRG authors, Anssi Paasi, conceives of regions as the output of “historically contingent social processes emerging as a constellation of institutionalized practices, power relations and discourse.”13
REG analysis usually refers to regional entities as being both components of scientific knowledge and referents of social practices. This may blur the message on regionality.
Brubaker and Cooper suggested that the notion of identity, having too many heterogeneous meanings, could not refer at the same time to a social notion and a scientific concept.14 Adam Moore adopted the argument for the notion of scale; he recommended keeping the notion as a category of social and political practice—a way of framing—and to get rid of it in the academic conceptual vocabulary, where it usually refers to "a nested hierarchy of bounded spaces.”15 Therefore, to ensure that the critical analysis of social practices and norms remains possible, Moore recommended focusing on “scalar practices of social actors,”
where “the tendency to partition the social world into hierarchically ordered spatial
‘containers’ is what we want to explain—not explain things with.”16 Following both arguments on identity and scale, I wonder if “region” as used in REG analysis should be reserved for describing how social actors and organizations make use of it. This does not mean that these regions have no real existence by themselves. Regions of regional governance are real as long as social actors shape them as relevant frames for action and build institutions accordingly. REG analysis focuses on regional institutions that shape social reality and, potentially, material reality (through spatial transformation such as water or biodiversity management). This is how Pierre Bourdieu shaped his own understanding of the making of social reality: social categories—such as family or marriage, but also regions in the French context—are institutionalizing frames for societies and, in the case of regions, for their social spaces.17
Conclusion: It’s Good to Think about Regions
REG analysis displays a wide diversity of conceptions of regionality. This is no problem at all as long as this diversity is clearly understood and motivated. There is no reason in my view for discarding ontological/epistemological pluralism in favor of one single approach.
However, authors focusing on REG should be explicit about the way they conceive regionality. If they do not, they risk undermining the relevance of such a focus and blurring the message. This would make it difficult to build a common or shared knowledge about the added value of focusing on the regional level in environmental governance. After all, if REG analysis wishes to become a space of dialogue among others—maybe a ‘knowledge region’
where political science, international relations, and geography could gain from shared
12 Frémont 1976; Zelinsky 1980.
13 Paasi 1991, 239.
14 Brubaker and Cooper 2000.
15 Moore 2008.
16 Moore 2008, 212.
17 Bourdieu 1980.
interest on regionality, knowledge building and identity—it would certainly gain strength, and clarify at the same time why the notion of region merits reflection.
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