In the first phase of the project I have been able to arrive at an in-depth account of the various policy problems and paradigms within which resilience is taken up, mobilized – and contested. The main scientific finding during these months is that resilience occupies a highly contested space within international and national environmental policy-circles. On the one hand, it is heralded as a welcome break from earlier stasis-oriented and top-down models of environmental management; on the other, it is seen as either an imperfect model that runs up against bureaucratic procedures and forms of management, or as a politically expeditious but ultimately empty signifier that in fact does not change work practices ‘on the ground’. Epistemologically it draws on a 1970s shift within ecological thinking from steady-state ecology towards a more temporality-informed evolutionary ecology. Politically the notion resilience currently oscillates between celebratory accounts of its promise and critical accounts of its empty or even neoliberal leanings. This analysis represents a major scientific achievement as studies of the resilience concept in environmental management have not previously addressed this both epistemological and political, as well as ‘slippery’ character of the resilience concept. This article in my view represents a clear scientific advancement vis-à-vis previous analyses, which have neglected this dual and slippery character of resilience.
On the basis of the above analysis, I have presented a paper at the European Association of Studies of Science and Technology Conference in Madrid (June 6-9, 2022), which is the basis of a paper that is currently work in progress and projected to be submitted to the journal Tecnoscienza in December 2022. Conceptually this paper further develops this understanding of resilience as a dual and slippery concept and situates it in broader theoretical concerns with Anthropocene theorizing.
The remainder of the project was spent researching the first case: forestry in Belgium. There, the data I gathered demonstrate that at the level of everyday and practical work, the notion of resilience is generative of new environmental management possibilities, but that it also runs up against specific environmental legal and bureaucratic challenges. On the one hand, ‘resilience’ allows actors within the organisation studied - a well networked NGO in forestry - to reach out to, and acquire public and private funding for, afforestation initiatives. In that capacity it also generates novel experimental ‘forests’ of relatively young forests, the development of which is of particular scientific relevance. On the other, the practice of planting trees paradoxically runs up against environmental law, as local municipalities are hesitant to attribute changing zoning classifications to accommodate these new forests, as conservation law (the Belgian Bosdecreet of the 1990s) dictate these forests may not be cut down at any one moment. Here, conservation law actively bars resilience-based management and forestation, which is an unexpected and societally relevant finding. In terms of knowledge, resilience-based management also asks for the development of new networks for knowledge exchange across Europe, in which practitioners from Belgium are sent to Eastern European nations for study-trips. It also calls for specific knowledges of non-native trees, which are projected to be able to deal with climate-associated stressors. Various non-academic, non-university actors, and specifically the NGO Pro Silva, are crucial in creating and sustaining these networks. In this capacity, resilience both generates novel possibilities for networking, exchange, and cooperation, and at the same time stands in tension with previously acquired knowledges and networks.
I have used these findings to organize a panel at the European Association of Studies of Science and Technology Conference (June 6-9, Madrid), together with dr. M. de Wilde from the University of Amsterdam. In this panel we brought together contributions on the topic(s) of ecological values in environmental policy and practice. We are currently co-authoring an article (in progress) which situates this panel within a broader literature and advances contemporary approaches by attending to the multiplicity of the ecological good as it is coproduced in environmental policies and practices of environmental management, aiming this to be a scientific advance within the study of environmental value(s).
