ABSTRACT
We have seen that what passes for knowledge about nature has become fragmented and contested in postmodern societies. Individuals construct their own views about environmental issues and these are dependent, for example, on their cultural heritage, life circumstances, media exposure and experience of environmental risks. As a result, contemporary environmental issues are frequently characterized by competing discourses. Discourses are simply ways of interpreting the world around us; they are the aggregate of various beliefs and experiences, as well as the linguistic devices used for their representation. Discourses contribute to individual and group constructions of environmental problems and their potential solutions. This chapter draws on two case studies to explore the notion of ‘competing discourses’ in postmodern environments. Firstly, we consider some of the main discourses operating in disputed North American forest lands, with a particular emphasis on British Columbia. In the previous chapter it was noted that processes of globalization can pull power away from local communities, whose discourses become marginalized by increasingly distant decision-making institutions. Conversely, it was also suggested that globalization can create the impetus to push power downwards towards communities, reinvigorating the multiple discourses of local civil society. The case study of British Columbia demonstrates such a pushing down of decision-making, showing how new systems of community involvement, based on local institutional arrangements, are a necessary step towards developing sustainability. The second case study looks at developments in Indian forest management where, since the early 1990s, new forms of community governance have been identified as the only realistic way to protect and enhance forest resources. Global institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are long-established forms of supranational governance. The ‘new institutionalism’ of local, community-based arrangements for environmental management are often less well established and we currently know less about what makes them function effectively. Some of the problems of such institutions are considered in relation to India’s village forest committees (VFCs).
