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Anthropology and the Environment
September 1998
Ed Liebow, Contributing Editor
This month, I invited Evelyn Pinkerton (School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser U) to offer some highlights from the June conference she organized on behalf of the International Association for the Study of Common Property.
Common Property Conference Highlights, Vancouver, BC, June 10-14, 1998
by Evelyn Pinkerton (Simon Fraser U)
This is an interdisciplinary conference, and twice it has been organized by anthropologists. Bonnie McCay (Rutgers) organized the association's 3rd conference in 1992 and Evelyn Pinkerton organized this 7th edition. Political scientists, ecologists, and sociologists have been responsible for organizing the conferences in other years.
About 500 participants were drawn to Vancouver this year from 50 countries. The conference draws anthropologists interested in resource management and common property issues not only because of its interdisciplinary approach, but also because of its focus on practitioner participation and grounded theory. A highlight of this year's conference was the manner in which Russell Collier, a Gitksan speaker at the "First Nations" (Northwest Coast Amerindian) evening at the U Brit Col Museum of Anthropology, picked up and applied to his situation the analysis of earlier keynote speaker James Scott. Speaking to his recent book, Seeing Like a State, Scott noted the strategy of state bureaucracies to "cadastralize" land: to remove from it all the complex overlapping boundaries and relations of reciprocal obligation and access that characterize pre-industrial societies. To establish a maximum level of production and a tolerable level of taxation, states have worked to simplify boundaries, privatize ownership, and establish a standardized grid pattern of land units. In the process they removed names, historical memory, and competing claims to land use, such as public assess to commonly held resources. Collier, a practitioner actively engaged in the process of reclaiming Gitksan territory and attempting to reorient management toward watersheds, ecosystems, and the natural boundaries of fish and wildlife passage, adapted and integrated Scott's terminology to describe the Gitksan mapping process. The Gitskan people are putting the names back on the map, redrawing the boundaries, and redefining how management should occur to be sustainable, and to integrate human communities. Collier and colleague Darlene Vegh gave a 4-hour workshop during the conference on the Gitksan project to reclaim their relationship to their environment.
Presentations and discussions were organized into 7 concurrent streams, resources streams (fish, forests, and multiple commons such as watersheds) and thematic streams (theory, governance, aboriginal, and global themes were overlapping categories). Each had a "stream discussant" following and reporting on the stream at 3 intervals, and participants also jumped across streams to follow themes such as the role of gateway communities in protected areas, or examples of building in communities the capacity to participate as partners with government in resource management. This dynamic structure, interspersed with several plenary sessions, helped create more dialogue across streams and disciplines, in keeping with the "crossing boundaries" theme of the conference. Anthropologists were particularly interested in sessions that critiqued rational choice theory from an anthropological perspective, in both the theory and the governance streams.
Also notable was the aboriginal stream, which brought together sessions from Canada and Australia in particular to examine questions of aboriginal institutions, title, shared jurisdictions, conceptions of property, management, and authority in the context of common property theory.
Emerging partially from a critique of failed development projects in developing countries, the IASCP always mobilizes sessions organized by veteran practitioners in community-based irrigation projects and other efforts to devolve decision-making to local and regional bodies. Three mobile workshops (field trips) illustrated local attempts to resolve common property resource conflicts through co-management arrangements, and a new pre-conference full-day workshop introduced newcomers to the field of common property studies.
This year the web site for the conference became a commons experiment itself. Participants were required to submit long abstracts (800 words), which were posted on the web, and password-accessible to others who had submitted long abstracts, and, after a certain date, to all those who had paid a registration fee to the conference. Draft papers were likewise required in advance and posted on the web, password-accessible to those who had also submitted their papers in advance. After the conference, these papers became accessible to all who had paid their registration fee. A list of the sessions and papers is accessible on the conference web site (http://www.sfu.ca/~iascp98), and the proceedings will eventually be published electronically through the website at the IASCP headquarters at Indiana University. The IASCP board is now deciding whether to subsidize the proceedings, limit access to members, or charge a fee for access. For more information, please contact Evelyn Pinkerton (604/291-4912; evelyn_pinkerton@sfu.ca)
Send your news items to Ed Liebow (liebow@policycenter.com, 206/675-1002; fax: 206/675-1005). Check the Anthropology/Environment web site regularly: http://travel.to/anthenv