Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 17

In the same way as claims are never isolated from the actors who make them, so actors are always tangled in complex alliances with and against each other. It would be wrong, for instance, to portray the Amboseli controversy as a personal confrontation between two scientists. If anything, Western and Moss temporarily became the spokespersons for two heterogeneous coalitions, comprising not only humans, but also animals, plants, political and economic institutions, and their actions were constrained by the interests and positions of these cohorts of allies. In fact, actors are themselves coalitions that compose and decompose depending on the situation. At times, the elephants make a difference as a species; at other times, as individual, sentient beings. Sometimes, the elephant research group speaks as a whole; sometimes its individual researchers speak for themselves.

Some actors can morph and change status as the controversy evolves. The nomadic Maasai living in the area, for example, were initially opposed to the park and the way it hindered their traditional migrations. With the establishment of the park, however, some Maasai found jobs in the institution and adopted a sedentary lifestyle, thus changing sides in the controversy. As a consequence, the Maasai people cannot be considered as one unanimous actor, but need to be broken into two divergent groups – or three if you count the Maasai representatives present at the Serena Lodge, torn between the two constituencies that they needed to represent. You can begin to appreciate how this dynamic complicates the task of representing the controversy!

Figure 2 Actor/issue table of the Amboseli controversy. Actors in the columns and their reading of different issues in the rows. Shading indicates the level of commitment to “beyond-park” or “in-park” solutions (created by the authors based on the account provided by Thompson, 2002; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).

Figure 3 Network of actors in the Amboseli controversy. The alliance of actors supporting the “beyond-park” solution on the left, the alliance supporting the “in-park” solution on the right. Neutral actors are circled with dotted lines. Hesitant actors are marked with a gray halo (created by the authors based on the account provided by Thompson, 2002; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).

As illustrated in figure 3, Western’s position was backed by the local government, which saw it as a possibility for asserting closer control over land use in the region. Moss’s ideas, on the other hand, were better aligned with international sponsors and their fear that local management of the environment would be more exposed to corruption and political instability. Other groups such as the tour operators were divided between those preferring to keep working within the established frame of national parks and those willing to explore community-based forms of tourism.

Key to tipping the scale of the controversy was the support of the representatives of the native Maasai communities and the press. The Maasai were split as different individuals had been collaborating with each scientist either by helping with the care of the park’s elephants or by contributing to developing the new paradigm of community-based conservation. Also, communities that had preserved the traditional nomadic culture were favorable to the idea of returning to their migrating habits; while communities who had embraced a more sedentary lifestyle were afraid that roaming elephants could damage their settlements around the park. In Thompson’s account we hear that the elephant research group tried until late in the night to rally the Maasai representatives to their cause. Eventually, however, the Maasai’s representatives joined Western’s position as his approach to conservation was better aligned with their ecological expertise and with the lack of opposition between human and nature at the heart of their culture.

As for the press, its sympathy initially went to Cynthia Moss who had earned a considerable reputation for her research and her devotion to elephant conservation. The support of the press, however, was eventually won by Western, through the mobilization of another actor – interestingly, a non-human one. The different experimental setups employed by Moss and Western had unequal capacities for sharing. Moss’s immersion in elephant life produced knowledge that could not be easily exhibited in a two-day workshop. Western’s fence setup, on the other hand, had been deliberately developed to facilitate the witnessing by nonexperts. During the workshop, Western staged a dramatic open-air experiment inviting all the participants to leave the conference room and travel through the park to observe fenced plots with different tree densities. The mobilization of the ecological experiments was such a coup that Moss and the other elephant ethologists ostentatiously refused to participate in the field trip, giving Western the upper hand in convincing the press.