Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 18

Networks are great visual tools to explore the relationship between actors and issues, but they have the disadvantage of flattening the landscape and hiding a crucial feature of sociotechnical debates, namely the way in which they telescope larger socio-political oppositions into smaller technical details. Even if they are fought on smaller and more concrete questions, controversies almost always entail an opposition between some larger, conflicting worldviews (or “cosmoses,” to use the notion of Isabelle Stengers, 1996). As noted by Thompson, African elephants stand for “competing philosophies of nature and these different philosophies are in turn metonymic for key disputes in science and epistemology, in distributive justice, and in governance” (2002, p. 167).

A first opposition in the controversy concerns the level at which nature should be defined. There was a fundamental scale difference between the ethological approach of Cynthia Moss and its zeroing in on Amboseli elephants and the ecological approach of David Western and its attention to the broader equilibrium of the ecosystem (see figure 4). Similarly, by emphasizing the importance of park borders in protecting wildlife, Moss’s position was distinctively more localized than the “beyond-park” approach advocated by Western.

Figure 4 Debate scales and scale inversion in the Amboseli controversy. On the left, the positions of actors in favor of “beyond-park” conservation; on the right, those of actors in favor of “in-park” conservation. The upper half of the diagram focuses on questions related to nature conservation, where “beyond-park conservation” advocates for a broader perspective on most issues; the lower half focuses on questions about the role of stakeholders, where “in-park” conservation advocates for a broader perspective. In both cases, questions become more specific from the top to the bottom of the inverted pyramid (created by the authors based on the account provided by Thompson, 2002; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).

Yet, as often happens in controversies, the relative position of actors towards each other changes from issue to issue. When it came to the question of natural management, the stance of the protagonists was inverted, with Western arguing for the involvement of local constituents, and Moss adopting a more globalized viewpoint according to which African wildlife is a world heritage whose preservation should be the responsibility of the international community. Similarly, the model of science promoted by Western was based on direct witnessing and local participation (hence his emphasis on open-air experiments), in opposition to the more purified version of science championed by Moss. Opposing the organization of the workshop, Moss claimed that if Western and the Maasai had solid data they should publish them in peer-reviewed international journals. She also opposed the decision of inviting the press to the workshop, claiming that its presence was irrelevant to the scientific decisions to be taken.