Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 19

Finally, one should never forget that sociotechnical debates are dynamic situations whose configuration can vary in deep and sometimes unexpected ways. This means not only that the balance of power can change during and because of a controversy, but also that the substance of the debate can evolve and, along with it, the cast of actors and issues. The Amboseli dispute offers a good example of both (see figure 5).

Up until the 1970s, Amboseli had been a scene for various migrations. As a consequence of the hydrological influence of Mount Kilimanjaro, the native Maasai population, their livestock, and the local wildlife lived a nomadic life moving to the central swamp of the savannah in the dry season and out again in the rainy season. With the decolonization of Kenya, however, settlements began to appear in the area, limiting the mobility of the inhabitants of Amboseli. In the same period, the value of ivory skyrocketed and with it the activity of poachers in the region.

The combined threat of settlements and poachers had two consequences. It almost halved the population of elephants in the area and pushed the survivors to stop migrating and take refuge in the center of the newly established national park. It also encouraged the emergence of a wide international mobilization for the defense of wildlife and of elephants in particular. David Western and Cynthia Moss were solid allies in this fight, the first through his work in the field of nature conservation, the second with her internationally acclaimed accounts of elephant life (originally commissioned by Western himself). In 1974, this mobilization led to the establishment of Amboseli National Park itself and in 1989 to an international ban on the ivory trade.

In the 1980s, the success of the wildlife protection policies had led to a fivefold increase in the density of the elephants in Amboseli, effecting, according to some observers, a severe loss of woodland and biodiversity. The link between elephants and deforestation had been a matter of controversy for a long time. In the 1970s, Western himself had opposed this link, blaming instead the excessive salinity of water from Mount Kilimanjaro. In the 1980s, however, the results of the electric fence experiments convinced Western that resuming the elephants’ migration was necessary to safeguard biodiversity. Accordingly, he asked the Wildlife Service to open a discussion on the overconcentration of elephants but was refused several times because of stiff opposition from the ethologists and the international sponsors of the park.

Figure 5 Stream diagram of the temporal evolution of the Amboseli controversy. Time flows from the top to the bottom of the diagram with each stream representing an actor. The size of each stream indicates the level of engagement of that particular actor at a particular moment in time according to a qualitative estimation (created by the authors based on the account provided by Thompson, 2002; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).

Only in 1995, after taking over the direction of the Wildlife Service, did Western manage to convene the workshop at Serena Lodge. Having full control over the agenda for the meeting, its participants (which featured prominent local stakeholders), and its schedule (which included a visit to the fenced plots in the park), Western used the occasion as a tipping point for his “beyond-parks” conservation approach. In the 1990s, such an approach had the wind in its sails thanks to a general decline in poaching, the rise of conservation biology and its focus on biodiversity, and the growing demands for more locally controlled land use management.

The success of Western’s approach, however, was not irreversible and in the following years it was put under pressure by the change of circumstances in Kenya. In the late 1990s, political turbulence, droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks tested the local model of natural management to breaking point. The devolution of national institutions exposed the Kenyan Wildlife Service to political unrest and in 1998, Western was fired and replaced with one of his most prominent critics. This change in the balance of forces illustrates how fragile the arrangement favored by Western really was and how its success was only possible in a brief period between the end of the poaching crisis and the beginning of Kenyan political unrest. Yet, that brief period did empower a series of local stakeholders (Maasai groups, regional authorities, local wildlife associations) who, thanks to the connections created in the 1990s, remained influential in the promotion of local and beyond-park natural management.

Charis Thompson’s analysis of the Amboseli elephant controversy offers a brilliant example of how a well-chosen field site can allow you to study issues that span far beyond the two days of the workshop and the walls of the Serena Lodge. However, not all controversies are conveniently observable from a pivotal situation where opposing sides encounter each other and attempt to settle their scores. More often, sociotechnical debates are distributed over networks of actions extending to distant times and places. This is why conventional ethnographic methods alone are not always sufficient for controversy mapping and why, as argued in this book, digital methods can be of invaluable help.