Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Politics of State and Indigenous Environmental Monitoring

University Of Oregon Eugene, Eugene OR

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project will analyze resource-based conflicts between indigenous groups and state environmental agencies. The project will develop a framework to enhance understanding of the roots of resource conflict and facilitate meaningful participation in efforts to resolve these types of conflicts. The project will expand capabilities for transdisciplinary and intercultural methods in the field of environmental monitoring. The project will facilitate enhanced contact between indigenous people and environmental agencies, which holds potential to advance innovative water, air, soil, and wildlife monitoring techniques that recognize the environmental knowledge of indigenous communities. It will help to advance equitable modes for indigenous participation in science, thereby creating new avenues to alleviate resource-based conflict, reduce environmental risks, and produce more relevant and accessible monitoring of environmental conditions and implications. More broadly, the project will constitute an integrative activity that may help reconcile relationships between governmental units in nations like the U.S. and Canada and their indigenous communities. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. State-led projects to integrate both indigenous and conventional monitoring techniques have become a popular mode to resolve conflict, and many have demonstrated that meaningful integration of indigenous knowledge with conventional monitoring offers possibilities for more credible and culturally relevant understandings of environment change. At the same time, such projects may be seen to conceal broader societal inequalities and unequal decision-making power. In northern Alberta, for example, environmental monitoring of the tar sands has been viewed by critics as a political process that advances dominant cultural and economic agendas. This research project will examine new participatory strategies that seek to bridge conventional monitoring with community-based understandings of the environment. The doctoral student conducting this project will study environmental agencies that monitor tar sands production as a case study to investigate the shifting power relations between First Nation communities and the state. He will employ interviews, Q methodology, and archival document analysis to explore answers to the following sets of questions: (1) How has environmental degradation been conceptualized among First Nation communities and Alberta monitoring agencies? (2) In what ways have the monitoring practices of Alberta's environmental agencies changed over time? (3) How has community participation with monitoring programs shaped agency findings and recommendations? Examination of the evolution of tar sands monitoring by state agencies will provide new insights into the competing cultural and economic agendas that structure conceptions of environmental change by different groups.