Options
Vetter, Thomas
Nom
Vetter, Thomas
Affiliation principale
Fonction
Ancien.ne collaborateur.trice
Identifiants
Résultat de la recherche
Voici les éléments 1 - 1 sur 1
- PublicationAccès libreThe Art of Governing through Multiplicity: Everyday Practices and Transitions in UK Agri-Environmental Governance(Neuchâtel : Université de Neuchâtel, Institut d'ethnologie, 2023-06-23)
; ABSTRACT: This thesis aims to uncover transitions in agri-environmental governance [AEG] in the UK through the lens of everyday practices. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and supported by different theoretical framings, it documents and analyses the mobilisations and social uses of four specific agri-environmental governance instruments in a series of research papers. The first paper draws attention to payments for ecosystem services [PES] and the practices used to inspire market-style transformations in Welsh AEG. Employing Murray Li’s (2007) practices of assemblage the findings show a mosaic of different PES arrangements emerging which serve and reflect diverse interests and needs. The second paper engages with the principles of partnership working to combat agricultural diffuse pollution in Herefordshire. Through the lens of Sheila Jasanoff’s (2004) instruments of coproduction this paper shows how farmers are proactively nudged towards better land management practices by a multi-actor partnership via their collective attempts to re-shape identities, institutions, representations, and discourses. This partnership work produces place-based versions of good farming which seek to reconcile rather than divide profitability and ecology in farming. The third paper investigates the establishment and ways of working of the Pasture-fed Livestock Association, a UK-wide food label and farmer-driven organisation based on grain-free livestock production standards. Using Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated learning theory this case study demonstrates how a private food label can also act as a community of practice stimulating social learning and unlearning between its members through virtual and non-virtual means of engagement. The empirical material of this paper generates novel insights about the role that such communities of practice can play in bringing marginalized practices, knowledges and products to people’s minds and markets. Finally, the fourth paper explores and contrasts socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015; Jasanoff and Kim, 2009) of digitised agri-environmental governance with the challenges of implementing these technologies in everyday contexts of various governance stages and actors. This final paper reveals how various digitalisations both transform the configurations of agri-environmental governance practices and agri-environmental knowledge in challenging and productive ways. Collectively, the papers document the shift towards a new art of governing through multiplicity. Whilst earlier iterations of UK AEG were directly aimed at producing policy or market interventions for clearly defined target populations (i.e. farmers), this new art of governing is less explicit about whom to govern and more concerned with what to govern. Overall, the findings of this thesis demonstrate the benefits of employing an everyday perspective to uncover such governance transitions including the diverse motivations and mundanities that are part of devising meaningful AEG practices within a governance system premised on multiplicity. It also demonstrates the changes in power relations and knowledge regimes due to the mobilisation of new governance instruments and the authorisation of specific forms of knowledge and associated learning processes. Eventually, the thesis makes the case for AEG research and practice to become more socially informed, sensitive to questions and relations of power, and interested in the networked performance of multiplicity to act upon its (dis)connections and unleash more of its transformative potential.