Competing translations of environmental knowledge

Abstract

Abstract

Anticipating environmental changes while planning natural-resource use involves multiple sources of uncertainty that stem from the complexity of social-ecological processes; and in conditions of uncertainty, the environmental management easily becomes politicised. The key questions are how the uncertainties regarding environmental management are managed through knowledge production, whose knowledge counts, and who therefore manages to gain support for their viewpoints in the decision-making. In this chapter, I focus on the controversial groundwater extraction plans in the Viinivaara region in northern Finland. This plan involves a decades-old, but still ongoing, dispute regarding the potential risks the devised groundwater extraction might pose to the environment surrounding Viinivaara, including the Kiiminkijoki River system, which is protected in the EU’s Natura 2000 network but whose water quality has already deteriorated due to intensive land use. I analyse how the understandings of the water extraction plan form among the stakeholders, and how different conceptions regarding water become contested in the struggle to construct and control the competing actor networks of knowledge. The case reveals how network-building among a variety of human and non-human actors becomes as important as the facts themselves in the attempts to stabilise certain understandings of groundwater in the debate on utilisation versus conservation.