Management of the Great Lakes, explained
Something else happened in 2005. Henry A. Regier was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for important and continued contributions to Great Lakes Research at a conference of the International Association for Great Lakes research. Here is how he explained conflict over management of the Great Lakes:
Two strategies have been used within our Great Lakes Basin’s governance institutions in recent decades to cope with adverse interrelationships between humans and the rest of nature. Important features of each strategy can be traced back to different emphases within Darwinism a century ago. T. H. Huxley emphasized the role of agonistic or combative interactions within natural selection while P. Kropotkin emphasized mutualistic or cooperative interactions. Capitalists invoked Huxley’s Mutual Harm version for legitimation of their practices while communitarians invoked Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid version. Implicitly the more legalistic regulatory strategies that now dominate within governance in our Basin presuppose Mutual Harm dynamics and seek to temper such harm through pre-cast technocratic capabilities. Participatory democratic programs, now sub-dominant, seek to foster Mutual Aid dynamics less formally. Old Rational Management tries to Temper Mutual Harm Technocratically, TMHT. Drama-of-the-Commons Governance tries to Foster Mutual Aid Democratically, FMAD. Currently, the higher the level of governance in which action on some environmental issue is centred, the more likely that TMHT will dominate, and vice versa. This asymmetry creates problems in hybrid cross-level Adaptive Co-Management and vertical inter-agency partnerships.
Scenarios for 2006 anyone? Any idea what category those of an “Intelligent Design” persuasion might fall into?
Comments are welcome here and may also be sent directly to Henry at “hregier at rogers dot com.”
Update 1/11/06: the above was posted at the Resilience blog with some links added to more about Henry, the award and about adaptive co-management of ecosystems. To which I want to add: kudos and congratulations!
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More housekeeping: One of these days, I will learn how to add a feed for comments to this blog – as suggested by James Annan, in a comment on the last post. Apparently, some news readers, unlike mine, refresh updated posts.
