Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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forms of tourism.
Key to tipping the scale of the controversy was the support of the representatives of the native Maasai communities and the press. The Maasai were split as different individuals had been collaborating with each scientist either by helping with the care of the park’s elephants or by contributing to developing the new paradigm of community-based conservation. Also, communities that had preserved the traditional nomadic culture were favorable to the idea of returning to their migrating habits; while communities who had embraced a more sedentary lifestyle were afraid that roaming elephants could damage their settlements around the park. In Thompson’s account we hear that the elephant research group tried until late in the night to rally the Maasai representatives to their cause. Eventually, however, the Maasai’s representatives joined Western’s position as his approach to conservation was better aligned with their ecological expertise and with the lack of opposition between human and nature at the heart of their culture.
As for the press, its sympathy initially went to Cynthia Moss who had earned a considerable reputation for her research and her devotion to elephant conservation. The support of the press, however, was eventually won by Western, through the mobilization of another actor – interestingly, a non-human one. The different experimental setups employed by Moss and Western had unequal capacities for sharing. Moss’s immersion in elephant life produced knowledge that could not be easily exhibited in a two-day workshop. Western’s fence setup, on the other hand, had been deliberately developed to facilitate the witnessing by nonexperts. During the workshop, Western staged a dramatic open-air experiment inviting all the participants to leave the conference room and travel through the park to observe fenced plots with different tree densities. The mobilization of the ecological experiments was such a coup that Moss and the other elephant ethologists ostentatiously refused to participate in the field trip, giving Western the upper hand in convincing the press.
Where? From networks to worldviews
Networks are great visual tools to explore the relationship between actors and issues, but they have the disadvantage of flattening the landscape and hiding a crucial feature of sociotechnical debates, namely the way in which they telescope larger socio-political oppositions into smaller technical details. Even if they are fought on smaller and more concrete questions, controversies almost always entail an opposition between some larger, conflicting worldviews (or “cosmoses,” to use the notion of Isabelle Stengers, 1996). As noted by Thompson, African elephants stand for “competing philosophies of nature and these different philosophies are in turn metonymic for key disputes in science and epistemology, in distributive justice, and in governance” (2002, p. 167).
A first opposition in the controversy concerns the level at which nature should be defined. There was a fundamental scale difference between the ethological approach of Cynthia Moss and its zeroing in on Amboseli elephants and the ecological approach of David Western and its attention to the broader equilibrium of the ecosystem (see figure 4). Similarly, by emphasizing the importance of park borders in protecting wildlife, Moss’s position was distinctively more localized than the “beyond-park” approach advocated by Western.
Figure 4 Debate scales and scale inversion in the Amboseli controversy. On the left, the positions of actors in favor of “beyond-park” conservation; on the right, those of actors in favor of “in-park” conservation. The upper half of the diagram focuses on questions related to nature conservation, where “beyond-park conservation” advocates for a broader perspective on most issues; the lower half focuses on questions about the role of stakeholders, where “in-park” conservation advocates for a broader perspective. In both cases, questions become more specific from the top to the bottom of the inverted pyramid (created by the authors based on the account provided by Thompson, 2002; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).
Yet, as often happens in controversies, the relative position of actors towards each other changes from issue to issue. When it came to the question of natural management, the stance of the protagonists was inverted, with Western arguing for the involvement of local constituents, and Moss adopting a more globalized viewpoint according to which African wildlife is a world heritage whose preservation should be the responsibility of the international community. Similarly, the model of science promoted by Western was based on direct witnessing and local participation (hence his emphasis on open-air experiments), in opposition to the more purified version of science championed by Moss. Opposing the organization of the workshop, Moss claimed that if Western and the Maasai had solid data they should publish them in peer-reviewed international journals. She also opposed the decision of inviting the press to the workshop, claiming that its presence was irrelevant to the scientific decisions to be taken.
When? From worldviews to change
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.