Abstract
In States of Knowledge (2004), Sheila Jasanoff argues that we gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced together, but she and her volume contributors do not yet offer a theory of the coproduction of scientific knowledge and social order. This article uses Mary Douglas’s cultural theory to identify four recurring states of knowledge and to specify political–cultural conditions for the coproduction of scientific knowledge, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change. The plausibility of this theory is illustrated by using it to explain the coproduction and transformation of forest and wildlife science and management in the Pacific Northwest.
Keywords
In the 1950s and early 1960s, science studies scholars argued about how much of scientific development was determined by factors internal to the scientific process and how much by social, political, cultural, and other factors external to the scientific process. All parties eventually acknowledged that both internal and external influences could be important and that their relative significance depended on particular circumstances, but many pressing related questions were left unanswered (Shapin 1992). In the last 20 years, science studies scholars have resumed their efforts to answer some of these questions, seeking to develop theories of science in society (Cozzens and Gieryn 1990) and concepts for analyzing not only how society, culture, and politics influence science but how they influence each other.
Renewed efforts to conceptualize the relationship between science and society and science and politics have attained their most developed and fertile expression in States of Knowledge (2004), edited by Sheila Jasanoff. She and her contributors argue that science and social and political orderings “coproduce” each other. That is, science, society, culture, and politics constitute and influence each other simultaneously. While applications of the concept of coproduction (Jasanoff 2004; Jasanoff and Wynne 1998; Kemp and Rotmans 2009; Martello 2004; Miller and Edwards 2001; Reardon 2001; Tuinstra 2008; Tuinstra, Hordijk, and Kroeze 2006) show its promise, they also show its limitations. Namely, as Jasanoff and others recognize, a theory of coproduction is needed to give the concept greater explanatory and predictive power.
This article argues that the cultural theory developed by Mary Douglas and others (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983; Schwarz and Thompson 1990; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990) may help science studies scholars develop a theory of the coproduction of science and social order, a possibility that Jasanoff appears to anticipate (Jasanoff and Wynne 1998). Douglas’s cultural theory derives four political–cultural types from two dimensions of social relations and specifies some of the political values and beliefs about human and physical nature that may be associated with particular patterns of social relations or social order. In cultural theory, these four packages of values, beliefs, and relations are called hierarchical, egalitarian, individualistic, and fatalistic political cultures. Since scientists are centrally involved in constructing beliefs about the physical environment in modern societies, and cultural theory claims that these beliefs are coproduced with functionally related political values, beliefs about human nature, and patterns of social relations (which scientists often also contribute to constructing, as Jasanoff and her colleagues show), Douglas’s cultural theory would appear to get a purchase on some major constituents of coproductive processes.
Moreover, Douglas’s cultural theory is not just a theory of how patterns of social order in political cultures are constructed, but, as developed by others, is a theory of how change in social orders occurs when beliefs about human and physical nature that are associated with a political culture are challenged by successful deconstruction of those beliefs. Thus, Douglas’s cultural theory potentially offers a dynamic theory of how the coproduction of science and social order occurs.
In this article, I provide a brief overview of the coproduction and transformation of forest and wildlife science and management by scientists, environmentalists, and judges concerned about spotted owls and their associated old-growth forest ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. Then, I discuss the concept of coproduction as developed by Jasanoff and her colleagues. Next, I present Douglas’s cultural theory, with a particular emphasis on the constructs of nature and policy associated with the four cultures. The plausibility of this theory is suggested by showing how scientists involved in struggles over land and wildlife management in the Pacific Northwest championed cultural constructs and policies. Then, I present the cultural theory of change, wherein new scientific claims about nature become catalysts for cultural and policy change. The plausibility of this theory of change is illustrated by analyzing the role forest and owl scientists, environmental lawyers, and Ninth Circuit federal judges played in dramatically altering land and wildlife management policy while coproducing new identities, institutions, discourses, and representations in the Pacific Northwest, as Jasanoff predicts. In conclusion, I suggest ways further to test and develop Douglas’s cultural theory as a theory specifying the political–cultural conditions for the coproduction of science, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change.
The research reported here is based on interviews with approximately sixty participants in and observers of the coproductive processes described in this study, most of whom were scientists, as well as on archival research and secondary sources. Unless otherwise indicated, all reports on or quotes from research subjects are taken from tape-recorded, in-person or phone interviews, or e-mail or regular correspondence in the period 1995-2001. If research subjects are identified by name, it is because they gave me permission to use their names or because quotes come from publicly available sources. Otherwise, respondents were promised confidentiality, and so are not identified by name.
Scientists, Judges, and Spotted Owls: Policymakers in the Pacific Northwest
Federal land management agencies in the Pacific Northwest that until the late 1980s were engaged primarily in timber production are now overwhelmingly concerned with ecosystem management. The U.S. Forest Service, which manages most of the federal lands in the region, had been an exemplary hierarchically organized federal agency since its founding in the early 1900s, so much so that in World War II it was held up to the U.S. military as an example to emulate (Kaufman 1960). It championed scientific management to produce a sustained yield of timber, managing forests as much as one would manage any other crop. The service called for the harvest of old-growth forests not set aside as Wilderness Areas or National Parks because it wanted to replace these slower growing, decadent, diseased “biological deserts” with faster growing, healthier, younger stands that would provide more and better quality lumber (Yaffee 1994, 3-8, 256-82).
As will be discussed in this article, research beginning in the early 1970s challenged the Forest Service’s view that old-growth forests were lifeless “cellulose cemeteries” that needed to be harvested. Researchers at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon found that these older forests were home to a wide variety of interdependent life forms. Environmental groups were excited by this research because it gave them a further reason to value and preserve older forests. Research specifically on the relationship between the Northern Spotted Owl and old-growth forests became a particular focus of these groups because threatened species were protected by various environmental laws passed in the early and mid-1970s.
In other words, research on old-growth forest ecosystems and specifically on the relationship between spotted owls and old-growth constructed nature in ways that were functional for egalitarian environmental groups. The development of this research and environmental groups’ interest in this research thus are one significant area where political–cultural conditions were ripe for the coproduction of science, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change (see, generally, Chase 1995; Luoma 1999; Yaffee 1994).
Accordingly, in 1987, as will also be discussed in this article, a public interest law firm, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF), began suing the federal land and wildlife management agencies on behalf of the Northern Spotted Owl. The SCLDF argued and federal judges agreed that federal land and wildlife managers were not doing enough to protect the owl, violating several environmental laws. One federal judge went further than this, however, reading these laws to require management of “biological communities” or ecosystems rather than individual species. Federal judges enjoined further timber sales pending the protection of ecosystems, frequently relying on the testimony and affidavits of federal and university scientists, and adopting their egalitarian constructs of nature, while largely ignoring scientists affiliated with the timber industry (Swedlow 2002a, 2003, 2007, 2009; Sher 1993).
Shortly after his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton appointed a scientific advisory committee of nearly 700 scientists and other experts to advise him on how to respond to court orders to manage ecosystems. Scientists affiliated with the timber industry were largely excluded from this effort. In 1993, on the advice of his Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT), President Clinton placed more than 24 million acres of federal lands in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California under ecosystem management, seeking to protect old-growth forests and over 1,000 species associated with them. This policy shift also reduced federal timber sales by more than 75 percent, adversely affected about 300 rural communities, and effectively institutionalized an egalitarian construct of nature for an area nearly six times the size of Connecticut (Chase 1995; Swedlow 2002a; Yaffee 1994).
The spotted owl cases thus resulted in a transformation of federal land and wildlife management in an egalitarian direction. In particular, the judicial injunctions of federal timber sales reflected the egalitarian view of nature as fragile, while court orders to manage biological communities, and President Clinton’s plan to manage ecosystems, can be understood as attempts to institutionalize the policies and social and political relationships preferred by egalitarians. These scientific, cultural, and policy changes were coproduced by scientists, judges, and environmentalists seeking to protect the spotted owl and associated old-growth forest ecosystems.
States of Knowledge and the Coproduction of Science and Social Order
“Coproduction,” Jasanoff (2004, 2) tells us, “is shorthand for the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways we choose to live in it.” Accordingly, in States of Knowledge: The Coproduction of Science and Social Order (2004), she argues that “we gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced together” (2). She particularly emphasizes the importance of politics in coproduction; several of her volume contributors “explore how knowledge-making is incorporated into practices of state-making, or of governance more broadly, and, in reverse, how practices of governance influence the making and use of knowledge” (3).
The value-added of the coproductionist lens is established in shortest compass by Jasanoff’s discussion of four “well-documented pathways” of the coproduction of science and social and political order. According to her, coproduction is frequently responsible for “making identities, making institutions, making discourses, and making representations” (38; italics in the original). The concept of coproduction helps us understand how knowledge and its production shape and sustain social and political identities and give them power and meaning (39). And because “[i]nstitutions serve as sites for the testing and reaffirmation of political culture” they are also sites for the coproduction of science and social and political order (40). When knowledge changes—specifically, “when environmental knowledge changes”—“new institutions emerge to provide the web of social and normative understandings within which new characterizations of nature … can be recognized and given political effect” (40). Finally, science and social and political order are coproduced by making discourses and representations. As Jasanoff notes, “Solving problems of social order frequently takes the form of producing new languages or modifying old ones …. In the process, scientific language often takes onboard the tacit models of nature, society, culture, or humanity that are current at any time within a given social order” (40-1).
Jasanoff thinks that the most significant contribution of the “coproductionist” analytical lens is its descriptive richness, which derives from providing fuller, deeper accounts than previously available of how particular configurations of science and social and political order are braided together (2004, 42, 276). Jasanoff and many of her contributors situate the concept of coproduction as a stepping stone toward developing theory and the ability to predict (3). While “[i]ts aim is not to provide deterministic causal explanations of the ways in which science and technology influence society, or vice-versa” (38), the concept may help identify “deep cultural regularities” that allow such explanations and predictions (42, 280).
Toward a Cultural Theory of the Coproduction of Science and Social Order
This article argues that Douglas’s cultural theory, as further developed by others, is a good candidate for characterizing some deep cultural regularities that may help explain and predict coproduction. Douglas’s four political–cultural ideal types, also called “ways of life” (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990), can help specify four recurring “ways in which we know and represent the world,” both natural and social, which are inseparable from, because functionally related to, four possible “ways we [can] choose to live in it” (Jasanoff 2004, 2). Notably, the social relations of the four ways of life specified by cultural theory are simultaneously specifications of four ways of making decisions, constituting authority, and exercising power—core concepts and concerns among those who study and engage in politics.
Douglasian cultural theorists hypothesize that different types of social and political relations will be accompanied by beliefs and values, including beliefs about human and physical nature, that allow people to justify these relationships to each other. In other words, different kinds of social and political relations, beliefs, and values are thought to be interdependent or functionally related. This interdependence and functional interrelationship creates the opportunity for and may often rely on coproduction. The corollary of the hypothesis of functional interrelationship is that these different kinds of relations, beliefs, and values cannot be mixed and matched. To live one way and think another is unsustainable, a pathway for cultural change. Changes in beliefs and values are expected to lead to changes in relations, and vice versa. Thus, relations constrain beliefs and values, and beliefs and values constrain relations. Compatible packages of relations, beliefs, and values are what Douglas and others call “cultures,” and beliefs and values taken together are what they call “cultural biases” or ideologies (Swedlow 2001, 2002b, 2008, 2009; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990).
Douglas and colleagues’ next move is more controversial, as it involves an attempt to characterize these cultural types in a way that is parsimonious and still exhaustive of the possibilities at a particular level of abstraction. Like many social scientists, they think that much of the variation in social and political relations is captured by the extent of individual autonomy and collectivism in those relations. 1 But unlike other social scientists, they think that these conditions are independent of each other rather than inversely related. Instead of lying on opposite ends of the same continuum, individual autonomy and collectivism vary separately on their own dimensions. More of one does not necessarily mean less of the other. These dimensions and the resulting patterns of social relations are depicted in Figure 1 .
Dimensions of culture, types of social order, and political values.
This conceptual shift allows analysts to account for four rather than two patterns of social and political relations. People in individualistic and fatalistic relations are not part of a collective undertaking, but individualists retain their autonomy, while fatalists do not. People in egalitarian and hierarchical relations, meanwhile, are part of a collective undertaking, but egalitarians retain much more of their autonomy than hierarchs.
Hierarchical relations are highly structured, with everyone and everything having his, her, and its place, represented by an organizational pyramid in Figure 1. In this cultural environment, legitimate decisions are made by persons with the proper authority to make particular types of decisions. In other words, the decision rule is that “the proper authority decides.” 2 Individualistic relations, by contrast, are highly fluid, and subject to individual choice, represented by a network in Figure 1, where “I decide.” Fatalistic relations, meanwhile, are tenuous and unreliable, driven by the “whim and caprice” of others, represented by atomized individuals in Figure 1, where “others decide.” Finally, people in egalitarian relations retain their autonomy by giving everyone an equal voice in (and thus the power to veto) collective decisions. Here, “we decide.” The egalitarian desire to “have it all” is represented here by something that looks like a chocolate chip cookie in Figure 1.
Each of these four patterns of social and political relations is hypothesized to be justified by and in turn justify (and make plausible) particular kinds of beliefs and values. Perhaps not surprisingly, cultural theorists hypothesize that individualists value freedom, egalitarians value equality, hierarchs value order, and fatalists value (good) luck (see Figure 1, Swedlow 2008; Coyle 1994). More surprising are the beliefs regarding human nature, the environment, and economics that are predicted to be associated with each pattern of relations, allowing the prediction of a lot of covariation among relations, beliefs, and values (Swedlow 2001, 342-46; 2002b; 2006, xviii-xxiv).
The Cultural Construction of Nature and Public Policy in Cultural Theory and the Pacific Northwest
Michael Thompson has been particularly instrumental in characterizing the cultural constructs of nature in Douglas’s theory (Schwarz and Thompson 1990, 8-13; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 26-33; as discussed in Jasanoff and Wynne 1998). Adapted from Thompson’s work, the constructs of nature that are functional for the different patterns of social relations are mapped onto the dimensions of social relations in Figure 2
, where a ball in a landscape represents the constructs of nature: In the individualistic construction, the ball is in a deep pocket, difficult to knock out: this represents nature as benign, resilient, or even robust or cornucopian.
3
The egalitarian construct of nature is most nearly the opposite of this: the ball is perched precariously on top of a pinnacle; the slightest disturbance will send it irretrievably downhill: this represents nature as fragile or ephemeral. The hierarchical construct of nature combines these two constructs: the ball is in a shallow pocket; small disturbances will not dislodge it, but large ones will; nature is construed as being benign or resilient within limits, beyond which it is fragile, ephemeral, or unpredictable.
4
In the fatalistic construction of nature, the ball is on a flat surface; it can roll any which way; this represents the unpredictability or capriciousness of nature; sometimes benign, resilient, or even robust or cornucopian, sometimes fragile or ephemeral, without discernable rhyme or reason.
5
The scientific debate regarding owls and ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest can be characterized as an argument between environmentalists and their academic sympathizers on the one hand and federal and industry scientists on the other over how shallow the pocket was, or whether the ball was in a pocket at all. However, federal scientists came fairly close to arguing that ecosystems were unpredictable—being “not only more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think”—while scientists working for industry argued for the resiliency and adaptability of the owl and ecosystems.
6
The debate effectively concluded when environmentalists and their academic sympathizers persuaded federal judges that the ball was teetering on the lip of the pocket or, alternatively, about to fall off its pinnacle perch (Swedlow 2002a, 2003, 2007, 2009; Sher 1993).
Dimensions of culture, types of social order, political values, and constructs of nature.
From these constructions of nature it is also possible to deduce the types of policies that will be pursued toward the environment. Individualists will take a very hands-on, transformative approach, which is what the timber industry advocated: “Tell us what owl habitat looks like and we’ll grow it.” They also suggested constructing nest boxes and breeding owls in captivity and trucking them between habitat areas rather than retaining old trees with nesting cavities and providing forested migratory routes. Egalitarians will take a hands-off, “tread lightly” approach, which is what environmentalists wanted when they advocated the complete halt of timber harvests that was mostly achieved. Hierarchs will be activist, but only to a point that is sustainable, which was the approach taken historically by the Forest Service with respect to timber harvesting and by Forest Service ecologist Jerry Franklin and his “New Forestry” ideas about selective harvesting and leaving “biological legacies” like decadent and fallen trees in place. Fatalists will remain passive in the face of nature’s fickle moods, a position that (in addition to the egalitarian “tread lightly” approach) significantly influenced the approach taken by federal research biologist Jack Ward Thomas and the forest ecosystem management team he headed (Chase 1995; Swedlow 2002a, 2003, 2007, 2009; FEMAT 1993; Yaffee 1994; see also Coyle 1994; Ellis and Thompson 1997; Pokorny and Schanz 2003).
The Coproduction of Scientific, Cultural, and Policy Change in Cultural Theory and the Pacific Northwest
“But if preferences and perception are socially constructed in such a way as to justify particular patterns of social relations, how does change ever occur?” ask Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky in their seminal refinement of Douglas’s theory (1990, 69). “Much the same way,” they answer, “as scientific theories lose and gain adherents: the cumulative impact of successive anomalies or surprises.” Anomalies and surprises occur because “nature, for all its accommodating ways, does not meekly accept every cultural construction we try to impose on it, and, in fighting back, it generates a countervailing force: the natural destruction of culture ….”
In other words, cultural theorists locate a catalyst for scientific, cultural, and policy change in surprises generated by encounters with nature in which nature displays properties or reveals characteristics that are at odds with scientifically or culturally generated expectations. Stipulating the world is one way and finding out that it actually appears to be another leads to a variety of predictable consequences, and can lead to such changes. 7 This is one reason constructs of nature can become so heavily contested: they are a major way that cultures justify and stabilize themselves. Successfully casting doubt on a construct’s correspondence to reality is to unmoor social and political life from its grounding in nature. Deconstructing rival constructs of nature is therefore a major way that scientific, cultural, and policy change is hypothesized to occur (see also Lockhart 1997; Wildavsky [1995] 2006c).
Jerry Franklin, Old-Growth Forest Ecosystems, and Environmentalists
One area where the natural destruction of science, culture, and policy appeared to occur in the Pacific Northwest was in the influence changing scientific understandings of older forests had on forest and wildlife science and management. The research at H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest that helped produce these changes began in the early 1970s and was led by Jerry Franklin, the chief plant ecologist at the Forest Service research station at Oregon State University (Chase 1995, 151-55; Luoma 1999).
In 1977, a forest planner approached Franklin looking for a definition of old-growth forest, so that the Forest Service could manage it properly under the newly passed National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which mandated management of all types of forest. To come up with a definition, Franklin convened his researchers. The article resulting from the meeting, “Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests,” described all the interdependencies among life-forms that the researchers had discovered (Chase 1995, 154).
Franklin also gave an interview to an undergraduate student activist organization at Oregon State University. A compendium including this interview, titled “Saving All the Pieces: Old Growth Forests in Oregon” (LaFollette 1979), prompted the Audubon Society, a birding organization, to organize a conference to which Franklin read his research team’s article publicly for the first time (Chase 1995, 161-62). Chase reports that environmentalists “badly wanted to see the paper published as proof that science was on their side …. 8 The entire Northwest conservation community began to rally around the issue of old growth. Within the space of 5 years—from 1975 to 1980—its interest had shifted from setting aside rock and ice wilderness [at higher elevations] to saving mature forests” at lower elevations, bringing environmentalists into direct conflict with forest managers (Chase 1995, 162).
Eric Forsman, Andy Stahl, Russell Lande, and the Scientific Basis for the Owl Litigation
Proceeding roughly in parallel with the research of the H. J. Andrews team was the research of wildlife biologist Eric Forsman, also begun in the early 1970s, on the relationship between the Northern Spotted Owl and old-growth forests (Yaffee 1994, 14-9). Forsman’s research became a focal point for the coproduction of science and social and political order, and a catalyst for the most dramatic scientific, cultural, and policy change in forest management in the Pacific Northwest.
Aided by the fact that his academic advisor occupied two powerful positions straddling the border between research and regulatory science, 9 Forsman’s master’s thesis research became the basis for Oregon’s land and wildlife management agencies to agree to protect 300 acres of 200-year-old forest for each of 400 pairs of owls, about 2 percent of the state’s remaining old-growth (Yaffee 1994, 34). Further studies by Forsman led the agencies to expand per pair set-asides to 1,000 acres, which the timber industry estimated would cost 1 million dollars per pair (Yaffee 1994, 53).
Meanwhile, Forest Service biologists, influenced by concepts from the new field of conservation biology, were rewriting their regulations concerning species diversity to include not only diversity of species but genetic diversity within a species, as well as diversity of biological communities (Yaffee 1994, 59-60). Since the father of conservation biology, Michael Soulé, claimed that the minimum population size necessary to preserve genetic diversity was 500 pairs of a species, Forest Service biologists decided that at least 500 pairs of owls had to be protected (Yaffee 1994, 62). Then, the distribution of the population in the landscape was also recognized as an important contributor to species viability. Accordingly, Forest Service biologists developed a rule that a species had to be well-distributed throughout the planning area (Yaffee 1994, 58). Their modeling effort led to doubling the size of the habitat areas, which was anticipated to cause a 5 percent reduction in allowable agency timber sales (Yaffee 1994, 96).
While environmental groups agreed with industry groups that agency modeling efforts had a poor biological basis, they did not think gathering more data was the solution; data collection would take too long (Swedlow 2002a, 206-08). Instead, they saw in the agency’s shift from studying owl populations to modeling them an opportunity to challenge the agency on new scientific territory. If they could find a scientist to do a better modeling job than agency scientists had, modeling that supported the inference that the owl was endangered by plans to protect it, they would be able to challenge those plans in court and win.
No one understood better how to displace the agencies’ presumed expertise with outside scientific authority than Andy Stahl, then working at the National Wildlife Federation, later a resource analyst at the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF). With Soulé’s help, Stahl located Russell Lande, a theoretical biologist at the University of Chicago (Chase 1995, 246). “Stahl explained the problem: he needed a paper to prove logging hurt owls …, [which] not only would … have to exhibit impeccable scholarship, but also [would have] to be timely and written in terms that a judge could understand” (246-47). Lande’s article was ready in June 1985, when Stahl “published” it at a press conference (247).
Lande’s article modeled both owl habitat needs and population declines. Lande predicted that if old-growth were reduced to less than 21 percent (± 2 percent) of the region “owls cannot persist,” and that the owl would in fact go extinct under the Forest Service’s management plans because they called for harvesting all but 7-16 percent of the remaining old-growth. “Even a plan that would double or triple the [Spotted Owl Management Areas], assuming these to consist of 1000 acres of old growth, would be likely to rapidly extinguish the population” (Lande 1988, 605). Lande’s article and its importance to the owl litigation are further discussed in Swedlow (2003, 196-202).
Scientists and environmentalists were coproducing exactly the type of owl environmentalists needed to shut down federal timber sales on a large scale. “It’s a perfect species to use as a surrogate [for protecting old growth forests],” Stahl told the Western Public Law Conference. “First of all, it is unique to old-growth forests and there’s no credible scientific dispute on that fact. Second of all, it uses a lot of old growth. That’s convenient because we can use it to protect a lot of old growth. And third … it appears the spotted owl faces an imminent risk of extinction” (as quoted in Yaffee 1994, 215-16).
Andy Stahl, Victor Sher, Todd True, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund’s Owl Litigation Strategy
While the lead plaintiffs in the owl suits were the Portland and Seattle chapters of the Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF) represented these and other environmental groups, the owl litigation strategy originated with Andy Stahl, working for SCLDF by 1987, and Victor Sher and Todd True, the SCLDF’s lead attorneys, who recruited these groups to serve as plaintiffs. The SCLDF believed that they could get much more environmental protection from Ninth Circuit federal judges under existing law than they could from Congress, where they would have to compromise with timber interests. For their part, established national environmental groups were reluctant to join the movement that SCLDF claimed to serve. 10 They saw SCLDF’s owl litigation strategy as high risk and feared that it would provoke a political backlash leading to a weakening of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which required the protection of species threatened with extinction.
The SCLDF feared this too and hoped to avoid weakening the ESA by basing its owl suits on other environmental laws. This is one reason Stahl tried to talk others out of petitioning the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list the owl as threatened or endangered under the Act. But there were other reasons that SCLDF did not want the owl listed as threatened. Once the owl was listed, SCLDF feared that federal judges would defer to FWS expertise on the owl and the FWS would not do enough to enforce the ESA against the land management agencies, particularly not against the Forest Service, the premier federal environmental agency. At the same time, SCLDF believed that federal judges would be less likely to defer to the wildlife expertise of the land management agencies than that of the FWS. Consequently, SCLDF needed to find laws that would allow them to mount their scientific critique directly against federal land managers. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) fit the bill (Swedlow 2003, 202-04).
Helen Frye, Thomas Zilly, William Dwyer, and the Ninth Circuit’s Spotted Owl Injunctions and Orders to Manage Ecosystems
The SCLDF began suing the federal land and wildlife management agencies in 1987, gaining their first injunctions in 1991. The SCLDF’s suits were directed at the BLM [Bureau of Land Management], FWS, and Forest Service and were heard by six district court judges, with Judges Helen Frye, Thomas Zilly, and William Dwyer issuing most of the eighteen published district court opinions in these cases (Swedlow 2003, 206-09).
The SCLDF’s litigation strategy was initially frustrated in Judge Frye’s courtroom in their suits against the BLM, while finding unexpected success in Judge Zilly’s in their suits against the FWS. But SCLDF achieved its greatest success in Judge Dwyer’s courtroom in their suits against the Forest Service. Ninth Circuit appellate panels were uniformly supportive of SCLDF’s suits from the beginning, claiming that “It was and is no secret that the northern spotted owl disappears when its habitat is destroyed by logging” before the district courts had even held hearings or made factual findings on the issue (Swedlow 2003, 210-11).
Judge Frye initially did not accept academic scientists’ (recruited by SCLDF) claims that there was sufficient new information to require the BLM to reassess the impact of its planned timber sales on the owl under NEPA. This was in part because Judge Frye deferred to congressional amendments that removed suits based on new information from judicial review. But Ninth Circuit appellate panels signaled their strong support of SCLDF’s suits, finding grounds to reverse Judge Frye on every appeal, going so far as holding that Congress had acted unconstitutionally when it prohibited judicial review of the agencies’ land management plans.
This ruling was in turn reversed by a unanimous Supreme Court, but the reversal would have no effect on the continuing owl litigation because annual congressional restrictions on judicial review were not renewed after 3 years when environmentalists had built sufficient support in Congress to stop them. Judge Frye ultimately held that the BLM had acted unreasonably when it decided not to consider new information about the owl, even as she claimed not to be choosing among experts. This new information consisted of models of owl population and habitat dynamics, not of new knowledge regarding owl biology. A Ninth Circuit appellate panel strongly endorsed Judge Frye’s ruling, claiming that it was supported by “a body of scientific evidence” (Swedlow 2003, 209-25).
Meanwhile, when the FWS declined to list the owl as threatened under the ESA due to “missing population trend and other biological data,” the SCLDF had little difficulty in getting Judge Zilly to rule that the agency had not adequately justified its decision. Judge Zilly did not defer to FWS expertise on the owl as SCLDF had feared federal judges would. Then, when the agency listed the owl, Judge Zilly further ruled that the FWS should have designated the owl’s critical habitat concurrently with that decision. In so ruling, Judge Zilly was undoubtedly influenced by the owl conservation strategy that had been produced by an unprecedented collaboration among federal owl scientists mandated by Congress in one of its appropriations riders (Swedlow 2003, 225-8, 235-9).
This 1989 rider, known as the “Northwest Timber Compromise,” required federal land management agencies in the region to sell specific amounts of timber, mandated that no sales were to come from spotted owl habitat areas identified in agencies’ planning documents, added specific protected areas for the owl, and directed the agencies to designate other appropriate areas as protected. This amendment also incorporated an interagency agreement directing the formation of an Interagency Scientific Committee (ISC) charged with developing “a scientifically credible conservation strategy” for the owl (Swedlow 2003, 215-16).
The ISC conservation strategy vastly expanded forest set-asides for the owl because it recommended that owls be protected in groups of twenty pairs rather than in individual pairs. The ISC claimed that models played a secondary role in developing their conservation strategy, with empirical studies of owls playing the primary role. Yet, they readily conceded that apparent owl population declines observed in a couple of study areas could not be used to predict declines in owl populations. They also conceded that forest structure was a more important determinant of owl habitat than forest age, and that owls could be found reproducing in stands as young as 80 years, and even 50 years, provided that there were a few remnants of old-growth (Thomas et al. 1990). Industry lawyers claimed that the ISC created a “façade of science” to obscure a series of professional judgments (Swedlow 2003, 229-35). When the FWS designated the owl’s critical habitat, the agency built on the ISC recommendations, expanding owl set-asides even further (Swedlow 2003, 239-40).
No judge played a more significant role in facilitating the rise of ecosystem management in the Pacific Northwest than Judge Dwyer. Not only was he the first to enjoin federal timber sales to protect the owl, but his injunction alone fundamentally altered the politics of the issue because the Forest Service owned most of the federal lands in the region. This temporary but 100 percent reduction in sales (when extended to BLM lands by Judge Frye’s injunction) created the policy window for FEMAT (1993) and President Clinton to propose a 75 percent permanent reduction for all federal lands in the region, going significantly beyond the ISC recommendations in an effort to protect 1,000 species associated with old-growth forest ecosystems.
Judge Dwyer also ordered the agencies to develop plans that would protect not only the owl but “biological communities.” This order implied that only an owl management plan that also managed ecosystems would be sufficient to lift the injunction. This order was the result of considerable judicial activism, with Judge Dwyer finding a mandate for ecosystem management in NFMA implementing regulations written by Forest Service biologists. These regulations required the agency to maintain “viable populations of vertebrates” on agency lands, arguably going beyond the ESA’s focus on the recovery of individual species, but not requiring ecosystem management per se. Judge Dwyer also read NEPA to require assessment of owl management impacts on agency lands, and, furthermore, he allowed the Clinton administration to extend ecosystem management to BLM lands and to invertebrates on both BLM and Forest Service lands.
Judges Frye, Zilly, and Dwyer adopted very different postures toward the scientists before them, which had significant consequences for the coproduction of scientific, cultural, and policy change. Judge Frye was very reluctant to choose among scientists, and she was the only one to give any space in her opinions to the critique of an owl expert testifying on behalf of the timber industry. She relied primarily on owl assessments produced by BLM’s own biologists to hold that the agency must reassess its timber sale program. Judge Zilly, on the other hand, sided with a lone FWS dissenter and three concurring outside scientists to find that the agency had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in deciding not to list the owl as threatened. He selectively quoted the industry owl expert to make it appear that all scientists outside the agency thought the owl should be listed.
For his part, Judge Dwyer barely even acknowledged industry experts in his opinions that lead to an injunction of Forest Service timber sales but lent an especially sympathetic ear to critiques of agency owl plans offered by scientists testifying on behalf of SCLDF. Even though the ISC conservation strategy afforded vastly more protection for the owl than set-asides for owl pairs, and Judge Dwyer initially was impressed by the ISC report, he was soon persuaded that their plan might not go far enough when FWS biologists produced an analysis suggesting that owl populations were declining faster than previously thought and academic scientists testified that the owl’s decline might even be worse than that, having passed a threshold from which it could not recover (Swedlow 2003, 243-63, 267-72). Judicial rulings in the owl cases consequently depended on resolving contested factual and legal issues in ways that required a dramatic reduction of federal timber sales and the implementation of ecosystem management.
Cultural Coproduction of Identities, Institutions, Discourses, and Representations In and Around the Forest Service
Scientists, judges, and environmental groups concerned about spotted owls and old-growth forest ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest also coproduced dramatic changes in identities, institutions, discourses, and representations in the federal land and wildlife management agencies, as Jasanoff leads us to believe would occur, while coproducing dramatic scientific, political, and policy changes. While these former changes have not been the primary focus of this effort to use Douglas’s cultural theory to specify Jasanoff’s account of the coproduction of science and social order, I would like to close this analysis by providing some examples of how scientists, judges, and environmentalists in the region coproduced new identities, institutions, discourses, and representations in-line with cultural theorists’ predictions.
Hierarchical identities were transformed and egalitarian ones created in both individuals and institutions, particularly in the Forest Service. At the individual level, the identities of foresters were transformed from model agency employees into narrow minded, voracious “timber beasts” in the minds of many environmentalists. Nongame wildlife biologists, by contrast, moved from the periphery of the land management agencies to the center, becoming heroes to many environmentalists. Conservation biologists in particular gained in stature, as many of their theories and concepts became the basis for owl management plans in the region. These changes in identity are also associated with changes in power and authority, with foresters losing power and authority and wildlife biologists, and particularly conservation biologists, gaining them.
Soulé influenced Forest Service owl management while he was self-consciously working to construct the identity of conservation biologists. “Conservation biology differs from most other biological sciences in one important way: it is often a crisis discipline,” Soulé wrote in 1985. “It’s relation to biology, particularly ecology, is analogous to that of surgery to physiology and war to political science. In crisis disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts; crisis disciplines are thus a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information. A conservation biologist may have to make decisions or recommendations about design and management before he or she is completely comfortable with the theoretical and empirical basis of the analysis” (Soulé 1985, 727).
Thus, the rise of conservation biology coproduced in part by scientists, environmentalists, and judges in the owl litigation not only changed the identity of biologists relative to foresters and other agency scientists and professionals, but it may have contributed to changing the identity of wildlife biologists and more generally what it means to be a scientist within the land and wildlife management agencies. These changes in the identity of scientists and their institutional participation in policymaking were coproduced in significant part by processes of boundary-work relying on pollution and purity claims that are analyzed in Swedlow (2007).
At the institutional level, the identity (and power and authority) of the land and wildlife agencies changed in ways parallel to that of the professionals most associated with each agency. Ninth Circuit rulings radically changed identities, authority, and power relationships among and within the land and wildlife management agencies, effectively handing control of land management to nongame wildlife biologists, previously the least influential members of these agencies. Within the land management agencies this inverted the previous relationship between foresters and wildlife biologists, while among agencies previous relationships were also turned upside down, with the FWS effectively gaining control of much of the land management done by the BLM and Forest Service.
The coproduction of the owl litigation also played a significant role in transforming each of these institutions. Changes in the Forest Service have been particularly well documented. Commensurate with the direction of external pressure from interest groups, Congress, and the courts (Farnham 1995; Jones and Callaway 1995; Jones and Taylor 1995; Sabatier, Loomis, and McCarthy 1995), as well as internal pressures from employees (Brown and Harris 1992a, 1992b, 1993; Kennedy et al. 1993; McCarthy, Sabatier, and Loomis 1991), the agency has been transformed in an egalitarian direction (Farnham 1995; Farnham and Mohai 1995; Farnham, Taylor, and Callaway 1995), although it is probably most accurate to view many of these changes as an egalitarian overlay on (or undermining of) an hierarchical foundation (Tipple and Wellman 1991), producing an hierarchical–egalitarian hybrid regime familiar to cultural theorists (Lockhart 1997; Verweij and Thompson 2006; Wildavsky [1986] 2006b, [1995] 2006c; and Swedlow 2002b, 2006a, xxii-xxiii).
Thus, whereas the Forest Service used to be concerned primarily with efficiency and economy in producing timber and other commodities from national forests, these values are now applied to a wider range of outputs, including producing noncommodity values, such as wildlife protection, and the agency is now additionally concerned with being responsive to and representative of the public (Tipple and Wellman 1991). Before 1960, forest rangers were seen as “the expert, local authority, and manager-in-charge” (Tipple and Wellman 1991, 423). By 1990, forest rangers had become public “servants” and “facilitators of public dialogue” (424). The old, hierarchical system relied on “‘dog loyalty’—unquestioning obedience to the agency and an acceptance of authoritarian governmental decision-making by experts.” More recently, agency employees exhibit “‘cat loyalty,’ insisting on more democratic, participatory decision-making and the right to dissent” (Jack Ward Thomas, as quoted in Chase 1995, 174).
This change from hierarchical to egalitarian ways of organizing decision making, authority, and power in the Forest Service has been endorsed by its chiefs and institutionalized in Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an organization founded by Andy Stahl. Dale Robertson, chief of the Forest Service during the owl litigation, described the forest manager’s new role as one of “guiding, educating, advising, and encouraging rather than regulating and controlling” employees (Robertson 1989, as quoted in Tipple and Wellman 1991, 425). Various pressures, including civil rights law suits, have also led the agency to diversify its hiring practices (Brown and Harris 1993; Kennedy 1991; Thomas and Mohai 1995). Once exclusively male and White, Forest Service employees now include women and minorities, an inclusiveness and leveling of the playing field that is also attractive to egalitarians.
Discourses and representations have also shifted significantly in an egalitarian direction, in significant part as a result of the coproductive processes of the owl litigation. The agricultural factory approach to forestry seeking sustainability in production of forest commodities has been displaced by a discourse that represents nature as ecosystems. This discourse and representation resonates with collectivists both hierarchical and egalitarian, but particularly with egalitarians because, as in the human communities they are trying to create, all members of the biological community are presumptively equally important to the preservation and functioning of the whole. Ecosystems are also complex, requiring lots of varied expertise to understand let alone to manage. Hierarchical organizations naturally gravitate toward creating this expertise, while egalitarians like the inclusiveness and equalization of experts that studying and managing ecosystems invites (see, generally, Cortner and Moote 1999; Fitzsimmons 1999). Along the way from multiuse forestry to ecosystem management, Chief Robertson attempted to develop so-called “New Perspectives” on forestry, borrowing from Jerry Franklin’s New Forestry ideas. But, when the discourse around ecosystem management appeared to have more support, Robertson embraced it, seeking to shape it into something the agency could do (Freeman 2002, 639-43).
Further Testing and Developing This Cultural Theory of Coproduction
In this article, I have argued that Douglas’s cultural theory is a good candidate for specifying, explaining, and predicting the political cultural conditions under which the coproduction of science, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change, are likely to occur. The plausibility of this theory was suggested here by showing how scientists involved in struggles over land and wildlife management in the Pacific Northwest championed opposing constructs and policies predicted by the theory. Moreover, as the cultural theory of change predicts, these constructs and policies and the hierarchical culture and organization of their associated institution, the Forest Service, were transformed in an egalitarian direction by new understandings of older forests and their associated species, like the northern spotted owl, that were coproduced by scientists, environmentalists, and federal judges. Identities, institutions, discourses, and representations were major pathways for coproduction, as anticipated by Jasanoff, and they took forms and changed for reasons and in ways predicted by cultural theorists.
While heuristic or interpretive uses of cultural theory are probably particularly well-suited for studying coproduction because coproductive processes often simultaneously constitute variables and cause them to act on each other (Jasanoff 2004, 274-78), making it difficult to specify variables for analysis a priori, interpretive case studies of the kind undertaken here (and typically used in science studies) can and probably should feed into advancing a more rigorous operationalization and testing of cultural theory’s claims. Recent efforts to operationalize and test cultural theory through surveys, content analysis, and experiments can be found in a forthcoming symposium (in PS: Political Science & Politics) and should provide ways to build on similar efforts cited in this article (Ellis and Thompson 1997; Pokorny and Schanz 2003) and in the bibliography to Wildavsky (2006a).
There are also several additional ways to test and develop this cultural theory of coproduction using interpretive case studies. First, one might study other opportunistically selected cases of coproduction, both to establish further the theory’s plausibility and to develop it, laying the foundation for more systematic testing and theory development. Conversely, existing case studies of coproduction could be examined for evidence that coproduction takes the forms and makes changes for the reasons predicted by cultural theorists. Existing case studies applying cultural theory could be examined to see whether scientists and other actors coproduce identities, institutions, discourses, and representations in the ways predicted by Jasanoff (see the bibliography in Wildavsky (2006a) for applications). To the extent existing studies lack evidence to support these investigations, their subjects could be studied further so that the claims made by coproductionists and cultural theorists can be tested and developed.
Second, the cultural theory of the coproduction proposed here might be systematically tested and developed by studying cases of coproduction that are most likely or least likely to validate the theory (a method discussed and applied to test, invalidate, and revise a different theory in Swedlow 2009) or, third, through comparative nested analysis of cases of coproduction.
Unlike the case study methods discussed so far, comparative nested analysis will allow scholars to make inferences about the external or general validity of the coproduction processes found in the cases studied. Seeking to exploit these methods in related work, my collaborators and I have constructed a universe of nearly 3,000 environmental, health, safety, and other risks and are studying a random, representative sample of them (Hammitt et al. 2005; Swedlow et al. 2009, 2010). Among other things, nested analysis of these risks will allow testing and development of theories of science in the regulatory process (Swedlow 2006b), including the cultural theory of coproduction proposed and hopefully made plausible by this article.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author thanks chair and discussant Mark Zachary Taylor, fellow panelist Calvert Arden, and audience members of the American Political Science Association conference where an earlier version of this paper was presented for helpful comments. The author also thanks Daniel Barben, Richard King, Chandra Hunter Swedlow, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback, and Anthony Clarke and Maureen Lowry-Fritz for their extensive research assistance.
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Bradley and Earhart Foundations; the Institute for Humane Studies; and the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy at Northern Illinois University.