Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems: Understanding textual mediation in the contact zone

Abstract

Indigenous peoples around the world are claiming and, in many cases, achieving recognition of their customary land rights, with significant challenges for planning systems. How should we understand both the nature of this demand and its politics of recognition? This article demonstrates how the insights and principles contained in political and democratic theory, along with a methodological framework inspired by Institutional Ethnography informs the conceptualization of what is happening between Indigenous peoples and planning systems in British settler-states. Using the highly evocative language of the ‘contact zone’ and an illustration from environmental planning in British Columbia, Canada, this article indicates how reading these theories together builds an approach for critically analysing the textual constraints placed on the social spaces where Indigenous peoples and state-based planning systems meet.

Keywords

Indigenous peoples postcolonial recognition difference text method

Introduction

Indigenous peoples around the world are claiming and, in many cases, achieving recognition of land rights through a variety of legal and institutional mechanisms. While its forms and applications are diverse, Indigenous recognition usually entails explicitly recognizing rights in title and customary use, as well as a broader political and cultural right to self-government. Indigenous title is communally held, inalienable, and derived from ancient and oral law systems. As such it represents substantially different ontological and epistemological philosophies of human-environment relationships when compared with non-Indigenous systems. Given its political and spatial characteristics, the recognition of Indigenous rights and title places a very specific onus upon planning systems, one that is not yet widely discussed in planning research and theory (see Hibbard et al., 2008). Indigenous recognition also highlights an essential tension in the governance of (post)colonial societies, and British settler-states, in particular, a tension between the modern state’s attempt to accommodate rights within existing institutional and legal arrangements and Indigenous aspirations for a more fundamental reconfiguration of their political and spatial relationships (Dyck, 1985: 2). We suggest that such tensions can be usefully understood as a particular kind of ‘contact zone’ (following Pratt, 1991, 1992). Our interest is in developing an appropriate suite of theoretical and methodological principles to explore the nature of this contact and the politics of recognition to which it gives rise.

Our paper is not a presentation of findings, but rather a discussion of our efforts to develop the theoretical grounding and methodological approach for how to see contact zones and the work they are doing in ‘unsettling’ the certainties of environmental and urban planning. Although the recognition of Indigenous and other customary land rights and governance systems is occurring in a wide variety of (post)colonial contexts (for some examples from different perspectives see Jentoft et al., 2003; Rangan, 1999; Shmueli and Khamaisi, 2011; Yiftachel, 2006), we limit ourselves to the study of two British settler societies: British Columbia, Canada and Victoria, Australia. The environmental and urban planning systems in both jurisdictions have been influenced by precedent-setting high court decisions that affirmed the existence of Indigenous rights and title and have started to define how they might coexist with Western systems of land title and governance. These legal principles have been picked up, reinterpreted and applied to land use planning law, policy and procedure, often opening up new possibilities for Indigenous–State planning. At the same time, our experience of working and researching in planning in both of these contexts has shown that the recognition of Indigenous rights and title is often constrained by the codification of both the process and outcomes of planning. These initial observations give rise to the focus of this particular paper: the role of text in mediating the depth and breadth of the contact zones that exist for planning in (post)colonial contexts.

Our purpose, then, is both theoretical and methodological and the paper is organized around a number of key questions: What gives rise to, constitutes, the contact zone for planning? What are the textual processes at play in the contact zone? What do they mean for a more appropriate and just recognition of Indigenous peoples? How should we see and interpret them?

We begin by outlining the ‘field’ of Indigenous planning literature as we see it. Then, we discuss a theoretical framing based in the literatures on the recognition of Indigenous difference within planning by using the work of political theorist James Tully as a departure point. We are especially interested in a less-developed aspect of his work around a more conflicting, or more ‘agonistic’ (following Mouffe, 1993, 2005), politics. Such framings of the politics of recognition resonate with, challenge, and have potential implications for the broader planning literature. They foreground the necessity and immanence of conflict in the politics of difference and in doing so allow the irrationality of ‘rational-deliberation-toward-lasting-consensus’ to become evident. For a methodological framework that helps make visible and explain the relations of planning with its ‘Others’, we draw from the ‘interpretive turn’ in policy studies (Fischer, 2003; Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003; Yanow, 1996), which has a growing influence on planning theory (for an early example, see Fischer and Forester, 1993). We refine and extend this literature by applying the methodological insights of Institutional Ethnography and the work of Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith, in particular. Institutional Ethnography seems to offer a more precise way of seeing, analysing and explaining how recognition is constituted, supported and negotiated in the contact zone. To help animate some of these ideas, we draw on a small example from one of our research sites: British Columbia (BC), Canada. The final substantive section provides a brief analysis of a BC policy document that guides the planning of public lands, and is one of the key texts that establishes and delimits the contact zone between Indigenous peoples (First Nations) and natural resource planners. This illustration is offered as a way of illuminating how such a methodological approach might help researchers working in places that resonate with the contact zone.

The contact zone of planning in (post)colonial contexts

Urban and environmental planning systems in British settler-states are developing alternative planning procedures and regulatory tools in an effort to ‘deal with’ the rights and land interests of Indigenous peoples. Two particularly important modes of recognition are appearing: first, a territorial recognition linking culture with place; and second, recognition of Indigenous political structures and government. These efforts are particularly pronounced in environmental planning, where Indigenous recognition has resulted in the expansion of conventional planning tools and spatial ordering practices. A substantial literature charts the significant shifts that have taken place over the past 20 years regarding the recognition of Indigenous rights and title in environmental governance, including the development of governance forms based on joint or co-management between Indigenous traditional owners and government agencies (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2004; Howitt et al., 1996; Jaireth and Smyth, 2003; Jentoft et al., 2003; Lane and Williams, 2008; Stevens, 1997); increased amounts of consultation with Indigenous stakeholders (Berke et al., 2002); the incorporation of ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ (TEK) in environmental planning models (see contributions to Inglis, 1993; also Daniels and Vencatesan, 1995); and increasingly protective cultural heritage management zones, overlays and new processes within land management (Jones, 2007). In a more advanced form, planning processes are also being conducted on a nation-to-nation (or government-to-government) basis, in which Indigenous peoples and the state mutually recognize each other’s governance authority and agree to share land use planning responsibilities (Barry, 2011). Indeed, ‘Indigenous planning’ is a field emerging within both theory and practice in its own right (Jojola, 2008).

At one level, some of the literature about planning and Indigenous peoples, and the practices it reports on, is drawn relatively simplistically. Much of the consultation literature (see, for example, Berke et al., 2002) tends to simplify Indigenous recognition to a matter of accommodating greater numbers of Indigenous people in established, mainstream decision-making forums. Some of the work on TEK is criticized for its dangerous potential to simply co-opt Indigenous cultural knowledge and socio-economic practices as just one more subset of data to be used (Nadasdy, 1999). The incorporation of traditional use practices within environmental plans has been similarly criticized as reifying essentialist readings of Indigenous culture (Jackson, 2006). Such approaches can be seen as a domestication of planning’s Other into mainstream practice, thereby making invisible the wider political and epistemological challenge of Indigenous recognition (Porter, 2010). If the rights and claims of and by Indigenous groups in (post)colonial states mount a substantial challenge to the very basis of state-based planning, then a just and appropriate response to that challenge must surely require a deconstruction, and decolonization, of planning itself.

The tension between domestication and decolonization helps explain planning’s uneven, contradictory and fundamentally ambivalent relationship with Indigenous peoples. For example, planning has been described as a positive site for the exercise of indigenous self-determination (Lane and Hibbard, 2005; Zaferatos, 2004); cross-cultural learning about the legacies of colonialism; and the improvement of community relations (Dale, 1999). At the same time, it can be interpreted as an avenue for deeply embedded, exclusionary and oppressive discourses, policy frames and power relations (Howitt and Lunkapis, 2010; Lane and Cowell, 2001; Porter, 2010; Yiftachel, 1995). There is a substantial debate, then, between normative values around the transformative possibilities of planning, particularly through reliance on more deliberative practices, and theorizations and empirical analyses that show just how fragile and superficial such practices might turn out to be. Any theoretical and methodological frame, therefore, must be analytically and politically sensitive to the historical and contemporary oppression that state-based planning often brings about for communities of difference and Indigenous peoples in particular. Yet it must also be open to the possibilities of transformative practice through planning as a site of transgression and resistance. Any theorizations of the actual relationships between state-based planning and those it ‘Others’ must be able to see and explain that relationship not as one thing or the other, but as contested sites that have both transformative and oppressive possibilities.

The notion of recognition as a politics of difference is one already firmly rooted within many threads of planning theory. Sandercock’s work has progressed the field a long way towards critically unsettling the universalizing tendencies of planning (1998a, 2003). Many others are pursuing these kinds of questions in specific areas, and are asking critical questions about how we should understand, explain and then act in these contexts of ‘deep difference’ (Watson, 2006. See also Beebeejaun, 2004; Burayidi, 2003; Fenster, 2003; Harwood, 2005; Jackson, 1997; Thomas, 2000; Yiftachel, 1998). We hope this paper adds to this important field of planning research. As it does so from a very particular position of cultural difference, that of historically constituted colonial relations in planning, we find the need for a different language, one that more accurately captures and describes this ambivalent and specific field of the politics of difference. American critical linguist Mary Louise Pratt’s conceptualisation of the ‘contact zone’ is, we suggest, a particularly insightful vocabulary for postcolonial planning. She defines contact zones as ‘the social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (1991: 34). In some ways, Pratt’s contact zones are similar to Sandercock’s exploration of the ‘borderlands’ (Sandercock, 1998b: 110) as spaces ‘shaped by cultural collision’ (1998b: 113) that openly embrace, rather than merely tolerate, cultural difference. Yet, in her quest for ‘a postmodern Utopia’ (1998b: 163), Sandercock’s focus on border crossing tends to downplay by what structures and discourses those borderlands come to exist and how they are maintained at the margins. These fragile, marginal spaces are by no means a guarantee of a radical, democratic ideal. To really understand them, we need to see them fully for what they are, how they come to be and how they function. Pratt’s work helps bring these dimensions to the fore by asserting that the contact zone is also a place where difference is manipulated, dominated or categorically ignored. In doing so, we find ‘contact zones’ more accurately evokes both the promise and pitfalls of Indigenous–State planning and so we adopt this vocabulary, and what it analytically and politically signifies, in this paper.

The contact zone is a vocabulary, and an evocative one, but it is not a sufficient theorization. Consequently, a more appropriate conceptual and methodological base needs to be established to allow contact zones to be seen, explained and subjected to critical analysis that evaluates how far from an ideal they might be. What might a just relationship with Indigenous peoples for planning actually look like? How should we explain and interrogate the obvious asymmetries of power, and the highly circumscribed nature of the relationship between planning and Indigenous peoples? The first question gives rise to the need for a normative guidepost, and the second requires a methodological framing that can make explicit the fractures, uncertainties, transgressions and possibilities inherent within that relationship. In the next sections, we deal with each in turn.

Towards a politics of recognition and a methodological framework

Following Tully (1995, 2000, 2004), we argue that a more just recognition of Indigenous rights and title in planning must be constituted through a continuing renegotiation of the relational, multiple and mutual moments of coexistence. This is different from forms of recognition that definitively fix or stabilize the content and scope of Indigenous claims. Tully (2004) problematizes the latter as the ‘monological’ mode of recognition, where claims are settled in fixed terms within existing structures such as courts and legislation and with little flexibility for review or change. They are not relational, but are embedded in an essentialist interpretation of the Others being accommodated. Recognition in this mode is produced through the ‘language of the master’ (Tully, 1995: 34) and in that sense tends to dilute and accommodate (in the pernicious sense of co-opt) Indigenous claims. Recognition in planning that formalize and position Indigenous interests might be seen as characteristic of such a monological mode. Common forms of such recognition are substantive use rights, fixities of identity around group-based claims, or procedural rights for inclusion and consultation.

Our use here of the work of political theorist James Tully is not unique in the planning literature (see, for example, Hillier, 2003; Sandercock, 2011) and has gained particular prominence in Sandercock’s writing on ‘mongrel cities’ and ‘cosmopolitan urbanism’ (2003, 2011). There is a powerful imagery at work in Tully’s writing, much of which is organized around and inspired by The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, a well-known sculpture by Haida artist Bill Reid. Referring to the sculpture as ‘a symbol of the spirit of a post imperial age’ (1995: 17), Tully notes how the 13 passengers of the sculpture’s canoe, most of which are drawn from Haida mythology, all seem to be vying for position, often facing different directions and sometimes teetering on the edge of the boat, yet ‘the paddles are somehow in unison and they appear to be heading in some direction’ (1995: 28). We share Sandercock’s interest in and application of the symbolism found in The Spirit of Haida Gwaii and argue that what we should take from this sculpture is that the recognition of difference does not mean the end of political unity, provided we develop appropriate conventions to guide the constitution of a new relationship. Tully provides a suite of normative principles around intercultural dialogue to produce the conditions for finding common ground (2000). Deliberative and collaborative planning scholars would find much that resonates and inspires in his poetic reading of The Spirit of Haida Gwaii: the emphasis on being different but together in the same process space, and finding mutual vocabulary (rowing) in order to move forward in the same direction. Similar notions are at the heart of the deliberative turn in planning (including its more recent institutional turn) and can be found in the work of theorists such as Innes and Booher (2010), Forester (1999, 2009), Healey (2006, 2007), Fischer (2003).

Tully’s emphasis on negotiative processes potentially gives rise to all of the problems inherent in the assumption that a consensus through rational deliberation is possible or desirable (Hillier, 2003; McGuirk, 2001; Mouffe, 1999; Porter, 2010; Watson, 2006; Yiftachel and Huxley, 2000). Yet, despite this critique, his work maintains an ability to acknowledge and interrogate the pervasive and inevitable presence of historically constituted power relations within deliberative moments. The very modes of recognition he both critiques and champions are all placed, rather subtly, within the field signified by, or constituted within, dominant colonial discourse. While Tully doesn’t directly speak to this, his critique holds open the analytical possibility for seeing power and conflict within the canoe. This more ‘agonistic’ democratic theory (and Tully only gestures towards it) is being developed by political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe (1993, 2005), and taken up into planning through Hillier (2003) and Pløger (2004). As Mouffe shows, any political moment can only exist within the already present operations of power: ‘the very conditions of the possibility of deliberation constitute at the same time the conditions of impossibility of the ideal speech situation’ (Mouffe, 1999: 751–2), indeed it is the ‘adversarial dimension which is constitutive of the political and which provides democratic politics with its inherent dynamics’ (Mouffe, 2005: 29). This ‘agonistic’ view of democracy applied to the politics of difference and the contact zone adds a new dimension to discussions about collaboration, deliberation and difference within Indigenous planning. It further highlights how a normative ideal of deliberative democracy in (post)colonial settings seems to inevitably reduce quest to one for better process, and in doing so, actively makes invisible the colonial histories that are always present. Orienting attention to the ideological formations, ontologies and rationalities that are structuring and mediating actual instances of negotiation between planning and Indigenous peoples makes those very structures available for us to see and explain.

Let us recap briefly here: contact zones are the sites within the democratic field where Indigenous interests, claims and values are brought forward to planning. They are inevitably contested, conflictual, highly circumscribed, ambivalent, agonistic spaces, filled with possibility. That such contact zones exist, and they surely do as the literature on Indigenous people within planning attests, begs a very important question – what gives rise to them? What constitutes and produces such possibilities for contact, exchange, intercultural dialogue, persistent colonial rule and dispossession? What effect does the way contact zones are structured, produced and performed have on the possibility of practice, or the ‘arts’ of the contact zone in Pratt’s language (1991)? How does it become possible to negotiate and renegotiate the terms on which the planning system will accommodate Indigenous interests?

If contact zones are not neutral, deliberative spaces but politically contested, inherently unequal kinds of zones, we also need methodologies that draw analytical attention towards how they are structured, how they come to exist. For state-based planning, a significant part of that structuring activity is done through text: the legislation, policies, guidelines, case law, regulations and mechanisms that constitute planning as a ‘field’ or a ‘master signifier’ (Mouffe, 1999) and shape its operational assumptions. This is not to argue that planning is ‘only’ text or is only recognisable through this formal network of signifiers and rules. Of course it is not; so much of planning activity – as authors such as Forester (1999, 2009) have explicitly demonstrated – is done in its daily practice, the local everyday ways by which values about place are negotiated and decided. However, the enabling moment of those negotiations and their everyday practice, is inevitably established and mediated through text. The contact zone we are identifying in this paper is no exception.

Textual mediation: a methodological framing

A focus on interpreting the meaning and power of text is not new to planning research and theory, and has become a well-established and increasingly accepted approach to public policy research more generally. For an example, one might look to recent efforts to introduce a more institutional approach to planning theory (see contributions to Verma, 2007). Collaborative theorists engaged in this project emphasize the ways in which collaborative planning efforts are shaped and constrained by larger administrative and discursive frameworks – many of which are reflected and codified in written texts (Healey, 2006, 2007; see also Barry, 2011, for an example in an Indigenous context). Similar ideas have been raised in the growing and related field of Interpretive Policy Analysis (see Fischer, 2003; Yanow, 1996, 2000, 2007), which has a much stronger tradition of studying the written text and has had a significant influence on planning research as discussed earlier. Written plans and policies are viewed as artefacts of dominant policy frames and modes of political and administrative behavior (Yanow, 2007). Interpretive Policy Analysts have applied tools drawn from complementary fields to explore how textual artefacts are ‘re-instated and maintained’ (Yanow, 2007: 114). For example, Fischer (2003) advocates using elements of Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (2003, 2005), while Hajer (1995) has developed a more applied form of Foucauldian discourse analysis. Yet, as Hendricks observes, these attempts are far from complete. Interpretive Policy Analysts have been ‘kept busy defending the relevance and validity of their approaches’ (2007: 279) and have not yet paid a great deal of attention to the development of a more precise analytical frame.

To address this deficiency, we look to the methodological framing offered by Institutional Ethnography and particularly the work of Dorothy Smith. Institutional Ethnography maps institutional relations by finding the specific textual mechanisms through which local practices are drawn into entire complexes of social relations, and how standardized codes of behavior are created and enforced (Campbell and Gregor, 2002; Smith, 2005). As a result, it is seen as particularly well suited for exploring how contact zones are shaped and constrained by institutional structures and frames; how the practices undertaken in contact zones are ‘textually mediated’ (Smith, 2005: 10). How are texts conceptualized and empirically approached by an Institutional Ethnography framing? Texts regulate and authorize institutional and organisational behavior, they signify the field of reference and what is possible or not (at least in the first instance). Texts are seen as key referents (not necessarily final determinants, but certainly powerful shapers) of the edges and the center, the normal and the different within institutional practices. They do this by standardizing the sequences of steps; naming appropriate courses of actions; and creating different roles and responsibilities. For Smith, then, texts are an essential site for study as they are ‘key devices in hooking people’s activities in particular settings and at particular times into the transcending organization of ruling relations’ (2001: 165).

They also ‘appropriate’ (Smith, 2001) local practices by assigning them to pre-established modes of institutional behavior. In that sense, texts provide the conceptual framework through which a local act (a daily practice) is recognized as fulfilling a general requirement: how, to use a small Canadian example, an informal conversation between an Indigenous community and a state-based planning agency is recognized as the first step in fulfilling a legal responsibility to consult Indigenous peoples on any potential infringement on their rights and title. This textually determined consultation process is, in itself, a product of a larger set of texts that establish positions, responsibilities and expectations within a planning system. Exploring the appropriating role of texts, then, involves considering the relationship among them: their intertextuality. This, according to Institutional Ethnography, can be traced in two ways:

… through the categories of objects, subjects/agents and forms of actions of the text itself which presuppose and rely on other texts; and it can be traced for its part in a complex co-ordinating the work sequences that produce organizational outcomes. (Smith 2001: 187–88)

Institutional ethnographers refer to these textually mediated complexes as ‘ruling relations’. This notion underscores the translocal character of everyday institutional practices: how ‘people’s doings in particular local settings are recognized and attended to as participating in relations in which they are active and through which their local doings are coordinated with those of others elsewhere’ (Smith, 2001: 162). Despite the use of the word ‘ruling’, texts do not act in a wholly prescriptive or uni-directional manner; they are interpreted through a phenomenon Institutional Ethnographers refer to as ‘text-reader conversations’. One side of this conversation is fixed, in that the ‘materiality’ of written documents (Smith, 2001: 191) allows them to remain the same no matter how many times and in what context they are read. The other is open to the agency of institutional actors who activate texts by reading and adapting them to their particular circumstances (Smith, 2005). In this way, studying the intertextuality of institutions is not simply about understanding the textual origins of specific modes of behavior, but also how discursive categories and frames are recontextualized (Fairclough, 2005) from one setting to another.

While some Critical Discourse Analysts have been intrigued by Smith’s work and see it as a complementary body of theory, they also criticize it for ‘undertheorising’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 58) the ‘orders of discourse’: one of the more structural dimensions of the relationship between text and practice (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2003). The elements of orders of discourse are not things like nouns and sentences (elements of linguistic structure), but discourses [ways of representing], genres [ways of acting] and styles [ways of being]. These elements select certain possibilities defined by language and exclude others – they control linguistic variability for particular areas of social life. (Fairclough, 2003: 24). Yet, this form of linguistic control is never complete; Critical Discourse Analysts stress the ‘interdiscursivity’ of written texts and argue that ‘hybridity is an irreducible characteristic of complex modern discourse’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 59). Texts change and evolve as new orders of discourse – such as the discourse surrounding the nature and extent of Indigenous recognition – are introduced to the social field. Yet, the introduction of new orders of discourse rarely supplants existing ways of representing, acting and being, but rather results in hybrid texts. The use of multiple orders of discourse within a single text is seen as a positioning device: a way of speaking to multiple, and potentially competing, social fields. Hybridity is also seen as a ‘resource in interaction’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 58) in that it creates windows of opportunity for the expression and expansion of alternative ways of representing, acting and being. Clearly, the application of an Institutional Ethnography approach to the study of planning in the (post)colonial contact zone would benefit from the incorporation of key principles from Critical Discourse Analysis. Yet as Turner’s (2001) institutional ethnography of a municipal planning process shows, not all institutional discourses are open to recontextualization and hybridization. Some intertextual complexes are so tightly knit that opportunities to pursue alternativee courses of actions are severely restricted.

Both the recontextualization and hybridization of discourse are potential mechanisms and products of the intercultural negotiations Pratt imagines in her discussion of the contact zone. But they can also provide avenues for domination, manipulation and control. Texts define the conditions and the boundaries of the contact zone between Indigenous people and state-based planning systems. Established planning texts authorize and regulate the contact zone by assigning positions and responsibilities and by legitimizing appropriate courses of action. They also appropriate practices undertaken in the contact zone by assigning them to pre-existing institutional categories and situating them within established hierarchies and authority structures. This tendency is particularly strong in texts that stabilize and fix those positions and responsibilities – the monological modes of recognition that Tully critiques. To illustrate how contact zones are textually mediated and can be constrained by monological modes of recognition, our next section examines one land use planning text from BC, a key document that is shaping the contemporary relationship between First Nations and planning systems in that province of Canada. Our interest in this text (as least for the purposes of this paper) is in the way that an analysis combining the methods we have outlined above reveals, animates and illustrates the textually structured and mediated nature of the contact zone. It is not a research finding, but an illumination on a methodological approach.

Textually-mediated contact zones: an illustration from British Columbian resource planning

The strategic planning of BC’s public lands and natural resources has a long and varied history. Underway since the early 1990s, these regional processes were the provincial government’s major policy response to decades of escalating resource conflict, in what is colloquially referred to as the ‘war in the woods’. ‘Peace in the woods’ (Wilson, 2001: 39) was to be achieved through the establishment of over 30 different multi-stakeholder tables and the application of a shared decision-making approach, based on the principles of interest-based negotiation. First Nation participation in many of these processes has been marginal, at best, (Barry, 2011) and is often complicated by ongoing debate over Indigenous rights and title. The intention behind this very brief example is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of the political and institutional complexities of this ever-evolving approach to strategic natural resource planning, as this history has been recounted with some depth elsewhere (Barry, 2011; Jackson and Curry, 2004; Wilson, 2001). Our purpose is rather different: to identify some of the tensions present within one particular text – written during a major period of upheaval in BC land use planning – and to use these examples as a jumping off point for commenting on the textual dimensions of the politics of recognition.

In 2006, regional and natural resource strategic land use planning in BC underwent a dramatic shift. The publication of A New Direction for Strategic Land Use Planning in BC by the provincial government reconstituted how environmental planning is conceived and enacted, particularly with respect to the rights and title claims advanced by First Nations across the province. It was written a mere two years after the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on the Haida case, which one legal analyst describes as having effectively ended any debate about the provincial government’s duty to consult Indigenous peoples on decisions that might affect their rights and title (Pearlman, 2005). The BC government could no longer afford to take a ‘business as usual’ approach (Mandell, 2004: 2); it had to ensure that First Nation involvement in regional land use planning met the legal standards developed by the courts. The new approach to strategic land use planning also needed to interpret and apply the province’s ‘New Relationship’ policy statement, which represents its primary policy response to the Haida decision and included a commitment to shared decision making. At the same time, the recently elected neo-liberal government was beginning to question whether the benefits of strategic land use planning justified the costs. A New Direction is, therefore, a hybrid document, one that embodies and tries to make sense of two competing priorities and institutional discourses: 1) the new legal realities of having to recognize and accommodate Indigenous rights and title; and 2) an economic desire to rein in an ambitious and time-consuming approach to the planning and management of public lands. Yet, the negotiation of these competing discourses does not appear to be the mutual and dialogical process Tully envisions, but a rather crude process of insertion and appropriation into pre-established ways of thinking about and organising the governance of BC’s lands and resources.

After more than 10 years of planning, at an estimated cost of $100 million (ILMB, 2006), it was decided that strategic planning would now require demonstration of a strong ‘business case’. Planning would only be initiated when there was a statutory imperative; ‘major emerging land use conflicts or competition among different user groups; a need to identify new economic opportunities; and/or a need to address FNs’ [First Nations’] opportunities, constraints, values and interests in areas where strategic plans have not been completed’ (ILMB, 2006: 10). Beyond the obvious intertextuality of associating Indigenous recognition with a neo-liberal desire for ‘business cases’ and economic ‘certainty’, A New Direction is revealing of other means through which the particular interests and aspirations of particular First Nations in particular territories are appropriated into a larger institutional agenda. Almost immediately, the very term ‘First Nation’ is collapsed into bureaucratic shorthand (i.e. FN) and begins to appear alongside other accepted acronyms within the provincial government: FRPA [Forest and Range Practice Act]; LRMP [Land and Resource Management Plan]; SRMP [Sustainable Resource Management Plan]; OGMA [Old Growth Management Area]. While the use of the FN acronym might generously be interpreted as a simple matter of convenience, we argue that it is highly suggestive of the ways in which First Nations are hooked in (Smith, 2001, 2005) to pre-existing institutional discourses and planning frameworks.

Not only are First Nations collapsed in the government’s resource planning and policy lexicon, but their distinct ancestral homelands are redefined as one of several potential planning ‘units’ (ILMB, 2006: 3). Their involvement in provincial planning processes is also categorized as a beneficial policy outcome and as a driver of future actions, even in the face of rising costs and dwindling support for integrated regional resource planning:

While recent studies show the benefits of strategic land use planning (e.g. improved communication and inter-agency cooperation; increased involvement of FNs; increased land use certainty for industry; and new legislative tools to benefit threatened and endangered species and improve wildlife habitat), there are also high costs and limited resources available. In addition to the cost and resource issues, land use planning is also now being impacted by other emerging business drivers including: New Relationship commitments; effects of major environmental change; increased exploration and development activities; new federal government initiatives; and new legislation and policies (e.g. FRPA). (ILMB 2006: 2)

Failure to address these ‘emerging business drivers’ is framed as a risk that must be mitigated by developing a new direction for strategic land use planning. An entire section was devoted to the proposal for involving First Nations in future planning initiatives. These policy directions suggest two interrelated things: first, that A New Direction not only serves to appropriate particular First Nations perspectives, interests and aspirations into the provincial planning agenda through the use of bureaucratic naming conventions, categories and policy frames; and second, that by doing so it actively regulates and standardizes First Nation involvement in strategic land use planning.

Individual First Nations are afforded some opportunity to self or collaboratively design the principles that will guide their planning relationship with the provincial government, but these individual protocol agreements are to be developed in accordance with the sequence of events and conditions identified in A New Direction. Both individual First Nations and the First Nations Leadership Council are recognized as legitimate planning actors, though they are assigned very different positions and responsibilities. The First Nations Leadership Council, composed of representatives from BC’s three Aboriginal political associations (Assembly of First Nations BC Region, First Nations Summit and Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs), is to work with the provincial government to develop a strategic planning ‘Statement of Intent’, which would provide the ‘overarching direction’ (ILMB, 2006: 11) for subsequent strategic planning processes. Planning protocols with individual First Nations would then be developed ‘where appropriate, based on the principles in the Statement of Intent developed with the Leadership Council’. This hierarchy of protocol development is revealing of an apparent need to work with First Nations in a manner that mirrors the province’s own bureaucratic structures, with the work of local government actors coordinated by a central agency/policy framework.

Although some attention is paid to the importance of using the individual protocol agreements to address the specific needs and aspirations of particular First Nations, A New Direction goes on to impose additional constraints on the kinds of planning relationships that individual First Nations can pursue with the provincial government. These constraints are firmly rooted in the provincial government’s political and economic agendas and are often connected to the neo-liberal discourse that imbues the entire document. For example, the planning outcomes envisaged by these agreements need to ‘reduce and streamline subsequent consultation requirements for specific developments. Planning outcomes must improve resource management and development certainty for investors, the province and FNs’ (ILMB, 2006: 11). This restricted view of the scope of the government-to-government planning relationship is reinforced by the funding guidelines included in the agreement. Given the limited staffing and financial resources amongst many BC First Nations, capacity development funding is a frequent component of government-to-government planning (Barry, 2011). Under A New Direction, the provincial government will only consider First Nations’ requests for funding when it complements provincial priorities or is part of a special provincial programme or initiative. No funding will be given to create land use plans for individual First Nation’s traditional territories; this in spite of the growing popularity and strategic effectiveness of First Nation-led planning (Jojola, 2008).

The document does include a commitment to ‘[e]nsure that [individual] planning processes are jointly developed, address capacity, decision-making and conflict resolution, and are mutually acceptable’ and, thus, seems to uphold and solidify the recent trend towards collaborative planning between First Nations and the BC government (see Barry, 2011). However, a critical reading of A New Direction reveals that even these innovative arrangements are highly circumscribed. All the caveats and conditions identified above raise serious questions about an individual First Nation’s ability to self-determine the nature of its relationship with the provincial government. Texts such as A New Direction predefine the boundaries and the limitations of the contact zone by establishing appropriate courses of action and modes of behavior. At a deeper and more pernicious level, key features of First Nations’ political, cultural and spiritual identities are rendered largely invisible as their traditional territories and ancestral homelands are appropriated into the larger planning framework and assigned to one of several potential planning units. Here, we are provided with a clear example of how the analytical and methodological insights contained in Institutional Ethnography are not simply about mapping institutional relations or understanding the coordinating work of texts; it is a method for understanding how certain types of power relations are created, mediated and enforced by text. A New Direction, then, provides two key analytical insights: first, it demonstrates the mechanisms through which the contact zone between First Nation and provincial planning agents is textually mediated. Second, it raises a series of questions pertinent to the concept of the modes of recognition discussed earlier.

Conclusion

The study of planning’s uneven and contradictory relationships with Indigenous peoples is not yet well served by the theoretical and analytical frameworks present within the established literature. While this literature provides some general grounding and a foundation on which to build, we found it often lacking in analytical power, methodological tools and a critical attendance to historically constituted relations of colonial power. In seeking to develop these foundations, to engage a more robust theoretical and analytical frame for the study of the contact zone between Indigenous peoples and state-based planning systems, we have woven together a reading of previously disparate bodies of theory. Tully’s work on multiple constitutionalism and mutual recognition provides normative guidance on what a just relationship with Indigenous people might look like. Developed with the attention to conflict offered by the agonistic political theory of Mouffe, we find a stronger theoretical basis for grappling with the politics of recognition in the contact zone. Smith’s Institutional Ethnography, along with Critical Discourse Analysis’ attention to the orders of discourse, helps clarify the practices of power in conceiving and enacting the contact zone, and how those practices are mediated by established planning texts.

We have argued against approaches that freeze or fix Indigenous peoples to defined ways of being and acting in planning systems and close off opportunities for Indigenous agency in defining the nature of their political and spatial relationships with state-based planning systems. In thinking about the nature of this contact zone, critical attention needs to be paid to both its potential and its vulnerabilities. For, as the analysis of A New Direction shows, Indigenous peoples’ relationships to state-based planning systems are highly circumscribed. Established planning texts appoint Indigenous peoples to predefined positions and create authority structures that are often grounded in Western legal and political conventions, traditions that do not sufficiently recognize Indigenous governance aspirations or structures. Texts delineate the boundaries of legitimate institutional behavior, but they also appropriate the political and spatial claims of Indigenous peoples by assigning them to established planning categories and systems of meaning: traditional territories become ‘planning areas’ and demands for recognition become ‘business drivers’. Clearly, these contact zones are not naturally occurring, and are mediated by established planning statutes, case law, regulation and policy. Smith’s approach to studying this textual mediation is found to be highly instructive in showing how individual moments of contact are hooked into larger institutional complexes or ruling relations.

Yet, following Smith’s call to attend to the dynamic nature of the text-reader conversation and the ongoing potential for both the subversion and transformation of established ruling relations, we stress the importance of not viewing texts such as A New Direction in isolation. Texts do not prescribe institutional behavior; they mediate it. A fuller understanding of this textual mediation cannot arise out of the study of texts alone, but rather through the study of the ways in which these texts are interpreted and applied in particular practices. We have argued that this interface between text and practice is a key dimension to the contact zone that exists between Indigenous peoples and state-based planning systems; ‘contact’ is conceived not simply as a meeting of cultures, but as a space where every text stands in ‘specific historical relationship’ (Pratt, 1992: 5) to all of the people contesting that zone. That relationship is of course enormously varied and historically contingent. We argue that it is by studying this ‘contact’, in all its dimensions, that a clearer picture of the complexities of Indigenous recognition is formed. In terms of our own research programme on Indigenous recognition in urban and environmental planning, this view of textually mediated contact zones requires us to constantly move between text and practice. To understand the ways in which texts shape, constrain, authorize and regulate, we will often need to work ‘text-down’, as we have done here. We will also need to work ‘practice-up’ to explore how monological modes of recognition are contested and reframed in particular places, and how multiple constitutionalisms, identities and planning practices are negotiated and new relationships are formed. We will be applying and developing this approach in the next phase of our own research programme.

Framing the recognition process as textually mediated contact zones not only extends the literature on Indigenous planning – a literature that is curiously underdeveloped – but it speaks to other branches of planning theory as well. It develops the literature on planning and difference by focusing analytical attention on the rules and norms that structure the moments of contact, or the definition (and crossing) of borders. It highlights the painful and contingent nature of work and life in the contact zone, and the potential, as our illustration from BC has shown, for manipulation, domination and control. It also challenges proponents of deliberative approaches to the recognition of difference in planning to think more clearly about the relationships between text and practice: how these moments of intercultural negotiation are framed and mediated by text and the specific mechanisms through which a text might manipulate and distort supposedly collaborative processes. Finally, the approach develops and extends the application of Interpretive Policy Analysis to planning. That diverse body of work significantly opens up attention to the discursive framing of policy problems, stakeholders and solutions. It also calls for greater attention to the actual practice, the material and concrete manifestations, of everyday policy making. Reading the contact zone through the approach of Institutional Ethnography, we suggest, offers a way of seeing the text and practice of recognition, the discourse and action, with much greater clarity of its relational dimension. Contact zones of recognition and contest have textual moments that mediate other moments of possibility, transcendence and manipulation. The actual processes, potential and vulnerabilities involved in crossing borders and engaging in the contact zone brings our attention right back to actual practices of the contact zone. Holding the text-practice relations of contact zones together for study in future research is a key challenge for understanding the politics of recognition and difference in planning.

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