Bourdieu in the north: Practical understanding in natural resource governance

Abstract

Natural resource management (NRM) analyses often avoid a position on environmental governance as arising from and shaped by social practices and power relations in resource conflicts, contested property rights, and political-economic strategies. I examine a northern Canadian Aboriginal community's experience of a structured yet dynamic sociocultural response to a period of social and political change. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's conception of social practice I suggest that a diffuse, or less determinist, theory of practice may help explain how power relations are interwoven throughout yet applied differentially in NRM governance. Drawing on ethnographic research on watershed management and protection of Aboriginal cultural landscapes in the Northwest Territories, I refine the notion of practical understanding to explain the ways government resource managers and community leaders challenge and negotiate one another's conceptions of environmental governance in a dual process of cooperation-conflict. © Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 38(3) 2013.