Appropriation by License: Authorizing the Antropocene

Abstract

Once you have read Thomas Pakenham’s (1991) encompassing historical study of the scramble for African natural resources spearheaded by large colonial powers in the late 19^th century era of economic liberalism, you never forget it. Might was right and the resources were there for them, the colonial powers, to be taken. This, however, despite the current situation, is not the dominant story of our time and is not the story of resource management in Western liberal democracies.

To the contrary, land and its natural resources are commonly managed within the realm of national jurisdiction, they are managed by a state bureaucracy under political control and through democratic procedures for taking decisions. Yet, resource management is conflict ridden, often surrounded by tense controversy and competing interests. When resources are becoming scarce and land areas crowded, conflicts intensify. This is particularly so in the area of nature management where conflicts are already tense, competing interests many, resources often scarce and the outcome of conflicts have major impact.

Democracy is not only about large overriding ideals and ideologies. It is also about a series of ‘little tools’, mechanisms and procedures through which issues are handled at an everyday basis. They may be the result of deep economic, political and philosophical reasoning, but take relatively prosaic forms. Knowing what these democratic inventions are, how they work, which values that sustain them and that of contributing to improving them, is essential.

The point of departure for this lecture and the research on which it builds, is an investigation of the licensing system (sometimes also called concession system) understood as a key mechanism and ‘little tool of democracy’ (Asdal 2008)] in land and natural resource management. Yet, licenses are not only tools of democracy, they are simultaneously ‘tools of appropriation’ and make up, this lecture will argue, a distinct ‘version of economization’ (Asdal and Huse 2023) where the state, interested actors and capital meet. This lecture seeks to delineate the licensing arrangement as tools of appropriation forming part of a distinct version of economization. It will ask how such tools of appropriation work, and for different issues, conflicts and areas of nature management. It will conclude with asking if tools of appropriation may work, not simply to appropriate, but to do so in appropriate, that is good, ways?

The paper to be presented builds on from Kristin Asdal’s earlier work on tools of democracy, and her co-authored book with Tone Huse: Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean (MIT open access 2023). It forms part of a newly funded research project by the Norwegian Research Council: APPROPRIATON. The paper underpinning the lecture is forthcoming in Theory, Culture and Society: “Licensing Appropriation and the Planetary Body Politic”.

Short Bio

Kristin Asdal is professor of STS at the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on the sociology of knowledge across economics and natural science and on how scientific expertise is partaking in democracy. Her key competence is on the politics of the environment, broadly conceived, and she has executed a series of comprehensive empirical studies on the politics, economy and history of the environment and the bioeconomy. She also investigates democratic procedures as versions of knowledge practices.