Decolonising Governance

Archipelagic Thinking

Paul Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351213011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Power may be globalized, but Westphalian notions of sovereignty continue to determine political and legal arrangements domestically and internationally: global issues - the legacy of colonialism expressed in continuing human displacement and environmental destruction - are thus treated 'parochially' and ineffectually. Not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence, democratic institutions find themselves in crisis. Reform in this case is not simply operational but conceptual: political relationships need to be drawn differently; the cultural illiteracy that prevents the local knowledge invested in places made after their stories needs to be recognised as a major obstacle to decolonising governance.

Archipelagic thinking refers to neglected dimensions of the earth's human geography but also to a geo-politics of relationality, where governance is understood performatively as the continuous establishment of exchange rates. Insisting on the poetic literacy that must inform a decolonising politics, Carter suggests a way out of the incommensurability impasse that dogs assertions of indigenous sovereignty. Discussing bicultural areal management strategies located in south-west Victoria, Maluco (Indonesia) and inter-regionally across the Arafura and Timor Seas, Carter argues for the existence of creative regions constituted archipelagically that can intervene to rewrite the theory and practice of decolonisation.

A book of great stylistic elegance and deftness of analysis, Decolonising Governance is an important intervention in the related fields of ecological, ecocritical and environmental humanities. Methodologically innovative in its foregrounding of relationality as the nexus between poetics and politics, it will also be of great interest to scholars in a range of areas, including communicational praxis, land/sea biodiversity design, bicultural resource management, and the constitution of post-Westphalian regional jurisdictions.

1 Exchange rates

Figuring the archipelago

Decolonising geography

Decolonising governance means, among other things, decolonising geography; within a remapping of the world, it involves reimagining human relations and the terms of encounter; the content of the relations negotiated and navigated also undergoes reappraisal – can what is related be separated from how it is related?¹ In this chapter some key disciplinary points of reference are mapped before sailing out into a differently imagined place of uncertain crossing. First, some conventional decolonising strategies are summarised. Next, the analogy between their goals of democratic governance, particularly associated with the reclamation of environmental ties, and the geographical figure of the archipelago is discussed. This introduces our thesis, that the archipelago is not simply an instance of geographical reimagining that shifts attention away from continentalism – the colonialist mindset that identifies territorial expansion with land theft and treats the ocean as the necessary externality of empire – but a challenge to think metaphorically. The archipelago is not only the illustration of a new governance order, one that is topologically sophisticated, inscribes difference into the heart of communication and which models perhaps radically rethought forms of federalism and cosmopolitanism: thinking the archipelago means thinking figuratively, achieving a poetic and rhetorical literacy able to withstand the verificationist criteria of bureaucratic institutions and the reductionist logic of planning. To engage in any significant exchange with Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems that does not collapse into renewed calls for simple withdrawal into autonomy (a utopian objective), the governance principles and practices conveyed in stories, and the social occasions of their performance, need to be grasped.

Conventional decolonising strategies promote Indigenous knowledge and mount a powerful critique of colonialist, neo-colonialist and, indeed, contemporary neo-liberal mindsets and world views. They are sometimes linked to the emergence of various kinds of blue sea thinking, associated with a revived environmental humanities, and often focused on the islands, island clusters and oceanic connections – an alignment influentially promoted by Édouard Glissant. Cultural and environmental decolonisation meet in a broad embrace of the deep ecological principles sometimes associated with Gaia philosophy. However, any review of these different strands in contemporary decolonising theory rapidly exposes a remarkable gap or oversight: the absence of decolonised representations of land and sea corresponding to the dynamic and evolutionary political systems said to characterise decolonised polities. Representations are graphic: the history of cartography is the politics of drawing lines. But, more subtly, representations are rhetorical and buried in the conventions of discourse. Most decolonising discourses continue to predicate the politics of identity on territorial and environmental divisions established by western, scientific mapping. Even within the history of cartography radically different ways of representing coastlines, islands, passages and ports exist; in older mapping conventions, relationality is visualised and even rates of relative movement; elements aggregate into creative regions. The elimination of these speculative elements coincides with the disappearance of metaphorical concepts from the language of administrative prose, a development conveniently attributed to Jeremy Bentham’s theory of fictions. The language employed to conceptualise, legalise, plan and implement the theories and practices of decolonisation remains resolutely verificationist, any metaphorical statements deriving ‘whatever properly cognitive meaning they have from the literal statements they are seen to replace’:² ‘local knowledge’ is privileged, but its translation into ‘action plans’ is invariably at the expense of its mythopoetic logic. Advocates of new, decolonised governance arrangements remain tied to planning cultures, and associated assumptions about the function of procedural infrastructure, that perpetuate the silencing of the subaltern. Linear reasoning, whose segmentation of narrative into a sequence of self-contained steps, prevents the emergence of complexity (all that is understood by the conventional narrative plot) and treats the relations of traditional knowledge holders – the stories, for example, of human and non-human interdependence that underwrite customary law – as non-scientific and primitive: planning elites and custodian communities talk past one another Western governance systems (across legislature, judiciary and executive) take language literally, employing an ‘atomistic, reductionistic model that sees the world as constituted by discrete institutional entities and problems, approaching these problems largely in isolation from one another,’³ while non-western conceptions of law and order are relational and dynamic, qualities that tend to locate emancipation not in the law book but in the place of human encounter and exchange.

The persistence of rhetorical geographies that inscribe colonialist concepts of territory and sovereignty into post- or de-colonising discourse is due to a kind of geo-topological naivete. In the view of many Indigenous writers, educationalists and activists, the key to self-decolonisation lies in the embrace of local/Indigenous knowledges, characterised as situated, contingent, multi-sited, dispersed and intricately connected to place, person and identity formation. However, the edges of these knowledge cultures remain largely unmapped: the fractal nesting of lawful patternings that link kinship to seasonal cycles to observational astronomy, while internally relational and dynamic, remains a world unto itself. This impression is false, yet it is the model of local knowledge that circulates in bi-cultural planning circles and fosters a renewed isolation. When local knowledges are held in the scale of globalisation, the tendency is, first, to insist on a plurality of world views and, second, to identify de-colonised governance with autonomy. Santos and colleagues urge, ‘starting from the assumption that cultural diversity and epistemological diversity are reciprocally embedded … the reinvention of social emancipation is premised upon replacing the “monoculture of scientific knowledge” by an “ecology of knowledges.”’⁴

Arun Agrawal argues, in a development studies context, that if Indigenous and local knowledges are to play an important role, ‘we must go beyond the dichotomy of indigenous vs. scientific and work towards greater autonomy for indigenous peoples.’⁵ Such formulations tend to beg the question of relationality – or, to put it another way, simply defer the identification of authority with universality. As Karen Litfin notes in another context, tackling the inheritance of western imperialism and its continuing reductionist logic implies ‘modalities of governance rooted in a systemic understanding of interdependence.’⁶ Yet, she acknowledges, Gaia theory has little to say about ‘the thorny problems of practical politics.’⁷ One reason for this is that a systems theory of ‘interdependence’ underrates differential regionality, imagined here as the creative negotiation of neighbourhood relations and the recognition of interzones of probable states of co-existence;⁸ such regions may be extra-territorial, distributed, essentially composed of passages.

Thinking back

A first step to breaking down these unilaterally imposed binaries is no doubt thinking back, understood directly as adopting and owning a speaking position that is not simply political but geopolitical, articulate and situated. Critiquing hegemonic, dominant Eurocentric narratives, Walter Mignolo introduces the concepts of ‘locus of enunciation’ and ‘border thinking.’⁹ A locus of enunciation is a ‘place of speaking’ that displaces and dislodges previous loci of enunciation. This allows new and different perspectives to be articulated, as well as the critique of established orders of knowledge and discourse.¹⁰ In a similar vein, Nakata has discussed the notion of a Torres Strait Islander peoples’ ‘cultural standpoint,’ which is ‘visible and given voice: “this is who we are.”’ In Nakata’s framework, this ‘cultural interface’ is as much a ‘theoretical’ space as it is a physical or geographic one and is the way that Torres Strait Islanders can position themselves (culturally, politically, socially) in relation to others.¹¹ Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’ offers a kind of relational epistemology: situated on, outside or in-between discursive borders, it offers an ‘other logic,’ a way of thinking from the perspective of subalternity. It ‘goes with a geopolitics of knowledge that regionalizes the fundamental European legacy, locating thinking in the colonial difference and creating the conditions for diversality as a universal project.’¹² Speaking back in this way suggests to Jeff Popke a new incarnation of an old governance model or, as he puts it, ‘an alternative reading of cosmopolitan ethics.’ Citing Mignolo, he suggests, a cosmopolitan ethics ‘begins with the recognition of… “epistemic colonial difference” within the Eurocentric traditions of modernity.’¹³ Popke finds in Argentine/Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel’s ‘transmodernity’ the possibility of ‘a worldwide ethical liberation project in which… modernity and its denied alterity, its victims, would mutually fulfil each other in a creative process.’¹⁴ Popke considers that an ‘ethical liberation project requires, to begin with, that we acknowledge and work to cultivate alternative geographical imaginations.’¹⁵ But the examples he gives are not geographical in any recognisable sense: they are different community-based knowledge systems and associated environmental practices that by themselves ‘risk becoming isolated examples of local particularity.’¹⁶ Even Santos’s quoted call for ‘a cosmopolitan politics networking mutually intelligible languages of emancipation’¹⁷ begs the question: how?

A decolonised governance model has to navigate between extreme isolationism and the boundless, globalised community of interests supposed by Santos. It has to be a filter between local and global in both directions; as a translator, it inscribes difference into the act of translation: it is able to discern similarities, or the basis of comparability, between customary systems of law that are, on the face of it, incommensurable. Above all, and most prudently, it has to keep in play the subtle relationship between a geography differently imagined and a geo-politics in practice. To take this last point: if we try to imagine the geographical figure that corresponds best to the idealised model of decolonised governance – decentred, interdependent, localised and pluralised (accommodating a constellation of speaking positions), as well as relational and dynamic – the organisation of islands conforming to what is called an archipelago immediately swims into view. The figure of the archipelago immediately allows us to visualise a way out of the binaries already encountered: it suggests a creative region unlike the nation state, defined relationally around shared responsibility for the ocean; resisting the simple enclosure of the cartographic boundary, reconceptualising the connections between islands, its identification involves what Stratford et al. call a fundamental shift: dislocating ‘static island tropes of particularity’ and foregrounding ‘fluid island-island inter-relations rather than the binaries of mainland/sea/island,’ they advocate a ‘counter-mapping’ that frames islands as part of an assemblage of ‘practices, repr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Exchange rates: figuring the archipelago
• 2 From your own seashore: a philosophical geography
• 3 Ocean connections: local knowledge and regions of care
• 4 Affiliations after the flood: Archipelagic poetics
• 5 Overflow: a model for culture-based regional development
• 6 Bacan: biodiversity in the anarchipelago