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116 chapter seven Conclusions The unusual state of the American stream restoration field raises some critical questions. First, why was Rosgen able to establish himself as the most scientifically legitimate expert in the stream restoration field—the primary trainer of practitioners and the developer of the most broadly accepted knowledge claims about how streams, and thus restoration projects, work—in the face of determined opposition from the scientific establishment? Second, why does that opposition exist, particularly given the lack of definitive evidence that the ncd approach is fundamentally flawed, and why has it persisted despite a consistent lack of results? As I have described in the preceding chapters, the answer to the first question is primarily political-economic, as environmental regulation and the needs of agency staff and restoration markets played a key role in Rosgen’s rise. Landmark environmental legislation was a powerful catalyst to the enormous expansion of the restoration field, which began in the 1980s. In turn, this growth created great demand for restoration training, a lingua franca to enable communication among the disciplines involved in restoration science and practice, and standards of practice to guide project managers’ selection of approaches and consultants, as described in chapter 5. The subjective structure that developed around Rosgen’s work powerfully promoted his scientific authority and knowledge claims, as federal agencies sent thousands of people to his courses, specified his methods in rfps and manuals, and lent credibility to the types of capital he possessed. The codified form of Rosgen’s knowledge claims and their circulation through short courses played, and continues to play, a crucial enabling role for the restoration market. As described in chapter 5, Rosgen became the key provider of the educational capital that allowed consultants to assert their legitimacy , which only became more important as the field expanded and the number of firms increased. Further, Rosgen’s work is central to the fastest-growing segment of the restoration market: stream mitigation banking. As described in chapter 6, this market-based approach to stream restoration practice is at Conclusions • 117 present deeply dependent on Rosgen’s classification system, which serves as the key metric for producing and certifying credits for sale. Restoration consulting firms, developers working to meet permit conditions, and mitigation bankers are all deeply invested in Rosgen’s legitimacy and success: without him, market conditions become much less predictable and, in the case of mitigation banking , potentially unfeasible. A last political-economic aspect of Rosgen’s rise comes from the congruence between the neoliberalization of environmental science and policy and the habitus he produced. As Bourdieu pointed out repeatedly in his work on fields, subjective structures are at their most powerful when they align with the objective structure of society more broadly. This suggests that it is no coincidence that the Rosgen Wars coincided with a major shift in the structure of American political economy with the rise of neoliberalism. A major source of Rosgen’s success is the resonance between his work and the neoliberal emphasis on the commercialization and privatization of knowledge. As described in chapter 1, the rise of neoliberal science management regimes has created a decisive and substantive shift in the organization and practice of science in the United States. The key features of the neoliberalization of American academia thus far include a dramatic increase in dependence on private funding for universities and research, the aggressive commercialization of knowledge through a striking expansion of intellectual property protection, a shift toward more applied work produced to enable the new markets created by neoliberal policies, and an increasing reliance on market take-up to adjudicate substantive intellectual disputes. As described in chapter 6, many of these trends are clearly visible in the stream restoration field. River scientists are shifting to more applied work in response to the demands of agencies with increasingly neoliberal agendas, markets created by government regulation (such as stream mitigation banking ), and the rise of Rosgen. Rosgen (a private producer of commercialized science) and his ncd approach (a privately produced, proprietarily held set of knowledge claims prepared to serve state and market needs) embody the neoliberal trends described above. Further, Rosgen’s commercial success is widely viewed as validating the strength of his knowledge claims, while universityand agency-based scientists’ claims are viewed as less legitimate because of their lack of marketable utility for participants in the stream restoration field. Rosgen’s success in shifting the internal power relations of the stream restoration field stems from the ways the subjective...

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