Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science

CHAPTER 6. The Political Economy of Stream Restoration

100 chapter six The Political Economy of Stream Restoration I feel [about the Rosgen Wars] a little bit like we feel down here in the South about the Civil War: deep down in our heart of hearts we have to admit we lost that one; even though our cause was noble, the conflict was a terrible waste. —An agency research scientist The preceding chapters analyzed the dramatic change in the internal power structure of the stream restoration field, revealed the accusations participants in the Rosgen Wars level against each other as simultaneous claims to truth and capital, and described how Rosgen’s production of knowledge claims and means of circulating them set the habitus for the field, enabling its daily practices and promoting the widespread application of his approach. In this chapter I analyze how broader political-economic relations have strengthened Rosgen’s position, simultaneously setting the conditions for and reinforcing his rise. I also examine how the production and circulation of ncd shape its application, arguing that neoliberal environmental management regimes depend on the production of particular kinds of knowledge. In the second half of the chapter I turn the tables and use the Rosgen Wars to reflect on the analytic framework of Bourdieu’s field concept, arguing that there are a few key ways in which it should be reworked for use by political ecologists and science and technology studies scholars. political-economic influences on the stream restoration field Political economy focuses on the profound interconnections among policy, distribution of wealth, and economic development and change. To analyze the political economy of stream restoration, I assess how state and federal environ- Political Economy • 101 mental policies create and shape restoration markets, which in turn influence the development of internal agency policy and the actions of agency staff. Bourdieu incorporates political-economic relations into field analysis through examination of what he describes as the relative autonomy of the field. To recap, according to Bourdieu, any field is structured between poles he defines as autonomous and heteronomous (figure 1.5). At the autonomous end are those actors whose production is controlled most thoroughly by the pursuit of capital specific to that field; at the heteronomous end are those whose production is shaped primarily by outside forces. The relative autonomy of a field can be measured by “the extent to which it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers” (Bourdieu 1983, 321). Put differently, a highly autonomous field would be structured in large part by its internal politics (e.g., Renaissance art history), while in a field with relatively little autonomy, the habitus and preeminent forms of capital would be heavily influenced by external demands from state power and economic capital (e.g., computer science).1 How autonomous is the stream restoration field? How much influence does the larger political-economic context within which stream restoration is embedded have in the field? How has that influence changed over time? policy and economic influences Environmental policy has played a central role in the Rosgen Wars through both formal legislation and the internal policies of resource and regulatory agencies. Many examples of such support have been woven throughout the book, but here I gather some of the most telling together. As described in chapter 3, federal environmental legislation in the late 1960s and early 1970s played a critical role in the current expansion of the restoration field by shifting the us government from a solely economic view of rivers toward an environmental one. Most notably, the Clean Water Act included regulatory provisions that made stream restoration a condition for obtaining a permit to culvert, channelize, or entirely relocate a stream. This catalyzed the exponential growth of the stream restoration market and of the field more broadly, as staff at federal and state resource agencies, regulators, and anyone wishing to transform an inconveniently located stream abruptly became part of the stream restoration field, drafted in by federal legislation. In order for this new federal policy imperative to roll out with any smoothness , however, the restoration field needed a structure to shape and unify the social practice of the rapidly expanding field and to enable the exponential 102 • chapter six growth of restoration markets necessary to meet these new permit requirements : a system for training the rush of new people joining the field, a shared language to enable communication among these disparate new participants, a way...