Pluralized wetland governance : landscape materiality and the politics of knowledge production in Tai Lake basin, China

Abstract

This research explores the emergence of wetland parks as experimental sites for addressing emergent ecological crisis as well as new modes of governance that underpin the transition of China from a rigid authoritarian regime to one that is more open to reform involving the participation of non-state actors. The research asks three questions: How do wetland parks materialize as sites of experiments through the ongoing reconfiguration of regulation, design, construction, and operation of the parks? How have these processes helped shape the social-political formation in late socialist China? How may the knowledge produced through the construction of Chinese wetland parks contribute to environmental discourse globally?

While recent scholarship has explored emergent environmental discourses in China, less attention has been paid to the material agency and feral effects of environmental solutions - the non-human contingencies emerged from human designs. To bridge this gap, this research focuses on the construction of wetlands in China¡¯s Tai Lake Basin, a highly urbanized region with a historical identity as a water town. With the basin¡®s low-lying topography, local farmers have a long history of engaging with wetlands such as rice paddies and fishponds. The 2007 algae crisis in Tai Lake propelled the early institutionalization of wetland parks which was conceived to fulfill a variety of objectives and functions. These objectives, such as ecological restoration, water purification and tourism, were often based on divergent managerial ideas that were often contradictory. However, these aspects have rarely been addressed in mainstream narratives, which tend to portray wetland parks as a simple technological panacea for urban problems.

This study seeks to illustrate the knowledge production process behind the technoscientific management of wetland parks, such as biodiversity monitoring and purification system design. An important part of my investigation is to elucidate the assemblage of human and non-human actors and their complex relations and interactions in these processes. These include examining the roles of and power relations between local administrators, ecologists, landscape designers and territorial workers and farmers, as well as the arrangement of materials including water, soil, plants and living organisms. This understanding in turn enables a new way of conceiving wetlands construction as plural governance, which highlights the multiple tensions between ecological restoration science, local economic interests, and traditional doctrine of garden design. At the same time, these tensions are often being mobilized to generate new knowledge that can be reintegrated to wetland management.

By attending to the contingent processes through which China¡¯s wetland parks were produced, this research will enable to a more nuanced understanding of environmental governance of late socialist China. This view unsettles normative assumptions about the operation of the Chinese bureaucratic system, which entails complex interactions between different human and non-human actors participating in the ongoing construction of environmental knowledge. It is believed that the findings of this study would contributes to broader perspectives of environmental governance beyond China and encourages new interdisciplinary approaches to addressing environmental problems in the age of climate emergency.