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地理研究 第63期 民國104年11月

Journal of Geographical Research No.63, November 2015 DOI: 10.6234/JGR.2015.63.03

多樣化的技術:多元民主的差異、正義與永續之治理

Technologies for Diversity: governance for difference,

justice and sustainability in pluralist democracies

Richard Howitt

a

摘 要

人類世中所有的環境系統是人類與自然的耦合系統,環境政策無可避免地的是使得人和環境的 關係密不可分,在此認知下,本文認為永續策略必須包括能助長尊重及寬厚的共存治理途徑。盡管 過去半世紀多以來,在許多哲學家的極力努力下,人類社會仍持續深深地被文化、宗教、種族及思 想的多樣化所困擾。以澳大拉西亞及台灣民主政府下的原住民經驗來看,本文認為培育及著重包容、 認同及參與的治理技術,是評估成功與否的關鍵原則,也是實現公正及永續未來的重點。本文簡要 探討環境與社會正義在轉換實務上的挑戰與機會。 關鍵詞:原住民權利、環境與社會正義、永續性、治理、人類世

Abstract

Starting from recognition that all environmental systems in the Anthropocene are coupled human-and-natural systems, and that environmental policy inescapably entangles people and nature, this paper argues that strategies for sustainability must include approaches to governance that foster respectful and generous being-together-in-place. Despite the best efforts of philosophers of difference over the past half century or more, human societies continue to be deeply troubled by cultural, religious, ethnic and ideological diversity in their midst. Reflecting on Indigenous Peoples’ experience under conditions of democratic government in Australasia and Taiwan, the paper argues that technologies of governance that foster and prioritise inclusion, recognition and participation as key principals for evaluating success are central to enabling just and sustainable futures. The paper briefly invites exploration of both impediments to and opportunities for transformative practice in areas of environmental and social justice.

Keywords: Indigenous rights, environmental and social justice, sustainability, governance, Anthropocene

a Professor of Human Geography, Department of Geography & Planning, Macquarie University NSW 2109,

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Introduction: difference and governance in the Anthropocene

1 The most urgent task for all fields of human endeavour is to reframe our [humans’] relations to the more-than-human world” (Head 2011: 38).

Lesley Head’s statement above starkly states the context for discussions of difference and governance in the Anthropocene. While conventional discussions of the technologies for sustainable environmental futures emphasise technologies that involve engineered and material interventions into human-nature relationships, this paper argues that explicit focus on technologies of governance is urgently needed in thinking about how to secure just and sustainable futures in coupled human and natural systems. The paper aims to clarify the importance of difference and diversity in framing the urgent tasks geographers face in our various professional and community roles.

The technologies of social and environmental governance that underpin just, equitable and sustainable human relationships with both human and natural systems will profoundly influence the future sustainability of human societies and environments. Yet, in contemporary democracies, including Australia and Taiwan, policy settings are more often attuned to the micro-politics of electoral cycles than the wider political-ecological dynamics of difference. Those wider dynamics need to be considered carefully to nurture a constructive space to think differently about the future of the other-than-us and more-than-human contexts in which just, equitable and sustainable futures might flourish. I use the term ‘technologies’, therefore, to refer to the ways that societies organise and govern social relations – the people-to-people, people-to-environment and people-to-cosmos relationships that determine how we deal with difference in our societies (Hsu et al. 2014).

Despite the best efforts of philosophers of difference over the past half century or more, human societies continue to be deeply, perhaps increasingly troubled by difference – by the presence of cultural, religious, ethnic and ideological diversity in our midst. Human beings continue being troubled deeply by how to think of those who are different as ‘us’, rather than ‘them’. Human societies have had very uneven and fragile success in developing technologies to govern ourselves and engage with others in ways that nurture, value and protect diversity (cultural, biological and otherwise).

In Western philosophical and social science discourses, the catastrophic history of holocaust in the European wars of the mid-Twentieth Century focused attention on ideas of otherness, alterity, difference and community as central to philosophical engagement with the human condition. This has also fuelled a series of significant shifts in social science generally and geography in particular around questions of

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 19th International Geographical Conference of Taiwan under the theme ‘Technology, Policy and Environmental Sustainability’, May 23, 2015 (National Taiwan Normal University). I would like to thank my conference hosts for the opportunity to present at the conference and to acknowledge the useful comments and feedback on earlier drafts from Shyue-Cherng Liaw, Ming-Huey Wang, Shew-Jiuan B. Su and Pasang Hsiao as well as Chun-Chih Chi, Yi-Fong Chen, Yi-Ren Lin and Da-Wei Kuan as well as the journal’s anonymous reviewers.

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social relevance, justice, inclusion and, as Head (2011) suggests, the more-than-human relationships that shape, limit and support increasingly complex human systems. In Anglophone geography, this discourse has driven significant theoretical debate since the 1970s, including the so-called cultural turn of the 1990s, the post-structuralist debates of the 2000s and more recent questions of post-human geographies.

The technologies of governance encompass relationships with more-than-human domains as well as the domains in which the rights, interest and values of the others-than-us are to be considered. Democratic nations, which encompass a wide range of political traditions and administrative systems, are challenged by differences that require acknowledgement of and support for pluralism. Democracies’ approaches to this challenge are framed, inevitably, by their particular histories, geographies and philosophies. In all democratic states, however, wellbeing in communities of (both biological and cultural) diversity relies on technologies of governance. Governance structures able to simultaneously nurture common purpose and solidarity alongside diverse and even divergent traditions are important to creating sustainable livelihoods in communities of difference.

In many settings, the technologies of governance are overlooked in favour of discussion of more conventional technologies that intervene into environmental relations and processes. Yet, as Head (2011) recognises, the technologies of governance are precisely the technologies that will allow human societies to reframe relationships within and between the diverse elements that constitute coupled human and natural systems in the Anthropocene.

As a geographer engaged with Indigenous geographies and the conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges of working across a variety of scale, cultural, ecological and political boundaries and edges (Howitt 2001, 2002, 2011, Coombes et al. 2012, 2013, 2014), I increasingly understand the challenge of sustainable futures in terms of difference. Just how might human societies develop capacity, technologies and institutions that foster respectful and generous being-together-in-place across relationships of difference?

These will inevitably be amongst humanity’s most important capacities, technologies and institutions for responding to challenges and changes facing humanity in the Anthropocene (Head 2014, Kotzé 2014, Latour 2014). I am particularly interested in thinking about technologies able to accommodate differences between human cultures and traditions and across human–non-human differences with generosity, compassion and respect. Such technologies will be most successful when they build on conceptual foundations and approaches that are adaptive rather than simply control-oriented in the way that more conventional understandings of technology often operate. Successful technologies that foster just, equitable and sustainable governance will be collaborative, participatory and engaged rather than centralised, authoritarian and imposed. They will be respectful and generous rather than aggressive and greedy. They are likely to be localised and diverse, even if they are also global in various ways. They will also be, inevitably, uncertain and negotiated – but, in the end, all technologies are uncertain and need to be negotiated. Many of the more conventionally technological means of intervening in environmental relations, of course, are framed around notions of universality, control, certainty and authority that devalue

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or misunderstand culture and the social contexts of coupled human and natural systems.

In inviting debate, discourse and engagement across cultural, political and environmental differences, this paper teases out three threads of difference to propose an approach to imagining technologies that might be marshalled to nurture more just, equitable and sustainable futures of biological and cultural diversity in the coupled human and natural systems that make up the context of all life in the Anthropocene. First it considers key technologies of governance – policy and legislation – and how they frame the terms of engagement with between complex social, natural and coupled systems, and their sustainability. Second it discusses how philosophies of difference and post-human approaches to difference offer us important conceptualisations of difference and diversity that should inform our approaches to and judgement of technologies of governance in the future. Finally, it explores aspects of Indigenous experience to clarify how technologies of governance might point to technologies of hope and engagement capable of reframing humanity’s relationships with the more-than-human world at several scales from the local and regional to nation state and international.

Legislation and policy as a way to frame coupled human

and natural systems

Human systems are governed in a variety of ways. The territorial nation state is a relatively recent human invention (Anderson 1983), but its governance structures are now the pre-eminent technologies of governance in the contemporary world. Similarly, the legal institution of the corporation has created critically important technologies of governance (Bakan 2004) in both social and environmental domains, as have the emerging intergovernmental, civil society and supranational entities of financial (Swyngedouw 2005, Mkandawire 2007), strategic (Murazzani 2009, Biermann et al. 2012) and environmental governance (Meadowcroft 2002, Adger et al. 2003, Young 2003, Eckerberg and Joas 2004, Liverman 2004, Bulkeley 2005, Folke et al. 2005). Construction of juridical power to enforce particular behaviours in particular settings relies on the construction of state power, and its articulation through laws (legislation) that frame intention (policy) and are reinforced by authority (representation) and threat (military, financial and political power). In democratic states, the capacity of governments to govern relies on the credibility of state institutions as technologies of power that are sufficiently principled and equitable to maintain some level of popular acceptance. In creating credibility, representation and authority across cultural, social, religious and other axes of difference, state institutions must demonstrate competence, fairness and relevance. As geographers, we might be particularly alert to the ways in which particular institutions govern relations in particular places – the ways in which geographies at multiple scales influence the credibility and authority of particular agencies, particular technologies and particular approaches to the challenges of sustainability.

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nature and landscape, saying in particular that “the unique and extraordinary entanglements of people and environment in Australia deserve to be more widely broadcast because of the particular geopolitical and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century”. In Australia the particular entanglements with issues of technology, policy and environmental sustainability are instructive in thinking about how human institutions might be productively focused on producing sustainable futures.

Australia’s key national environmental legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity

Conservation Act 1999 defines ‘environment’ in a particularly useful way. Its approach points to

significant possibilities for reframing relationships with the other-than-us and the more-than-human, but its implementation in practice points to the significant challenges in realising those possibilities. The legislation defines “environment” as follows:

(a) ecosystems and their constituent parts, including people and communities; and (b) natural and physical resources; and

(c) the qualities and characteristics of locations, places and areas; and (d) heritage values of places; and

(e) the social, economic and cultural aspects of a thing mentioned in paragraph(a), (b), (c) or (d) (Commonwealth of Australia, 1999. Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation

Act 1999, Chapter 8, Part 23, Division 2, Section 528 – Definitions: page 525)

This definition clearly recognises the environment that the Australian nation state seeks to simultaneously protect, manage and exploit is a complexly coupled human and natural system. In the Australian context, where both “ecosystems and their constituent … people and communities” and issues of heritage inevitably evoke and demand consideration of Indigenous Australians’ rights, interests and cultures, this definition also demands attention to difference in the processes of engaging with and managing “environments”.

The defined purpose of the Australian legislation also offers an important window on how framing policy in relation to the themes of technology, policy and environmental sustainability reveals the imperatives and possibilities of engaging with difference as constitutive in the challenges that face the pursuit of sustainability. The legislation identifies the following as the policy objects of the legislation:

(a) to provide for the protection of the environment, especially those aspects of the environment that are matters of national environmental significance; and

(b) to promote ecologically sustainable development through the conservation and ecologically sustainable use of natural resources; and

(c) to promote the conservation of biodiversity; and

(ca) to provide for the protection and conservation of heritage; and

(d) to promote a co-operative approach to the protection and management of the environment involving governments, the community, land-holders and indigenous peoples; and

(e) to assist in the co-operative implementation of Australia's international environmental responsibilities; and

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(f) to recognise the role of indigenous people in the conservation and ecologically sustainable use of Australia's biodiversity; and

(g) to promote the use of indigenous peoples' knowledge of biodiversity with the involvement of, and in co-operation with, the owners of the knowledge (Commonwealth of Australia, 1999.

Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, Chapter 1, Part 1 –

Preliminaries, Section 3: page 1-2).

In framing policy purpose in this way, the EPBC Act entangles natural and human systems and simultaneously demands entanglement of cultural systems – the significance of Indigenous knowledge, heritage and rights, and the interplay of culture, economy and nature. This is not a policy direction informed by some radical academic agenda. This legislation was drafted by a neoliberal conservative government early in its political life (Chapple 2001, Raff 2001). The conservative Howard Government that produced the EPBC Act was able to claim a significant mandate for change on the basis of its endorsement by the electorate in national elections. The legislation it drafted did not implement more radical aspects of the opposition Labor and Green Party proposals for revision, which would have better entrenched the social domains in environmental decision-making. Subsequent actions by Australian governments of all political persuasions have never fully implemented the integrative approach anticipated by the terms of the legislation. In the field of social impact assessment, for example, the integrative framing of the legislation has not secured institutional accountability for the social consequences of major decisions about resources, infrastructure and economic development. In one ongoing example, a NSW Land and Environment Court decision to reject an application for expansion of the Warkworth coal mine north of Sydney on the basis of its overlapping biodiversity, social and related impacts, changes in planning and approval procedures have undermined the capacity of public interest groups or environmental defence groups to secure standing, let alone legal victories in holding public or private agencies accountable for actions that have significant impacts in the terms defined by the EPBC (Higginson 2014).

The construction of power in contemporary democracies has often been characterised in terms of globalisation and neoliberal reform (Lockwood and Davidson 2010, Howlett et al. 2011, Mowbray 2011, Brueckner et al. 2014), with policy reform often mobilised as the means to implement politically preferred outcomes. The contestation of such reform, both within and beyond parliamentary law-making processes is a focus of much media attention and political activity. The impasse in both legislation and policy in Australia in the wake of the conservative coalition’s 2014 National Budget and subsequent policy confusion reflects the risks, contingencies, limitations and possibilities of policy reform as a technology to respond to the challenges of sustainability. Facing a complex and unpredictable balance of power in the nation’s upper house, the radical right wing reform agenda has stalled but persisted – producing huge uncertainty across multiple sectors including renewable energy, infrastructure, higher education and manufacturing.

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simplistic oppositional tactics. It has certainly not mobilised an integrated vision of coupled human-and-natural systems in which energy policy reform is tied to a social justice, biodiversity conservation and social inclusion agenda – despite the existence of a legislative frame to do so in the

EPBC Act.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a parallel reading of Taiwanese legislation and its policy implications, but I would like to point to the importance of Taiwan’s efforts to address the issues of difference arising from its diverse Indigenous population. I do not seek to claim any particular expertise in these issues, but see a significance and importance in the Taiwanese experience that is undervalued in international discourses. The importance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has been widely acknowledged (eg. Ornelas 2014) – although its effectiveness in governing the behaviours of both state and non-state actors towards just and sustainable futures for Indigenous peoples has been uneven at best. What is less widely understood is that Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples Basic Law of 2005 parallels that international declaration, and foreshadowed a significant commitment to the island’s recognised Indigenous groups (see eg. IWGIA 2015, Mona 2007, Shih 2010). In the context of Taiwan’s complex geopolitical setting in East Asia (see inter alia. Keum and Campbell 2001, Hsieh 2006, Bush 2011, Jue 2011, Sehnálková and Kučera 2012, Waldron 2012, Hickey 2013, Munsterhjelm 2014), commitment to the rights of Indigenous peoples will command careful international attention in any future reconfigured sovereignties across the region.

Philosophies of difference and post-human

approaches to difference and diversity

Concern with ‘being’ was the key philosophical issue of the late-19th and early 20th centuries. The focus shifted to the questions of “how to conceive difference and how to valorize it” (May 1997: 2) in the wake of totalitarian obsession with and commitment to the annihilation of difference in the Nazi treatment of Jews and others in Europe in the Holocaust. For Indigenous Peoples in the territories coveted by colonial power, the vicious and intolerant barbarism revealed in the heart of Europe in the mid-20th Century (and glimpsed again in the late-20th Century disintegration of the former Yugosloavia) was hardly surprising. It echoed deeply their own experience on the frontiers of kleptocratic colonial power – state, corporate and religious. But what might 20th Century European philosophers of difference offer to contemporary discussion of technologies for sustainability? What might they contribute to debate in Taiwan and Australia about sustainable futures? This is not the place for a detailed exploration of the implications of French poststructuralist philosophy and wider engagements with post-humanist thinking for the debate, but it is worth outlining the important issues raised in these philosophical domains as a foundation for the later, more specific discussion of Indigenous rights and their implications for the development of technologies of governance for justice and sustainability in both human and

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more-than-human futures.

In Reconsidering Difference, philosopher Tim May offers a critical reading of four key philosophers of difference: Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze. Each has been drawn into geographical discourses, but May suggests that none provide an unambiguous framing of difference that might adequately underpin the development of new technologies of governance of diverse human societies and complexly dynamic coupled human and natural systems. As he sees it:

The holocaust requires of us that we engage in forms of thinking and living that do not reduce others who may be unlike us to the status of mere things … In a fragmented world, people are finding it difficult to respect the differences of others, and this, ironically, at a time in which technology brings what is different closer to them (May 1997: 9)

My colleagues and I have argued elsewhere that cultural diversity amongst human societies is best conceptualised as ontological pluralism (Howitt and Suchet-Pearson 2003, 2006) – requiring acknowledgement that universalist claims to truth need to be understood as contingent and contestable rather than simply assumed to be true. That is, at the level of ontology, different peoples understand the world to be constituted differently, and dealing with both large scale truths and local knowledges necessarily required a respect for and engagement with pluralism. That is, efforts to mobilise state, corporate or religious power to discipline cultural diversity to conform with a singular set of beliefs, behaviours, values or goals misunderstands the significance of different peoples’ ontological constitution of creation and their place within and relationships to it. We have also identified the lack of intercultural competence in key institutions of social and environmental governance (state agencies, resource corporations and non-government agencies) as a significant capacity deficit in situations as diverse as resource management (Howitt et al. 2013), community services provision (Howitt et al. 2014) and disaster recovery (Veland et al. 2013, Hsu et al. 2014). At the heart of these weaknesses, failures and shortcomings is weakness in the ways difference is approached in thought and practice. Reduced to a simplistic binary (us-them, self-other, black-white etc), diversity becomes reduced to a singular difference (me-not me, us-not us). This polarises diversity and dehumanises and devalues the pole of differences. It makes it easier to imagine the human and non-human other as not me and therefore not as worthy as me.

Derrida (1998) emphasises the need to understand the violence implicit in silencing linguistic diversity, and the burden such silencing brings to the silenced. The demand for linguistic conformity with the dominant language group not only creates turmoil for individuals’ identities (in breach of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), but also silences those relationships between people and their environment and people and the cosmos that are deeply woven into language. Thus whether through intolerance of linguistic, cultural or religious diversity power seeks to discipline difference into conformity, it breeds violence and alienation.

For Levinas (eg. 1969, 1998, 1999), ethics offers the pathway to the challenge of how to conceptualise and valorise difference without resorting to either a binarised self-other reductionist approach to difference that would elide diversity, nor sliding into a relativistic amorality in which anything

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goes. Levinas emphasises the ethical imperative implied in the face-to-face encounter with others as constitutive of human experience. May (1997: 145) suggests that Levinas’ focus on the ethics of the human-to-human encounter all but precludes a similar ethical availability to the non-human (or more-than-human) other. Yet mediation of human-environment relationships in the cultural, linguistic and faith traditions that structure peoples’ relationships to other people, their environments and the cosmos inevitably influences the ways in which non-human others are imagined and engaged with. Thus, at least for some humans, the face-to-faceness that drives Levinas’ commitment to the pre-eminence of ethics in philosophical discourse is to be seen in the intimacy of people-to-place and people-to-cosmos relationships that shape how people understand their place in the world. For many cultures those relationships are constituted as relationships to kin – and alterity and difference are accepted as part of the relationship rather than as barriers to relationship.

This leads us almost directly to Gilles Deleuze’s emphasis on rhizomic rather than hierarchical constructions of relationships (Deleuze 1994; Deleuze & Guattari 1988). Deleuze seeks to encourage and support actually thinking differently, creating what Lesley Instone (2012) so evocatively refers to as “the possibility of cultivating in-between spaces of connectivity and ethical engagement.”

In more practical terms, of course, this must lead us back to considering the technologies by which such in-between spaces might by cultivated and supported in practice as well as in philosophical discourses – how the in-betweeness of social and environmental governance might be re-imagined. The need for policies that conceptualise difference in more sophisticated terms than is common in the electoral competitiveness of democracies is clear. Sadly, however, the trajectory towards them is far from clear at the moment, at least from an Australian vantage point. In a nation state where principles of fairness and equity (at least for white male citizens) has been long-enshrined as nationalist ideology, commitments to multiculturalism, human rights, social security and even the belated acknowledgement of the need to recognise, respect and accept First Australians have all been eroded over the past two decades as a result of the reinstatement of paternalism as the dominant mode of state engagement with Indigenous peoples, a retreat towards a politics of fear by conservative governments and a failure of Labor governments to secure Indigenous rights in legal, political or social discourses, despite the benefits of a long economic boom and previous bi-partisan political support for a generous and respectful approach to cultural difference and social inclusion (Denniss 2015).

Building capacity to govern at multiple scales within communities of difference, including capacity to govern to value and protect biological, cultural and environmental diversity as well as economic success, is a necessary and foundational technology for justice and sustainability. Developing and securing policies that conceptualise and valorise difference within our political systems, and practices, procedures and protocols that encourage engagement and compromise raher than the pursuit of winner-takes-all victories in government must rely on such capacity being distributed across societies (Brett 2015). Yet all too often, people demonstrating that they have capacity for self-government is experienced by the political elite in modern democracies as a threat that they may no longer be willing to be governed by others, or participate

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in government by ‘us’ (whoever ‘we’ are). Education, negotiation and reconciliation are all key technologies to be fostered to build the necessary capacity to govern, to think and to engage in the complex intercultural and more-than-human domains of future politics.

Indigenous experience as a pointer towards technologies

of hope and engagement

In both Australia and Taiwan, the challenge of cultural diversity in the form of Indigenous nations within our national societies highlights the relevance of the philosophies of difference to the practices of justice and sustainability. Both our nations have complex colonial histories and post-colonial geographies in which Indigenous presence unsettles and subverts naïve and simplistic discourses of national unity, sameness and singularity. In both our nations, significant biodiversity and environmental capital is present in the traditional territories of the Indigenous peoples. In both our nations’ questions of sovereignty and governance are complicated by the messy and contested histories and geographies of colonial and postcolonial times. In Australia, the historic compromise that produced an innovative, progressive and (with some significant limitations) generous democracy is currently being tested by a period of minority government and poor leadership amongst all political parties and at multiple scales of governance. In Taiwan, the continuing ambiguity of national sovereignty and the scale(s) at which unity might be imagined creates complex in-between spaces. In both our nations the uncertainty of Indigenous claims that challenge well-established rights and interests of dominant culture interests (eg. in urban and rural Australia and the unrecognised claims of Indigenous nations of the Taiwanese plains areas) have challenged the political classes to find ways to recognise and respond to awkward others.

Yet, as Indigenous Australians have often highlighted, their survival and persistent presence in the lived landscapes of our contemporary nations presents a simple challenge to the dominant narratives of absence (Howitt 2012). Despite the often grudging and ambivalent nature of the recognition provided by Australia’s national, state and territorial governments to Indigenous peoples, and the difficulties government and societies in Australia have had in framing policies that accept difference over the last fifty years2, there are some remarkable innovations emerging in Indigenous Australia. Samantha Muller (2014) draws on the work of Esteva (1987) to advocate the idea of co-motion as a productive avenue for engaging across differences in northeast Arnhem Land in Australia’s north, and accommodating Yolngu understandings of human relationships with and responsibilities to the non-human world:

To acknowledge, recognise and respect that there are different ways of understanding the world that are not able to be understood, that may appear to be commotion, are a necessary element of equitable and sustainable co-motion. Indeed, co-production of knowledge from

2 I am currently undertaking an Australian Research Council-funded project reviewing the impacts of

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multiple knowledge producers is necessary for sustainability (Cornell et al. 2013). Acknowledging the deeply colonised context of land and sea management is fundamental to redressing its power imbalances and transforming institutions to be able to fundamentally recognise, respect and resource Indigenous ontologies (Scherrer and Doohan 2013).

The long negotiation of the United Nations Declaration in the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2007, Ornelas 2014) offers another pointer to the value of the technology of international treaty making as a means of creating capacity to deal with difference. While it is clear that ratification of such treaties can provide no guarantee of more just and sustainable approaches to difference emerging in particular settings, it does invite their development and the creation of the “in-between spaces of connectivity and ethical engagement” that Instone imagines. It is in these spaces of engagement across differences to imagine common purpose, common fate and shared understandings that the rights proposed in the Declaration might be enacted and realised as governing people-to-people and people-to-environment relationships, rather than in the spaces of confrontation in legal cases as so often becomes the domains in which Indigenous rights are resolved.

At more local scales, opportunities to frame new technologies of governance are emerging. New mechanisms for acknowledging, valorising and respecting Indigenous knowledges in social and environmental governance are being tested. For example mechanisms of self-determination such as Indigenous Protected Areas, Indigenous ranger programs, local autonomy in hybrid economies and support for different versions of what might constitute ‘the good life’ have developed in Australia without such diversity threatening a singular (and imaginary) national interest. In Taiwan, I have been privileged to glimpse new foundations for recognition, respect and justice being forged in places as diverse as Taiwu Elementary School, where Paiwan children are marking their presence and belonging in both traditional and relocated territories in language, song, craft and economy (Kuo 2012, Taiwu Elementary School Folk Singers 2011), and Smangus, where the bravery of Atayal leaders provoked some level of institutional and political recognition of the gift of rights and opportunity that a fallen tree offered to its local people and their cultural systems of governance of its mountain forest landscape and the absurdity of the state’s assertion that fallen timber belonged to it and it alone (Icyeh 2011, Reid 2010).

Following Alfred (1999) I am neither naïve nor romantic in my approach to Indigenous governance and its role in fostering a rethinking of human–more-than-human relationships in the Anthropocene. Like Rose (2004), I see important pointers towards an ‘ethics for decolonisation’ in the efforts of Indigenous peoples to secure justice and sustainability for themselves and the places they rely on for their wellbeing, identities and livelihoods. The challenges of accommodating difference and dissent within contemporary Indigenous governance are substantial, but there is much of value to be pursued in rethinking how our democracies might govern better for justice and sustainability (see eg. Ford and Rowse 2013, Altman 2002, Hunt 2008).

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Conclusions

The complex challenge of conceptualising and valorising difference has been a powerful influence in philosophy and social science for most of the last six decades. As we enter a new level of understanding of the challenges presented to human societies by the social and environmental dynamics of the Anthropocene, both the philosophers of difference and the experience of Indigenous peoples offer important insights to the discussions that will shape human capacity to respond to those challenges. The technologies of both philosophy and governance are crucial in building both capacity and opportunity to respond to difference in human and more-than-human domains more justly, equitably and sustainably, but are unlikely to provide a simple or linear trajectory towards sustainability. As Muller (2014) suggests, the idea of co-motion as a way forward to new forms of social and environmental governance, will insist on finding new forms of inclusion, participation and engagement as the foundations for governance at various scales from the micro-local to the landscape and beyond. In our own practices academic and professional geographers might consider just how our own work creates spaces of co-motion in our own fields of endeavor. For example:

 the ways in which we push for more principled and ethical academic practice in intercultural spaces,

 the ways we demonstrate respect for Indigenous rights in our fieldwork and engagement with governments,

 the ways we open our institutions to Indigenous students and colleagues, and

 the ways we conceptualise and valorise difference and diversity in our practices of review, research and teaching

will all provide small but significant steps towards respectful and inclusive engagement with diversity and difference. In both Australia and Taiwan, these technologies for change are within our reach and within our existing fields of practice and responsibility. They cannot be left as someone else’s responsibility to pursue. The ethical imperative to create, foster and support transformative experiences that encourage co-motion across communities of human and more-than-human differences relies on innovation in developing respectful, generous and inclusive technologies of governance in many domains. Geographers have our particular roles to play and I certainly look forward to nurturing and advancing geographical research collaboration between our two countries into the future.

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投稿日期:104 年 05 月 26 日 修正日期:104 年 08 月 10 日 接受日期:104 年 08 月 10 日

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