Browsing by Author "Lewis N"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Four propositions about how valuation intervenes in local environmental politics
    (John Wiley and Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society, 2020-02) Tadaki M; Sinner J; Šunde C; Giorgetti A; Glavovic B; Awatere S; Lewis N; Stephenson J
    1. Environmental valuation provides a way of soliciting and organising information about how people relate to their environments. By canvassing a broad spectrum of human–nature relationships, valuation practice seeks to make environmental decision-making more inclusive of diverse human concerns and aspirations. 2. When valuation is undertaken in real-world decision-making settings, choices must be made about how to adapt valuation into context. Generic guidance illuminates choices of theory and method, as well as practical issues such as cost and complexity; however, little guidance exists on how to understand and respond to the political implications of valuation in places. 3. To address this, we develop four propositions on how valuation intervenes into conflicted environmental decision-making contexts, drawing on interviews with government officials and marine values-holders from Aotearoa New Zealand's Marlborough Sounds. 4. Valuation intervenes in politics by (i) vesting certain scales and actors with authority, (ii) aligning with or contesting existing regulatory categories, (iii) reallocating expertise about the environment and (iv) reproducing or reworking the uneven playing field of decision-making. Understanding these implications can support valuation practitioners to situate their work within locally relevant contexts and objectives. 5. These propositions provide a way of grasping the mechanisms through which valuation intervenes in local political struggles for environmental authority. Using these prompts, and developing others, can help valuation practitioners to ‘do good’ through seeking place-based environmental justice and sustainability.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Quality as a governmental rationality in New Zealand wine
    (2013) Prince RJ; Lewis N
    The notion of ‘quality’ circulates around wine economy as it does many cultural economies. It may be possible to identify objective dimensions of quality in wine by referring to various aroma profiles, but it is both an inherently subjective and multiply qualified conception. In this paper, we begin from the position that one of the consequences of the widespread use and uncertain materiality of quality is that it defines a discursive field within which various technologies of control are brought to bear on the wine economy. We use the New Zealand case to argue that quality has been deployed to support the collective rents generated by a national reputation for quality wine and highlight key technologies developed to organise industry in the creation and support of that reputation. We suggest that as a governing rationality (governmentality) quality enacts an ethical economy associated with ownership of collective rents and a culture of wine that transcends its economy. The paper focuses attention on the work that quality performs in governing the New Zealand wine economy.