Estrategias sociales de prevención y adaptación Social ... - La RED

joint development discourse 5 is expressed in the concept of “spatial quality”. Areas held to
be “neglected” (e.g. http://www.waalweelde.nl/page_id=217) need a quality boost. But local
people are unlikely to view their backyards are “underdeveloped and neglected”.
Resisting the Constant Gardiners - Understanding Local Politicisation
of “Best Practices”
According to Bruno Latour (1992) “we have never been modern” anyway. Rather than reinvented
tradition, it may makes more sense to identify a hybridization of pre-modern, modern
and postmodern strands in water management, as the Dutch anthropologist Van Der
Werff (2004) does. Van Der Werff identifies the current (re)naturalization trend and the
ideas it has triggered such as “the creation of so-called Green Rivers as retention basins and
bypasses” as a postmodern trend. These ideas “both benefit from and contribute to modern
state arrangements, technological innovations and economic growth, and suffer from technological
drawbacks, social alienation and a reductionist worldview” (Van Der Werff, 2004)
In communication terms, Trude van Heems and Boukje Kothuis (2008) make similar comments
on the very ambiguous “Nederland left met water” campaign, which suggests “living
with water” is compatible with full control. This ambiguity may explain some of the protests
over present-day river engineering projects.
But then, the same may go for their opponents. “Premodern” community involvement
now manifests itself as a mix of cooperation and conflict, with a view of reaping the benefits
but sharply delimiting their limits. Thus, the Doorbraak, a new brook in the East Netherlands
integrating urban, rural and environmental values, was seen by rural stakeholders as
facilitating urban encroachment (“urban development”) on the countryside. Rural opponents
successfully resisted this, and managed to convince the project initiator, the water
board, to demarcate the river flow as a boundary beyond which no new development would
be allowed (Warner, Lulofs and Bressers, 2010).
Van Der Werff (2004) goes some way towards explaining this phenomenon when he
observes that while residents may appreciate the “postmodern” rediscovery of environmental,
cultural and landscape values in current modalities of river planning, they regret the loss
of their pre-modern sense of social cohesion. Several interventions threaten to cut communities
in two, or lop off part of a community. This causes residents to emphasise, perhaps
rediscover or even reinvent their community identity. Local authorities have frequently sided
with their constituency, presenting the locality as victim to external meddling and a threat to
the specific local landscape and culture.
The past few years have indeed seen many local responses, many obstructive, some more
constructive in nature, presenting alternatives to planned Dutch river interventions crossing
their backyards. In the case of the Ooij polder expounded below, for example, there was a seamless
transition from anti-dike reinforcement protests to anti-inundation protests, with campaign
funds being transferred from the former to the latter (interviews 2005/6, in Roth et al.).
5
A discourse is away of thinking, speaking, writing and acting reproduced in social interaction and is regulated
by a plethora of social, institutional processes, procedures, powers and forces
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