Environmental Studies Association of Canada

Final Call for papers AAG 2012: Powers of Environmental Impact Assessment

Organizers: Nicole Becker (University of Arizona), Kevin A. Gould (Concordia University)
Paper and panel sessions at Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, New York City, February 24-28th, 2012

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is carried out in the name of reducing unwanted impacts of proposed projects on environments, populations and cultures. Yet many of the most destructive development projects in the world have been subject to a barrage of EIAs and ultimately approved. Some conclude that this occurs because EIAs are too lax or because institutions that carry out EIA are complicit. While such critiques are important, we contend that they do not go far enough to grapple with the power of EIA. This session will bring together approaches that explore how EIA itself is implicated in environmental, economic and social impacts and transformations. Specifically, we hope to bring together scholars who, in different ways, seek to understand how power works through the material and meaning-making processes of EIA. In this session, we welcome varied theoretically informed and empirically grounded perspectives. However, there are four approaches that we see as especially promising.

Knowing EIA. We are interested in studies that will reveal the logics at work in EIA. How do these logics constitute new subjects, territories, and especially socionatures, and with what effects? Related studies would also trace how the work of EIA helps to constitute experts and scientific institutions as well as new relations and configurations of corporations, states and universities.
Marketing EIA. We are interested in connections between EIA and capitalism. How might EIA and its practices contribute to transforming or making markets not only for commodities, e.g., minerals and timber but also for environmental impacts, e.g. wetlands banking? How is EIA articulated in regimes of (neoliberal) capitalist accumulation?
Colonizing EIA. We invite postcolonial scholarship on EIAs. How does EIA naturalize the dispossession of aboriginal lands and resources? How are the logics of EIA linked to military and policing power that protect such regimes of extraction? How is the power of EIA disrupted or appropriated by anti-colonial and other types of resistance to resource extraction?
Mapping EIA. Finally, we invite empiricist studies of EIA. Where are the centers of EIA production? What environments and what lives are at stake in contemporary EIAs? How do the shifts in EIA practices across uneven geographies reveal the contours of corporate and state power as well as resistance? How are exceptions to EIA negotiated?
We ask that presenters consider the practices of EIA in the context of the complex historical and geographical conditions which have and continue to allow EIA to gain traction. Assembling a collection of papers that engages with the power of EIA from different theoretical perspectives is not meant to be merely an intellectual exercise. Rather, it is an attempt to confront the tremendous and at times subtle influence that EIA has to order lives and landscapes, often in violent ways. We focus on EIA for several reasons: because it is ubiquitous, because it is rarely studied critically compared to its enormous influence, because it serves as a connection across a wide array of environmental issues from mining to urban sustainability, and because EIA is so often connected to socio-environmental injustices.

We would like to put together a session and a panel based on this call for papers. If you are interested in either, please submit an abstract no longer than 250 words to Nicole Becker (nicolebecker@email.arizona.edu) and Kevin Gould (kgould@alcor.concordia.ca), no later than the 26th of September 2011.