Dean Bavington is interested in the political and ethical issues surrounding natural resource management (NRM)

Recent attempts to reform NRM through participatory techniques and the integration of traditional and local ecological knowledge are of concern in my current scholarship on the Newfoundland and Labrador cod fisheries.

Participatory management, while using the rhetoric of empowerment and democratic decision making, often re-inscribes new forms of power relations that continue to place scientists and managers in control and expose the targets of participatory techniques to increasing responsibilities without commensurate resources. Moves toward the incorporation of traditional and local ecological knowledge into NRM programs often act as reductive translation exercises that mine “ways of knowing and living” for data that is compatible with scientific resource managers and their bureaucratic agencies without fundamentally challenging structures of institutional power and ways of knowing that have proven to be undemocratic and ineffective when practiced on the ground. In general my environmental justice research interests revolve around the politics of experimental versus experiential ways of knowing and being as expressed by users and managers of natural resources.