Literature from the USA has dominated this analysis with a lesser al- though still important input from European literature. Broad lessons learned though are transferable to the Australian and to some extent the New Zealand context (due to the significant broad similarities be- tween all these nation-states socio-economic, cultural, scientific and forest governance systems).
This thesis calls attention to the need for critical, value-rational, and methodologically-aware scientific research focused upon the nexus be- tween private landowners and forests. This is in reflection to the con- tinuing politicisation of and contest over vegetation on private property in Australia, since the 1990s. The ongoing tussle between the (adminis- trative) state, political parties, landowners, interest groups and ele- ments of civil society over who controls what on private land will affect many lives and have an appreciable affect on not only the politics of socio-nature, but the more general political environment in Australia. This alone reinforces the need for good science on this topic, and good science driven by ethically aware organisations (and institutions).
Chapter 5: Linking the epistemic and normative in a research rationality
A further significant dimension of this research is that it calls atten- tion to the current debates about the relationship between research practice, methodology and meta-theory within private forest landowner research. Midgley (2000) has effectively pointed out why it is necessary to attend to such questions by stating that:
[i]n a society where most scientific practice is based on a meth- odology of experiment and observation, it would be all too easy (without a compelling counter argument) to be dragooned into conforming to the norm…philosophical arguments can help us to see practice in quite a different light than we might otherwise, and the new perspectives we can gain from this can be very valuable…Philosophical discourses provide one (but not the only) arena in which to judge the quality of methodological ideas. If we find contradictions between philosophical and methodologi- cal perspectives, then this is an indication that the adequacy of one or both of them might need to be reconsidered (Midgley 2000: 29-32).
To be in touch with these issues is as relevant to being in touch with the wavefront of literature within a topic area (such as private forest land- owners). Although this presents some major difficulties in carrying out a research project (as many philosophical debates have little equivalent practical dimension), it has major advantages in offering the chance to produce relevant research for society/socio-nature. This kind of option has a positive spin-off, as it could increase inter-disciplinarity and trans- disciplinary research capacities. This is especially notable as private landowner researchers are in a strong position to capitalise on their connections to capital and the state in a research realm that straddles applied and topic contexts of socio-nature. Clearly, it could also help avoid:
[d]isciplinary parochialism, and its close relative disciplinary im- perialism, [which] are a recipe for reductionism, blinkered inter- pretations, and misattributions of causality (Sayer 2000: 7).
What I am saying in this chapter and more broadly in the thesis is that what we need to do in relation to applied PFL research is to more adequately understand where we are at, rather than where we would like to be. We have a lot of information on PFL landowners and more emerging all the time (notably in the USA and Europe), yet this litera- ture tells us remarkably little about people’s lives with the forests and
less still about what it might mean to ask what is good with landowners, forests and ourselves (as knowledge dealers) in terms of social life for the future. If anything, it still appears with research into private land- owners that more of the same (survey research) is the norm. Where we would seem to like to be is to produce more of the same type of know- ing, and knowing in places that is turned to the service of interest groups, rather than looking hard at what we have in hand and how we might more adequately understand what we might have (and how to get to those places instead).
To conclude, this thesis has detailed, in regard to private forest landowner research and how landowners are known, why we are where we are and where we could go. It stands in mildly reflexive critique to the literature as what we already know and how we make that so. In this, it has been determined that there is a normative commitment (the NIPF problem) evident in the case literature alongside an epistemic framing. Together, they constitute (and are evidence of) an interlocked scientific worldview or rationality which constrains how landowners are depicted as a research problem and then consequently how landown- ers get known, all of which delimits certain actions. Although, as noted, it is difficult in a literature review such as this to say unequivocally that this worldview or rationality comes to be activated in the world through (substantial) power mechanisms of some type, there are echoes in the literature to suggest that this occurs. The normative frame and the (em- pirical-normative) epistemic frame when translated into this or these mechanisms becomes an ideology. It is a powerful one, as it carries the trappings of an epistemic justificatory frame and authority well effaced in the word scientific that hides, to a considerable extent, the normative and the normative in the epistemic. It has cognitive, social and, some might argue, material weight disproportionate to nearly any other knowledge framing in Western society. It is also an unfavourable ideol- ogy due to the commitment to a single rationality and the attached con- sequences of that knowing in action - by and large, a blindness to researchers power to write others histories and how this may be a (moral and ethical) bad, if not properly understood for what it is. In this,
Chapter 5: Linking the epistemic and normative in a research rationality
it behoves private forest landowner researchers to diversify their theo- retical and discursive practice in their community, and establish con- texts in which critical dialogue can operate in an environment of generally supportive consensus.