Plan Nacional de Desarrollo – Toda Una Vida

The preceding sections have aimed at building up a basic understanding of the prob- It has therefore not been necessary to define each concept or identify each tacit assumption. A conceptual framework should ideally possess a high degree of logical rigor, however, in order that it may organize our thoughts also in complex or vague problem situations. The present section and the next section aim at tightening the conceptual reins, leading up to the framework's summary in Section The section focuses on actors, options, environment and other concepts in the 'social causes' block. The treatment will be compact and apodictic, because depth, detail, more formal definitions, discussion and literature references will be provided in Chapter

Like 'systems' or any other concept by which we try to describe the social world, the concept of expresses and leads to a certain perspective, a bias in seeing that world. Through the concept of for instance, we study, and therewith assume and come to see, people and other social entities as input-output machines (sophisticated and poorly predictable, but machines nevertheless). Through the con- cepts of 'action' and we study, and therewith assume and come to see, people and other social entities as reflective and choosing. 'Behaviour' emphasizes heteronomy, 'action' emphasizes autonomy.

My adoption of action and actor as the core concepts is therefore not only a technical choice for efficient research, but also a normative stance. I want people to be actors; there is simply no hope if we (and governments, and other people) would only 'display At the same time, however, I want to steer clear of

extremes and of the humanistic image of man as a free-floating Tying actors to contexts (structure, culture) is a means to stay aware of, and

in the research, people's partial heteronomy and boundedness.

The concept of actors has loosely alternated with 'people' in the preceding sections, but this is in fact a dangerous thing to do. Actors are social entities that act, in other words, social entities that may reflect and decide upon what to do. The concept of actors thus denotes more, as well as less, than Many actors are not individ- ual people but collective entities, e.g., private firms, village councils or government agencies. On the other hand, many individual people are not actors concerning the things they may actually be seen doing, e.g., if they are hired to fell trees for a logging corporation or to herd cattle belonging to an urban elite family, and do not involve in problem-relevant sideline activities. The concept of actors leads us more efficiently to an explanation of activities (and hence environmental problems) than

It is not without meaning that the popular version of the Dutch Environment Policy (NMP, 1989) is titled: To Choose or to Lose".

does the concept of An other advantage of the actor concept is that, although rather abstract itself, it forces us to be concrete about the degrees of freedom that social entities actually have with respect to the environmental problem at hand. One cannot be 'people' in a restricted sense, but one can be actor with respect to one activity and no-actor with respect to another, and anything in-between; social entities are actor to the extent that they can implement options. The concept thus also leads us to increasing or restricting of the actors' array of options as an opportunity in the design of solutions.

This being clarified, it still leaves us with a substantial problem. In the examples up till now, the number of actor categories has been kept deliberately low, loosely specifying only simple categories like private car owners or village inhabitants. Often, however, an environmental problem is caused by a wide variety of actors who, to make matters worse, interact in complex ways. In a regional analysis of a deforesta- tion problem, for instance, big landowners may be found to close off fertile valley floor land, pushing farmers uphill; logging companies may be found to fear that their forest lease is vested in weak government and opt for the strategy; their logging roads may be found to pull farmers into the forest; the local pioneer communities may be found to assess their land claims vis-à-vis government actors as too weak to justify investment in good soil management - or follow a reverse tactic, making terraces and planting trees in order to strengthen their land tenure

tribal forest people may be found to join forces with forest protection NGOs in a last attempt to regain their dignity. Such an analysis cannot do without some degree of 'mapping' the problem-connected actors. As Chapter 5 will exemplify in more detail, 'mapping' the actor interactions can be carried out without taking recourse to some 'social systems' approach. Holding fast to rule that we should start out with the actors that decide upon the concrete problem-relevant activity, we may first ident- ify the 'primary actors' who make the concrete tree cutting decisions; then, we may identify 'secondary actors' behind the primary actors, simply by posing the question what actors (if any) influence the primary actors' options or motivations. In the example above, the government will become an actor behind the logging company because it influences the company's motivation to grab and run. The big landowners will show up as actors behind the farmers because they influence the farmers' range of options, and so on. Thus, the options and motivations of the primary actors become in a two-dimensional the actors field, that comprises secondary actors, tertiary actors and so forth.

It is often important to distinguish between actual and potential actors. Actual actors (primary, etc.) are those who contribute to the causes of the environmental problems; together, they form the actors field in the explanatory, social causes block

This is different, of when it comes to the identification of victims, not causes, in an other part of the framework.

This interesting reversal of (1988) rule that tenure insecurity leads to low environ- mental investment is reported by (1987).

of the framework. Potential actors, on the other hand, are those connected to the design of the problem's solution. These categories may overlap, of course, but actors which are not actual ones are of special importance to identify. Potential actors may play a destructive role, when powerful groups grab resources made more valuable by small farmers' investments or by the construction of a rural road (Cook, 1985). Other potential actors may play a beneficial role, e.g., when a new common resource management body is formed in order to overcome dilemma of collective action, as has been the case in the 'social fencing' example.

The action-in-context perspective leaves room for a wide variety of 'actor models', i.e., preset theories describing how actors are supposed to see the world and decide what to do. These actor models vary along many dimensions. One of them is, for instance, the degree to which actors are supposed to consciously assess and weigh all alternative actions and their consequences. An other dimension concerns the values actors are supposed to apply in their perceptions and decisions; the so-called 'rational choice' of the homo model is an example here; Chapter 5 will supply others. As will be shown there too, a formalized actor model will often be more of a ballast than an asset. Common sense, mixed with a qualitative and research-based understanding of actors and an empirical inference of their decision principles, will often work better than adherence to some prefabricated decision model. Therefore, it is chosen in Figure 3H to leave out the formal 'problem' and 'design' elements in the social causes block defined in the previous section (Figure 3F), and confine the figure to a 'model' that does not describe the decision process itself, but only the two decision process inputs and their context: actors decide on the basis of what they see as their options for action and the motivations they have for these options. These options and motivations are in their turn embedded in a context of structure and culture (markets, power relations, available technology, environmental knowledge, world views etc.).

We now arrive at Figure 3H that summarizes and formalizes the social causes structure of the environmental problem. It has an intermediate complexity in the sense that it is in-between the ones drawn up till now and the elaborated version of Chapter 5. The figure has been arrived at by dropping the 'design' element from Figure 3F (being too biased, as if people are designing actions all the time) but retaining the environment and environmental problem which indicate the recursiviness of the emic and perspectives, then mixing it with Fig. 3B and adding the 'sub- activities' and 'actors field' concepts.

The elements below the 'activity' indicate optional subdivi- sions. Sometimes it comes in handy to separate the number of actors and the intensity of activity per actor, sometimes it does not. Sub-activities are sometimes important to analyse, sometimes one lumped activity suffices. Sometimes there are only one or two relevant actors or actor categories, sometimes a complex actors field has to be investi- gated. Each actor or actor category has of course its own options and motivations attached, as well as its own perceived background structure and culture (which may largely overlap, if actors live in the same

j SUB-ACTIVITIES NO. OF i ACTORS PER . SOCIAL BACKGROUNDS • CULTURE • STRUCTURE I fa fa fiJb ?

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The structure of the 'social causes' element of framework

'Environment' and 'environmental problem' are parts of the social background of options and motivations, highlighted here in order to keep track of the fact that they indicate the emic environment and problem (environment and problem in the

Everything, after all, in the social causes block has that character, also the feed- back lines that indicate the activity's consequences on social backgrounds, and on the actors' environment more

The dotted lines indicate the rest of the picture, in which the activity starts off the effect chain of the normative observer's environmental problem, and in which activities, actors, options, motivations and backgrounds become interpreted as the social causes (context) of the normative environmental problem.