REALIDAD CHILENA: EDUCACIÓN PARVULARIA EN CHILE

Now that we have seen how pre-colonial communities and kings,VOCtraders, and colonial and Indonesian governments in the Indonesian archipelago throughout history conceptualised nature we can turn to the question of what kind of policies and laws institutionalized the dominant discourses.

The spiritualist discourse, to start with, had as its major objective to behave in such a way that the spirits that inhabited nature would take good care of the well being of the people living in their neighbourhood. To implement this policy people formulated rules ranging from the very general, such as living in peace and harmony, to the very specific, such as prohibitions to cut certain trees or hunt certain animals, and rules about rituals to be performed before entering the spirits’ habitat and offerings to be brought after hunting. Im- portantly, these rules were negotiable. Another type of regulation that had its roots in the spiritualist discourse had to do with making resource claims. People claimed trees and terrestrial and marine territories as reserved and legitimised such claims via the fact that they or their ancestors had negotiated an agreement with the spirits that owned the resources and territories.

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The policy belonging to the subjugate-and-rule discourse was similar to that of the spiritualist discourse except that it aimed at satisfying new deities that were to replace the old spirits. The rules that were to ensure that these deities would take good care of humans were, for rulers, about subjugating nature, the spirits living therein and their subjects, as the deities obviously disliked the spirits and had a preference for a restyled nature that – more than the wild and untouched nature – resembled their own world. This first type of rule certainly served to legitimise power and resource claims of new rulers. To secure these new, royal, resource claims there was another type of rule that we also, albeit in another form, already know from the spiritualist dis- course: rules about not entering royal reserves, about not harvesting royal resources, about not trading products and about paying taxes for resources. For the subjects of such a new ruler these new rules meant that they had less direct access to nature and that they had to enter into a new relation of de- pendency. As long as a ruler took good care of his subjects, however, this did not necessarily have to result in worse living conditions.

When the Dutch traders and, later, colonial authorities began to think about a possible crisis in the supply of timber they developed a policy that aimed at sustaining and eventually improving the forests’ productivity. The rules belonging to this rational forestry discourse aimed at regulating the exploitation of forests. The rules, again, were similar to those of the earlier discourses: not cutting certain trees, or in the most extreme case prohibiting access to particular forests. But these rules reserved trees and forests only for a certain period of time until they were big enough or until a forest was recovered. And the rules were based on a completely different rationale and favoured new, this time foreign, actors: most notably scientists who attained the authority to define ‘good management’ and the Dutch authorities who on the basis of this new knowledge claimed authority over all production forests.

The next discourse, i.e. protection against disaster, was institutionalised in a policy that aimed at protecting humans and their economic activities against natural disasters, such as droughts and floods. The rules belonging to this discourse were again not new: the Dutch authorities prohibited the access to particular forests, only this time not to claim a monopoly for their exploitation but to protect them against it.

Likewise, the policy built on the nature protection discourse aimed at protecting certain territories and species against human exploitation. It did this, however, not to uphold their protective function as in the case of the protection against disaster discourse but to uphold their function as a source of scientific knowledge and moral improvement. To achieve this objective two types of regulations were issued. The first concerned hunting. Once again, as in the spiritualist discourse, there were prohibitions and exceptions formu- lated about the hunt of particular species. None of the instruments, a prohi- bition to kill particular species, the obligation to obtain a license prior to hunting and closed hunting seasons, was new. Only the rationale behind them

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was. That was true also for the second type of regulation belonging to the nature protection discourse: prohibiting popular access to particular territories. This type of regulation had also been issued under the dominance of various other discourses. However, importantly, under the nature protection discourse exceptions were made for certain new actors, such as scientists.

The first policies and laws of independent Indonesia reproduced rational forestry and the protection against disaster discourse in particular to justify the governmental re-appropriation of land. Later, the Indonesian government also started to re-institutionalise the nature protection discourse in govern- mental plans and activities, including conferences and study trips to other countries.

Thepembangunandiscourse, the first ‘new’ discourse on man-nature re- lations to gain dominance after Indonesian independence, was institutionalised in development plans and legislation that aimed at regulating the exploitation of the country’s natural riches. As nature protection did not play any role in thepembangunandiscourse, the legislation, most notably the 1967 Forestry Act, was about production and protection against disaster only. However, there was one element in the new legislation that recalled the recreational aspect of nature protection, i.e. a new category of recreational forests. However, contrary to the ideas of the nature protection discourse, these recreational forests were mainly to serve as another development strategy instead of as a counterweight against development and production.

From the early 1970s onwards, the Indonesian government also increasingly reproduced the rhetoric of the sustainable development discourse in its regular development plans and other documents. Conservation elements of the dis- course were institutionalised in several major policy documents, such as the National Conservation Plan of 1980 and Biodiversity Action Plan of 1993 and ratifications of international conservation treaties. In terms of legislation, the government produced several animal protection decrees, but most importantly the Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1990 that, just as in colonial times, pro- vides for the possibility to reserve both areas and species.

All policies and legislation of theReformasiera so far have also reproduced the sustainable development discourse. They differ from their predecessors mainly in their relatively stronger focus on human rights issues. The national development programme of 1999, for instance, very much focused on communal rights in their relation to natural resources and thus also to con- servation. The new Forestry Act of the same year again showed the lack of specificity of sustainable development. It formed a compromise of very di- vergent interests that were related to the government’s three main streams of thinking: development, conservation and human rights issues. In terms of conservation it, again, did not introduce new instruments but only a new supra-category called the conservation forest.

In sum, therefore, and quite significantly, especially in terms of policy instruments – resource claims, prohibition of access, reservation and the like –

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little has changed throughout history. What have changed are the rationale behind and the purpose of rules. Likewise, who benefited from discourses and policies and the rules built on them and who did not has partly changed, as the following paragraph will show.

16.3 ENABLING AND CONSTRAINING EFFECTS OF DISCOURSES AND THEIR