Stewardship Politics and the Control of Wild Weather
2007; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/0306312706069435
ISSN1460-3659
Autores Tópico(s)Island Studies and Pacific Affairs
ResumoThe failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina not only ended the lives of many of the city's inhabitants, but also undermined the legitimacy of government officials, from the mayor to the president. The structures that crumbled were built by the Army Corps of Engineers, and represented the ability and will of the state to stabilize the land and make it safe for habitation. The fact that it was not safe reflected the lowered commitment of the government to ordinary people, and the failure of politicians to maintain national infrastructures. It signified and furthered a deterioration of the American landscape. It also marked the decline of the political culture of stewardship that had gained authority, along with tech niques for building levees and seawalls in 17th-century France. During the reign of Louis XIV, good governance was equated with effective land management. Levees and seawalls were used to improve the countryside, and give the young monarch greater authority over his king dom (Mukerji, 1997; Turnbull, 2000). His finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, systematically studied and protected French natural resources, while creating a new infrastructure of fortresses, roads, bridges, canals, and ports (Clement, 1968; 1979: vols II and IV). The politics of steward ship helped empower the state vis-a-vis the traditional nobility by provid ing measures of good governance that could be used to hold aristocrats accountable for poor uses of the countryside. Local nobles had tradition ally leveraged their control over local estates and regional legal institu tions to resist demands from the state. But where they misused royal lands, Colbert proved them to be poor stewards of these parcels, and claimed the territory for the state in the name of stewardship (Mukerji, 2005, 2007). Even as it was being used against them, stewardship politics was hard for nobles to oppose because it was based on Christian principles. Since the
Referência(s)