What Is Local about Local Environmental Governance? Observations from the Local Biodiversity Action...

What Is Local about Local Environmental Governance? Observations from the LocalBiodiversity Action Planning ProcessAuthor(s): James EvansSource: Area, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 270-279Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of BritishGeographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20004392 .

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Area (2004) 36.3, 270-279

What is local about local environmental

governance? Observations from the local

biodiversity action planning process

James Evans School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham,

Edgbaston, Birmingham B1 5 2TT

Email: [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 26 February 2004

In line with the tenets of sustainable development, environmental policy has privileged action at the local level. This paper explores how the local has been manifested in practice, drawing upon an extensive qualitative study of biodiversity action planning in Birmingham, UK, undertaken between 1999 and 2002. Analysis highlights the embedded and geographically uneven character of the process, and a number of local path dependencies are identified that act to both constrain and enable the process. It is concluded that environmental policy tends to accept the positive rhetoric of local action rather uncritically. In practice, the local is manifested in a number of different ways,

with highly heterogeneous effects.

Key words: UK, local environmental governance, biodiversity action planning, path dependency

Introduction The Rio Earth Summit of 1992 formalized the notion of 'thinking globally, acting locally' as the modus operandi of sustainable development. This ethic underpins the so-called Local Agenda 21 framework for governance that implements the global aims set out at Rio through a set of scaled national, regional and local policies for action. While the catchall status of sustainable development renders it some thing of a 'conceptual chameleon' in the academy (Cowell 1997, 292), there is increased interest in

what changes have actually been effected on the ground. A large degree of latitude exists in the organization of the Local Agenda 21 process (Wilks and Hall 1994), producing an increasingly uneven geographical tapestry of knowledge, governance and landscape (Muir et a!. 2000). This paper ex plores the concept of the local through a detailed

empirical study of local biodiversity action planning. Analysis generates an appreciation of what environ mental governance at the local level can and cannot do, in order to contribute to environmental plan ning and policy debates upon local environmental governance.

Local Agenda 21 forms of environmental govern ance are closely linked to wider transformations of the civil sphere (Goodwin 1998). These range from the 'hollowing out' of the state apparatus (Jessop 1991), characterized by increasing dependence upon collaborative forms of local action (Healey 1992), to the undermining of government institu tions and grand political narratives (Giddens 1991) associated with the weakening of individual faith in expert knowledges and traditional institutions (Wynne 1996). These trends indicate the suite of values that have become attached to the local, such as inclusivity, collaborative action, self-determination

ISSN 0004-0894 ? Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2004



What is local about local environmental governance? 271

in terms of policy and action, and responsiveness to real-world needs. However, what constitutes the 'local' is unproblematically assumed in legislation,

and the translation of these values into practice is neither homogenous, nor inevitable. This paper inter rogates how the local level has been constituted by local environmental policy in practice, through a

detailed case study of biodiversity action planning, arguing that environmental policy tends to assume the implementation of local rhetoric rather uncritically.

Biodiversity action planning represents an import ant arena of sustainable development, harnessing local expertise to conceive of nature conservation across environmental, economic and social activi ties at the local level (Harrison and Davies 2002). In the aftermath of the publication of the first tranche of plans, it is now possible to assess the process.

While biodiversity action plans have been explored at a Habermasian communicative level, as facilitat ing other voices to speak (Goodwin 1998), and redefine aims and objectives (Selman and Wragg 1999), this paper focuses upon the specific role played by the local.

The following analysis draws upon 25 interviews with contributors to the Birmingham and Black Country biodiversity action plan, local, regional and national policymakers, and professional and lay experts, conducted between 1999 and 2002. The Birmingham and Black Country is a metropolitan area located in the centre of the UK, comprising 2.5 million inhabitants. Although a less familiar context for nature conservation, the urban setting throws the impact of the local in biodiversity action planning into greater relief, creating considerable friction with traditional ideas and practices of nature conservation and ecology (Barker 2000). A comparative element is provided by interviews conducted with biodiversity action planners in neighbouring (rural) areas.

The local biodiversity action planning framework and its implementation through key individuals and organizations is discussed in depth, and it is argued that the local biodiversity action plan process is people-driven and geographically embedded, creat ing wide geographical variation between local bio

diversity action plans. The successes and failures of this process are related to the notion of path depend ency, which simultaneously enables certain forms of action and knowledge, while preventing others. This double-edged sword lends the local a heterogeneous character in practice, and the paper concludes by considering the ramifications of this for governance through a consideration of its scale of application.

Local biodiversity action planning in practice

The framework Under the Convention on Biodiversity, the imple mentation of national obligations follows a nested hierarchy, from national, to regional, to local (DoE 1994). The local biodiversity action plan process emphasizes action at the local level, through the bottom-up construction of plans and policies, based upon local expertise and institutional capacity. As a spokesperson from the national Biodiversity Policy Unit stated,

Our role is to say biodiversity is something you should be considering . .. it is the people who are the implementers and deliverers who make the judge

ments because they're working with it on the ground - we're not, we don't do anything on the ground. (Deputy Director, UK Biodiversity Group, 29 November 2000)

Local authorities statutorily are required to produce a biodiversity action plan. The formation of a local partnership is designed to facilitate 'working know ledge', in the form of 'actions' that can influence a

wide range of other activities, as well as being a product in its own right. A wide range of stake holders are included in a cross-sectoral partnership through a process of consensus building, to create

mutual understandings, coherence and a common general vision, which includes a set of specific targets for conservation (UKLIAG 1 997a).

National guidance outlines a rigorous format for the local biodiversity action plan process, shown in Figure 1. It begins with an ecological summary of the status of rare habitats and species, considering both threats and opportunities for conservation, and finishes with a list of actions to be taken to enhance the resource. These actions are listed with targets for achievement over a ten-year period, and lists of partners and lead partners undertaking them. Habi tat types from the UK Biodiversity Action Plan Prior ity Habitats list and species listed on the UK Species

of Conservation Concern list occurring in an area form the core of each plan, and are supplemented by species and habitats considered to be of particu lar local interest or worth. A two-tier national and local priority framework runs through every stage of the biodiversity action plan process, which relates national and international conservation priorities to the natural resources of an area. In accordance with the values associated with local action, the process



272 Evans

Establish Plan Partnership

Agree broad objectives

Review resources of area

10 Establish database

Identify priorities within national and local

context

4

Set specific targets for proposals and action

4

Identify delivery mechanisms and sources of

advice and funding

4,

Publish plan and implement programme

4

Establish long-term monitoring programme to

measure effectiveness of plan in achieving

national and local targets

Figure 1 Functional components of the local biodiversity action plan process

Source: UKLIAG 1997a

is intended to pool resources to respond to local needs, and create a shared commitment to and

ownership of the plan process (UKLIAG 1997b). The proportion of habitat action plans undertaken

due to their national level status is far lower than the proportion of species action plans, for the

simple reason that the number of nationally rare species is far higher than the number of nationally rare habitats (the Birmingham and Black Country

Biodiversity Action Plan includes 22 nationally rare species, compared to two nationally rare habitats).

Being more locally based, this paper concentrates upon the formulation of habitat action plans, as they generate the highest degree of divergence between areas. Specifically, the formulation of the deadwood habitat action plan and the urban wasteland habitat action plan are examined.

These two plans represent opposite ends of the ecological spectrum, with deadwoods being the product of ultra-stable conditions, and urban waste lands being the product of disturbance and chang ing conditions. This lends a comparative check to the conclusions drawn from each. Furthermore, they are not traditionally 'popular' areas of conservation, and because they were relatively un-established amongst local conservation groups were expected to yield insights into how new local networks were established and maintained.

Establishing the local network Guidance recommends that biodiversity action plan partnerships be initiated by an established lead player in nature conservation within an area (UKLIAG 1997b). In Birmingham this role was performed by the Birmingham and Black Country

Wildlife Trust. The Wildlife Trusts partnership, established in 1912, is the UK's leading conserva tion charity exclusively dedicated to wildlife, and has 47 local Wildlife Trusts across the UK (WT 2002). Wildlife Trusts are lead partners in the majority of the 160 local biodiversity action plans

in the UK (UKBG 1995). As part of the voluntary sector, they provide a number of functions in dif ferent contexts. In Birmingham, the Wildlife Trust engages in a range of voluntary 'charity' activities such as reserve management, surveying and educa tional activities, but also has service-level agreements

with the metropolitan local authorities to comment upon planning applications and undertake contractual site surveying work.

The Birmingham partnership consisted firstly of a small group of key players, with the ability to iden tify and approach a range of wider stakeholders. A

Steering Group was set up in 1997, with officers from the five urban Local Authorities (Birmingham City Council and the boroughs of Walsall, Wolver hampton, Sandwell and Dudley), and representa tives from the Environment Agency, English Nature, the University of Wolverhampton and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The steering group set out basic principles governing the deci sionmaking processes, links to other plans, com

munication within and external to the partnership,




resources (including information, funds, time), a timetable and monitoring arrangements. Their first act was to appoint a Biodiversity Action Plan Officer as the key facilitator (an ecologist working part-time for the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust), and to secure funding for the post for two years from English Nature and the Local Authorities. From this point on the biodiversity action plan assumed an existence of its own.

The members of this initial steering group reflected the Wildlife Trust's immediate contacts. Conservation planners from the local authorities liaise regularly concerning their work with planning departments, while representatives from the government agencies and Universities either were, or had previously been, formally involved with the Trust. For example, while the University of Wolverhampton is one of four major university establishments in the Birming ham and Black Country conurbation, only their aca demics were invited onto the steering group, due to their strong personal links with the Trust.

Having identified relevant species and habitat categories, the steering group held a forum at Wol verhampton University in June 1998 to discuss the format of a draft plan with a wider group of inter ested parties. Six months later, all relevant parties were invited to a larger inaugural meeting of the Birmingham and Black Country biodiversity action plan, held at the Sandwell Valley Park Centre in January 1999. This wider group of potential contrib utors were identified through a variety of informal channels. Many contributors were contacted through organizations on the steering committee, such as local authority reserve managers and tree specialists, local conservation groups through the Trust, and

personal contacts. The Urban Wasteland Habitat Action Plan lead

author was an active member of the Wildlife Trust, and known to have a political interest to match his academic knowledge of urban wasteland ecologies: 'being interested in urban ecology I said I'll do

urban wasteland, gardens, open space and so on' (Lead Author, Urban Wasteland Habitat Action Plan, 13 March 2001). A number of less straight forward channels were also utilized,

I wrote a letter to the council saying they had destroyed the habitat of many invertebrates probably for twenty miles around - quite a unique habitat had been destroyed ... and a guy from the council rang up about the letter, and actually ended up coming over to find out why deadwood is such an important habitat ... They wanted it [the Deadwood Habitat

Action Plan] done on account of my previous letter. (Lead Author, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 2 May 2001)

It was only on account of this contributor that the Deadwood Habitat Action Plan became a fully fledged habitat action plan, having originally been proposed by the steering group as a multiple species action plan. The person in question happened to have had a life-long interest in Diptera (flies), which constituted a 'hobby' only in terms of never having needed to formally exploit it, rather than being in any way an amateur. Having retired from a career in petrochemical geology, time had been freed to

pursue his interest full time in the West Midlands, and through studying locally valuable sites he became involved by the chance correspondence with Wolverhampton Local Authority.

Localizing knowledge Allocating nature A list of plans was put on display at the launch meeting, and attendees 'signed-up' to those that they were interested in contributing to. The list of categories was aspirational - it was not expected that all the proposed plans would be taken up.

We were given a list of subjects to look at, and there was one or two I was interested in . . . and there was a place for each of the proposed subjects, and we just

went and hung around these places. (Lead Author, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 2 May 2001)

This method of organization was selected as a way to efficiently match a large pool of expertise and resources to the biodiversity action plan priorities quickly,

When we got there it was just a case of allocating yourself to what you wanted to work on . . . you could move yourself around and allocate yourself onto various biodiversity action plans. (Ecologist, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 27 March 2001)

This voluntary mode of organization allowed new networks to be formed quickly and efficiently, but as expected, a number of biodiversity action plans

were not taken up. Hence as one biodiversity action plan officer stated,

It was pointless trying to find info on rare woodlice if we didn't have anyone who could write the plan . .. we were obliged to put the stuff in from the UK biodiversity action plan, but when it got down to the



274 Evans

local stuff, we just put in things we knew about. (Biodiversity Action Plan Officer, Staffordshire, 22 February 2001)

For example, Urban Wasteland is not included separately in the UK standard habitats classification (Jackson 2000) against which habitats requiring habitat action plans should be identified (UKLIAG 1997c). The inclusion of the Urban Wasteland Habitat

Action Plan was dependent upon there being an

expert urban ecologist who also actively promotes biodiversity conservation on wasteland amongst the local authorities in the area. Similarly, the Deadwood

Habitat Action Plan only emerged as a fully fledged habitat action plan because of interest and enthusiasm from the attendees at the Sandwell launch.

The flexible nature of the process also had nega

tive consequences, as people were not always allo cated to the most needy or relevant biodiversity action plans to their expertise. A number of people signed up to more than one biodiversity action plan,

which then became untenable in the light of the work involved. This left some biodiversity action plans, such as the Urban Wasteland Habitat Action Plan, being written by one person, while others, such as the Woodlands Habitat Action Plan and Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, were written by teams of more than ten. For example, an academic

with specific expertise said,

I started out on three, the woodlands, the hedgerows and the deadwood, but in the end it was too much so I stayed on the deadwood [Interviewer: You didn't go

on the Urban Wasteland Habitat Action Plan?] No, in retrospect it seems a bit silly. It was all very voluntary, it was structured so you could do as little or as much as you wanted. (Ecologist, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 27 March 2001)

In a few instances, political and personal factors became apparent in off-the-record conversations, concerning antagonism between people or institu

tions, such as a degree of 'bad blood' between

academic ecologists from two local universities concerning a recent government funding decision.

The groups formed at the inaugural meeting elected a lead author, responsible for collating and

drafting the plan, and coordinating it with other plans. They set the general scope of the plan, and identified additional individuals needed to cover each aspect (UKLIAG 1997d). This process was again undertaken through existing contacts and networks on an ad hoc basis,

Because I don't have a job it was decided I should run it, and also at that time I think we decided to get the fungus people on board . . . Mike [blank] - dipterist living in West Brom, I knew him through the dipterous forum, Mike knew fungus people as did Jon, so we put together a list. Eric [blank] living down the road, coleopterist, two or three people for each - flies, beetles, fungus ... we needed some people who worked for the council. Peter [blank] is the guy in charge in general of the parks in Wolverhampton who I had corresponded with about the trees . . . he recommended Tim [blank] in charge of trees in Walsall. (Lead Author, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 2 May 2001)

An overall timetable was then set by the biodiversity action plan officer, to coordinate the sub-groups and ensure that cohesion was achieved within the network through 'effective and regular communica tion' (UKLIAG 1997b, 3).

Planning nature Due to the lack of temporally coherent ecological datasets, quantified estimates of species or habitat decline were not applicable for habitats such as deadwood and urban wasteland, heightening the importance of local expertise borne of familiarity

with the area. In the case of the Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, these streams of expertise were gath ered through contributors writing parts of the plan from their expert point of view, which were then edited together by the lead author. A number of authors noted that this structure placed them at a difficult intersection between a multitude of 'top down' guidance priorities, and 'bottom-up' informa tion and data, which tended to create large amounts of work. The formulation process took eight meetings over about a year, involving an iterative process of writing, coordinated through email. As one con tributor stated, 'it was quite a heavy procedure and took quite a long time' (ecologist, Deadwood

Habitat Action Plan, 27 March 2001). The first draft of the Deadwood Habitat Action Plan was ten times longer than the final draft. Within this framework, the identification of actions

and targets for enhancing habitats established a clear set of dynamics between the contributors. Evaluation and actions,

... (W)ere based on expert knowledges of the people at the meeting, and there were people at the meeting who worked on beetles like me, a guy who worked on fungi and a group of people from forestry related disciplines, people who worked for actual forestry




companies, and people who worked for the council who were aware of the actual orders that were placed on trees, so there was lots of complementary expertise that fed into it. (Ecologist, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 27 March 2001)

The academic ecologists provided general guidance on how to improve habitats, which was translated into practical actions by conservationists, within the limits set out by end-users and managers (typically local authority personnel). For example,

More popped out of the expertise of the people on the biodiversity action plan like myself [research ecologist] . . . although there was lots of documen tation [from English Nature] that informed our decisions. (Ecologist, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 27 March 2001)

While the input of local authorities personnel was critical in making the biodiversity action plan practicable:

Being a Local Authority official, you do get an idea of what is achievable and what is not, which the voluntary sector wasn't able to do particularly. They saw the council as being responsible for everything. (Strategic Conservation Planner, Birmingham Local Planning Authority/Birmingham and Black Country Biodiversity Action Plan Steering Group, 8 November 2000)

This opinion was shared by an amateur conservationist,

What we needed was people on the inside, and Peter [blank] was marvellous. He told us what the council

would do, what they would take no notice of, how to get in, how to influence them, and how to embarrass them! A wonderful guy to have, because what you've got there is essentially a group of specialists. (Lead Author, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 2 May 2001)

Similarly,

The... [local authorities] people were very active. They had very clear ideas, they knew how the park regimes worked and they were very useful people to have around . . . I think otherwise we would have been useless. (Ecologist, Deadwood Habitat Action Plan, 27 March 2001)

There was thus a discernible division of labour, which began by gathering ecological knowledge, refining this knowledge through the more practical expertise of conservationists, and finally translating it into actions and targets with the help of end-users.

This division of labour was in effect internalized in the case of the Urban Wasteland Habitat Action Plan, with the single author providing all three levels of expertise. The individual plans were then edited and compiled together by the steering group, taking over a year to prepare the document for publication.

Embedded geographies

The sociology of involvement What became most obviously apparent when

interviewing contributors was the sociology of personal involvement involved with what is largely a voluntary process. The fact that some actors were far more active than others imparts an unavoidable bias to both the process and product. As one biodiversity action plan author commented off-the record, 'if you want to get your views across, you have to write the document yourself'. Some con tributors mentioned their motivation to raise their profile on the local conservation 'scene', whilst others were involved purely through institutional commitment.

Amateur naturalists may have more time and motivation than a senior strategic planner from a local authority does, and accordingly the majority of biodiversity action plans were lead-authored by conservationists. A species action plan was intended for swallows and house martins (both on the UK Species of Conservation Concern list and each found in the Birmingham and Black Country area), but the intended author was too busy to write the plan.

The group that formulated the Deadwood Habitat Action Plan was dominated by ecologists, conserva tionists and local authority land managers. Given this combination of contributors, the emphasis of the document upon ecologically informed manage

ment of existing local authority sites is hardly sur prising. Pushing this line of argument further, the lead author's own involvement came about through

writing to the local council about the clearance of deadwood from a park and nature reserve near his home, which further directed the Deadwood Habitat Action Plan focus towards park management. The circumstances of his involvement in the biodiversity action plan process structured the subsequent recruit

ment process and overall direction of the document. Similar arguments can be made concerning the

Urban Wasteland Habitat Action Plan. Although formally an academic, the lead author has a back ground in the Birmingham and Black Country



276 Evans

Wildlife Trust working with planners, and is an active contributor to Local Agenda 21. He stated,

Some of the aims were quite explicitly to get these sites used by people . . . it ties in with work I've been doing on Local Agenda 21 ... integrating the environment in its broadest sense with the com munity. (Lead Author, Urban Wasteland Habitat Action Plan, 13 March 2001)

The Local Agenda 21 experience of the author directly influenced the document's emphasis. There are clear relations between the specific networks of actors who formulate plans, and the resultant knowledge, as each biodiversity action plan can be seen as following one of many possible paths between an array of ecological knowledges, and an

array of end-user scenarios.

Local legacies These sociologies of involvement are contextualized by the historical legacy of nature conservation in the area. The local biodiversity action plan network

was largely an extension of the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust who have a history of progressive and inclusive urban conservation, and this legacy is worth considering.

In 1980, following a highly vocal and organized campaign to save a local Site of Special Scientific Interest in Birmingham (Moseley Bog) from housing development, a number of local naturalists, activists, planners and teachers formed the West Midlands Urban Wildlife Group (Bennett, personal communi cation). This group then became the Urban Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and Black Country in 1990, later joining with other urban wildlife groups to form the Urban Wildlife Partnership, which is now the foremost national partnership championing urban wildlife. A number of the original actors in the Moseley Bog campaign and founders of the

West Midlands Urban Wildlife Group subsequently entered local authority planning departments in the area. The close relationship between the local plan ning authorities and local conservationists has been maintained through the current Wildlife Trust, and transmitted in turn to the local biodiversity action planning process. The local biodiversity action plan process was embedded in this specific legacy, which largely defined the local network, the pool of contributors and the resultant actions.

It is instructive to consider briefly how differently the biodiversity action plan for a neighbouring rural area was organized,

We got everyone together who we knew were good ecologists ... and ourselves of course. So we got a very select group, as I didn't want people starting to go on about Red Squirrels or something. So we probably had the best group of nature conservation people in the country, and sat down and discussed what we wanted in it and how we wanted it to look ... I know that's different to Birmingham where they involved everyone from the beginning with lots of people in a big room. (Biodiversity Action Plan Officer, Staffordshire, 22 February 2001)

While this approach allowed more control over the process, it was also less cross-sectoral, being seen very much as an exercise purely in nature conservation. The difference in approach reflects the preferences of the biodiversity action plan officers concerned and the differences between nature conservation in urban and rural contexts, but this in turn is expressed through the extant legacies of nature conservation in each locality. The legacy of the Wildlife Trust in Birmingham reflects the fact that urban nature conservation is implicated more deeply in a wider range of human activities, demanding engagement with diverse local authority departments, residents and business.

The biodiversity action plan process can be seen as a continuation of these local geographical lega cies. An analogy can be made with Massey's (1984) geological metaphor for the accumulation of layers of capital investment over time (Bryson et al. 2002), as the local biodiversity action plan process accretes over previous social networks of nature conserva tion. The geographical heterogeneity of the voluntary sector is widely recognized (Wolch 1990; Kendall and Knapp 1995), and the same argument can be

made about the capacity for environmental activism (While et al. 2003). The geographical unevenness of such historical legacies and resources both exerts a

major influence over, and is accentuated by, the localization of environmental governance.

Path dependency: constraint, opportunity and scale As a consensus-based network, the local biodiver sity action plan process utilizes the existing pool of expertise and institutional capacity. However, in

doing so, three distinct forms of path dependency were imparted to the process. Firstly, the biodiver sity action plan group was comprised of a largely pre-existing group of conservation actors, and the composition of the Steering Group exerted a major strategic bias upon the orientation of the wider




process, as the wider network was built up by

extending the network of the steering committee. As one member of the steering group stated,

... (T)he steering group are nearly all ... either Local Authority ecologists, or conservationists, reps of the major utilities and bodies . .. So I'm not terribly sure that that is absolutely the correct way of going ..

what I feel we ought to have rather than ecologists and conservationists, is regeneration department peo ple in here. (Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council Ranger/Biodiversity Action Plan Contributor, 22 June 2001)

Secondly, the personal circumstances and prefer ences of contributors exerted a strong influence on the focus of the local biodiversity action plans, determining what issues are included and what issues are not. Thirdly, the pre-existing power relations between these actors influenced the final shape of the biodiversity action plan. While path determinacy and geographical embeddedness en hance the social and biological diversity between places, they also raise the question of how original the biodiversity action plan process can be in a locality. For example, the consensus-based mode of knowledge formulation can easily reproduce pre existing networks and power relations (Hillier 1999), as can be seen to some extent in the groupings of actors who auto-allocated themselves to each plan. As one steering group member stated,

... (W)e've got back to the situation now where once again the herp [herpetological] group are all herp enthusiasts, and the bird group is all bird enthusiasts with a butterfly person in it. (Birmingham and Black Country Local Biodiversity Action Plan Steering Group Member, 22 June 2001)

These forms of path dependency lend the local a Giddensian character, simultaneously enabling and constraining the process. The use of existing local resources are maximized, and knowledge becomes localized within geographically embedded networks of people and institutions. However, echoing the arguments of transition theorists working upon post-socialist regions (Grabher and Stark 1997), the process fails to break entirely from pre-existing power relations and knowledges, casting its transformative potential into doubt. Just as the biodiversity action planning process is constrained by local legacies and resources, so it is these networks that facilitate local action. Accordingly, because the institutional and organizational capacities of different areas vary,

their ability to respond to initiatives such as local biodiversity action planning will also vary.

The question of inclusion is instructive with respect to the original aim of the paper to explore the gap between the rhetoric and practice of 'local' environmental governance. While it seems obvious to say that only people with either an obligation or interest took part, it is important to note in the context of 'inclusive' governance that very few 'real' local people (i.e. residents) were involved. The out come largely results from the activities of a small group of like-minded, educated middle-class people who were, or had been at some time members of or involved with the activities of the local Wildlife

Trust. Thus the inclusivity that was achieved between a specific set of actors simultaneously excluded others. But while current orthodoxy would attribute this to a failure to fully implement the communica tive aims of the biodiversity action planning process, the notion of path dependency points to a more structural explanation, related to the scale at which the local is applied.

The Birmingham and Black Country area could be as accurately described as a metropolitan region, as a locality. Local Agenda 21 schemes occurring at the level of wards and districts, which can cover areas of less than one fiftieth this size, also represent 'local' action. The scale at which the local is imple

mented will have major consequences for the type of inclusion that is achieved. Extending this argu ment further, it will have a structural effect upon the overall form governance takes, as certain organiza tions will be able to operate at these levels, and others won't. Accordingly, it is possible to say that the forms of path dependency that become dominant in local action are determined loosely by scale. The rather fuzzy notion of local action would be given

more clarity and purpose in practice if policies for environmental governance were more sensitive to the question of scale. Such sensitivity would allow greater predetermination over what types of 'local' action and inclusion were to be achieved.

Conclusions

This paper has outlined the specifically local soci ology of network building and knowledge produc tion involved in formulating the Birmingham and Black Country Biodiversity Action Plan, from its inception to its completion. The national guidance notes setting out the framework for the process drew strongly upon the rhetoric of local governance, such



2 78 Evans

as inclusivity, responsiveness and partnership. In practice, the implementation of the generic national

framework was people-driven, building upon pre existing networks of individuals and expertise, and socially embedded, within institutional and political legacies. It brought ecologists, conservationists and end-users/implementers together in an effective partnership, that facilitated the production of 'localized' knowledge, i.e. knowledge that was both

based upon and achievable within the local environ mental and organizational context. This local embed dedness was conceptualized as path dependency, in terms of the network of people and organizations that formed the steering group, the extension of this network, and the processes of allocating and planning species and habitat action plans.

The path dependency of the process was both constraining and enabling: if local expertise was available then plans were written, but if it was not then proposed plans were discarded. Thus the plan is localized two-fold, in terms of its responsiveness to the nature of an area, and the existence of local expertise in the area. The local character of the Birmingham and Black Country Biodiversity Action Plan is thus a function of the inclusion of certain people and natures, and the exclusion of others. This dual character contextualizes the successes and failures of the process, but also indicates the need for a more critical understanding of the local.

The business of negotiating the complex terrain of sustainable development is inescapably geographi cal, localized in certain places and at certain times. This in itself flags up the tendency of environmental policy to adopt the homogenous positive rhetoric of local action rather uncritically, assuming that a similar set of virtues will be achieved through local action. In practice, the local is a heterogeneous concept applied at a number of scales, and its

supposed benefits are only ever partial and geo graphically embedded, i.e. path dependent. Different levels of localness create different constellations of

governance, and the pejorative values attached to local action vary accordingly in practice. The local as a scale of application should be considered more carefully in policy, as it has important consequent effects on governance in terms of the format for local action that is achieved.

Acknowledgements

This work exists thanks to the continuing financial support

of the UK research councils. The fieldwork was conducted

under a joint Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)/NERC interdisciplinary research studentship (award no. R00429934133), and has been written up under the auspices of an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (reference no. T026271328). I would like to thank all my colleagues in the school at the University of Birmingham for their support, in particular John Bryson, Jon Sadler and John

Gerrard for their stream of ideas, encouragement and use

ful comments, and the people I interviewed who were kind

enough to share their knowledge, experiences and opinions with me. The usual disclaimers apply.

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