Posthumanist Participation. Beyond extractivism in the Dutch Wadden Sea Area.

Summary

Posthumanist Participation develops a novel approach to participation in natural resource governance to explore how it can resist extractivism. Instead of seeing participation as located only in practices assigned as such, posthumanist participation is multiple and decentralized, performative and material, and situated in problematic humanist legacies. Extractivist regimes have thrived by exploiting those who continue to fall de facto outside of the domains of the humanist human. This dissertation addresses this sacrifice logic by deconstructing binary understandings of exploitable/non-exploitable bodies through tracing how distinctions between (various types of) bodies come into being. The concepts intra-action, response-ability and affective atmospheres aid the analyses of case studies concerning gas and salt mining and dredging in the Dutch Wadden Sea Area. A posthumanist participatory approach highlights that to be able to participate, participants need to be actively enacted as well as recognizably reproduced in other constellations to ensure their continued existence.