Kangaroos in the Australian Capital Territory: An institutional ethnography of human conflicts over wildlife management

Australia has long had the world’s worst rate of terrestrial mammalian extinctions. Disagreements over wildlife management can be a significant concern for those trying to address species decline, as they may delay or prevent planned interventions. They also present an opportunity to share previously unconsidered knowledge, strengthen communities, increase socio-ecological knowledge, and enhance participation in social and ecological programs and processes. My thesis aims to shed light on these disagreements and the implications for managing them, focusing on human conflicts over the management of eastern grey kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).Since the early 1990s, debates have raged in the ACT over whether kangaroo grazing caused detrimental economic and ecological impacts and whether killing them would alleviate these problems. Such concerns were brought before the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal (ACAT) three times by three different community groups that challenged the ACT Government’s decisions to issue the licences required to kill kangaroos. Each time, the decisions were upheld. The hearings contributed to the creation of radical new legislation: the ACT Nature Conservation Act 2014. Following its enactment, protests significantly declined. Outward appearances indicated that the ACT Government’s interventions were immensely successful.However, I attended one of the hearings and observed the starkly inconsistent way the ACAT panel members overseeing the case handled the witnesses and their evidence. The official recordings capture the dialogue throughout the proceedings and illustrate how policy and legal texts central to kangaroo management in the ACT were mobilised and transformed. They also demonstrate how the ACAT panel members developed processes to identify the ‘right witness’ and determine what constituted acceptable scientific evidence. My investigation reveals how such processes favoured the ACT Government’s witnesses and evidence. This ensured a business-as-usual approach to kangaroo management, while maintaining the appearance of delivering on its promised aims of fostering ‘open government’, particularly by facilitating ‘public participation’, and using the ‘best scientific knowledge’ to inform kangaroo management practices. The licencing and legislative changes that occurred after the close of the final hearing foreclosed democratic processes and criminalised dissent.My research is grounded in institutional ethnography (IE), a framework developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith. IE research examines texts in social contexts to understand how they facilitate the coordination of institutional action. The research commences in people’s everyday worlds to discover how texts coordinate action translocally through what Smith called ‘ruling relations’. At the outset, the researcher identifies a ‘disjuncture’ whereby a way of knowing from a ruling perspective differs from how it is experienced in everyday life. This occurred when I observed the ACAT panel members’ uneven handling of witnesses and their evidence. The researcher then establishes a ‘problematic’ that directs questions not previously posed but ‘latent’ in people’s everyday lives. The problematic I explore asks how human conflicts over kangaroo management in the ACT were suppressed through and beyond the administrative review system. To do so, I trace how documents were mobilised to uphold and extend the ruling relations associated with managing both kangaroos and human conflicts over kangaroo management.The key contribution this research makes is to trace in great detail the processes employed by the ACT Government that gave the appearance of enacting ‘open government’ and drawing on ‘best science’. I highlight the overriding influence of the economic imperatives of the ACT Government and commercial interests, and how they compromised both democratic processes and the knowledge upon which kangaroo management in the ACT was founded. As this work involved several arms of the government, this research adds to the growing number of institutional ethnographies that span multiple institutions. While institutional ethnographies often reflect how ruling relations are maintained by activating a stable authorising text, my research demonstrates how strengthening ruling relations was possible by maintaining key texts in a state of instability. The IE ontology on which this research is grounded has made significant contributions to wildlife management literature, particularly in relation to enhancing our understanding of human conflicts over wildlife management. Investigations in this area rarely consider the involvement of the management agency and are overwhelmingly quantitative. My research demonstrates why the former is imperative and how rich and important insights are generated through qualitative research methods, particularly through IE.