Privileging Knowledge Claims in Collaborative Regulatory Management: an Ethnography of Marginalization

We examine how a good faith effort at collaboration with Native peoples in the regulation of white-fronted geese in North America nonetheless resulted in their marginalization. Our investigation explores how dramatically different ways of knowing are articulated and contested in a complex, structurally differentiated, and highly professionalized institutional setting—the Migratory Bird Management Regime of North America. We find local knowledge emerging among and being legible to the street-level administrators of the management regime, but unable to penetrate regional management, where methodological commitments reinforced existing problem frames and administrative objectives.