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environmental governance. Appropriating Bennett’s culture complex we could call this a

“biocultural complex”.

This turn to cultural diversity can also be understood as being modeled on

biodiversity discourses. Deborah Litvin (1997, p. 188) argues that the ‘birthplace of diversity

discourse in Western tradition lies in the realm of natural sciences and philosophy’, beginning

with Platomic essentialism and then systematised through the work of Linnaeus, the father of

taxonomy. Through the case study of workplace diversity discourses, Litvin argues that such

discourses non-reflexively integrate ‘essentialist ontological assumptions’ from the realm of

natural sciences (Litvin 1997, p. 188) where ‘the presence of the same essence is inferred on

the basis of observed similarity’ (Litvin 1997, p. 191). In the case of cultural diversity, there

are assumptions about the kinds of values and knowledge that exist, as I will elaborate in the

next section. And in a similar way to the understanding that biodiversity is essential to the

maintenance of the world and for successful adaptation (think of Darwin’s natural selection),

cultural diversity is understood as a philosophic reserve needed for adaptation in the face of

global environmental destruction and globalisation.

Remaking a Nature/Culture Binary

So far I have suggested that there was a cultural turn in global organisations that were

charged with the task of environmental governance (in addition to other forms of global

governance). In this section I suggest that in the same period there was also an environmental

turn in many social science fields and a revival of nature/culture debates. Both these turns

were related as part of a culture complex in the realm of environmental governance.

Furthermore, both turns led to similar conclusions: diverse cultures (in its limited sense as I

have just discussed) offer a solution to environmental problems and the quagmire of Western

sciences and environmental management, by widening the ecological framework upon which

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