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environmental management is largely based. The purpose of the current section is to illustrate

the connection, which took effect between these academic criticisms and the discourses of

cultural diversity coming from global institutions like UNESCO. Across these institutional

spaces, academics pushed the boundaries of the nature/culture discourse and we could say

that they initiated a re-imagination of a previous environmental order. It was not that the

nature/culture debates were new, but wider environmental issues and the potential of

sustainability posed new ways to think through and analyse this binary. In this section I do

not wish to reopen these debates as criticisms of nature/culture dualisms are now well

established. Rather, my aim is to look at specific ideas that appeared in relation to

environmental governance. Critiques were taken up in two ways. First, attention was directed

towards non-Western knowledge, variously referred to as traditional, indigenous, or local

ecological knowledge. Secondly, there was a growing body of theoretical work (ANT,

Science and Technology Studies) that addressed the study of science and the relationship

between nature and culture, the human and more-than-human. This work unsettled the

nature/culture binary and at the same time, as I will argue, further dualisms emerged –

local/global, traditional/modern – that continue to play a key role in marine sustainability

debates today.

th
Much of the anthropological debates of nature and culture of the 20 century were
premised on the assumption that either nature was the basic determinant of culture

(environmental determinism), or that cultures imposed meaning onto nature (relativist,

structuralist, constructivism). For those on the environmental determinist side – materialists,

cultural ecologists, socio-biologists, and some strands of Marxist anthropology – cultural

features, as well as human behaviour and social institutions, were seen as expressions of or

adaptive responses to environmental constraints (Pálsson & Descola 1996, p. 2). On the other

side were numerous positions within anthropology that in quite different ways rejected the

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