Accounting, auditing and accountability in Canada's national parks.

摘要

One response to the increasing densification of the global commons and the environmental stresses attendant with this densification is the protected area, perhaps best represented in the Canadian context by the national park. Studies of the many issues concerning protected areas are relatively numerous, but there are few which adopt either a cultural theoretical or political economy approach. Even fewer examine accounting, auditing, and accountability in this context. This gap in the literature is in need of addressing if there is to be a fuller understanding of the protected areas phenomenon and the human dimensions associated with these spatial and temporal organizations and conceptualizations.;Adopting the work of French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and others, this study focuses on accounting, auditing, and accountability in Canada's national parks system. Specifically, it uses Bourdieu's insights in the areas of social relations and language to reconceptualize the manner in which the accounts provided by protected areas "stewards, users, and evaluators" are understood. In the context of Canada's national parks, these stewards, users, and evaluators and their respective accounts include (1) Parks Canada and its annual, corporate, and state of the parks reports, (2) the Banff-Bow Valley Study and its roundtable dialogue, and (3) the Auditor General of Canada and its national parks audits.;Supplemented with primary and secondary interview data, this study's examination of these accounts illuminates the production, dissemination, and consumption of national parks discourses of conduct, and how those discourses play a role in the maintenance of existing practices and relations in both Canada and Canada's national parks. The study also illuminates the "contest" that is going on in Canada's national parks, and how that contest is not one between "protection" and "use", as the common sense would suggest, but rather between a dominant (white, first-world, and corporatist) group of social actors and a dominated or marginalized group of social actors (the poor and indigenous peoples). The study further links these discourses to the two projects of ecological modernization and economic globalization and their dialectically-related material and symbolic, and production and consumption-oriented, manifestations.;Numerous theoretical and practical implications of the use of this study's specific "power-based" framework are provided as are a number of theoretical, empirical and contextual limitations. Finally, as a means of providing a foundation for both future inquiry and popular understanding, the study offers a number of directions for future research and an easily understood and "digestible" summary, the latter being offered in the form of a "fairy tale".