Every Grain of Sand: A Chronotope of a Policy Conflict

The paper explores a policy conflict over sand and gravel mining in a rural area in the Czech Republic. For more than 12 years, numerous efforts have been made to start gravel mining close to Moravský Písek – an area with a long agricultural tradition and the fifth large drinking reservoir in the Czech Republic. This plan agreed by the Ministry of the Environment raised a wave of protests among nearby municipalities. According to them, the whole process has been accompanied by a number of dubious steps by public authorities and regulatory bodies. This case might represent a typical example of a clash between lower tiers of governments and their civil society supporters with higher tiers of governments. However, this vertical conflict is accompanied by numerous horizontal conflicts – between public authorities, experts or public interests. Last but not least, the conflict has an important temporal dimension. The paper uses the Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope as referring to the unity of time and space inherent to a narrative in order to highlight an interconnectedness of geographical and temporal dimensions in analysed policy narratives. The paper explores the role of future imaginaries in policy conflicts. It employs Jens Beckert’s two modes of relating to the future – (1) calculation and (2) utopia – and examines their role in policy narratives. From this perspective, policy conflict can also be reframed as a conflict among different kind of risks calculations, imaginations and emotions. What future imaginaries are articulated in the public debate, how those imaginaries are justified and what responses they produce. Doing so the paper departs from a discourse analysis of policy documents and public hearings. The paper examines how local actors manipulate with the scope of conflict in discursive, spatial and temporal dimensions and how local conflicts are related to macro-debates and global risks – such as climate change or crisis of democracy in this particular case. The paper intends to bridge macro-micro distinctions in studies of policy conflicts and to describe how broader policy conflicts might be incorporated in local arenas, what are consequences of those discursive strategies and what is the role of time and space in studies of policy conflicts.