Stakeholders’ conflicting orders and classifications of the environment and land use as drivers of environmental conflicts

• We analyse ontological conflicts between non-moderns and moderns, and between moderns. • We differentiate between orders and classifications as key mechanisms of these orders. • Differences between stakeholder groups’ orders and classifications are conflict drivers. • The spatial extent of orders and classifications and imbalanced power relations drive conflicts. Political Ontology addresses mainly ontological conflicts between non-moderns and moderns. However, only a few studies analyse the ontological conflicts between moderns. To develop more fine-grained analytical tools to study ontological conflicts between non-moderns and moderns, as well as between moderns, we build on the literature on the social, economic and political orders of nature and society and their respective classifications, which are the key mechanisms for producing these orders. We analyse empirically the two levels of the conflicting ontologies: the orders and respective classifications of the environment and land use by the local community, state entities, infrastructure, and housing developers to better understand three environmental conflicts in the indigenous village of El Morro in the Colombian Caribbean. We use the following empirical data: mental maps by the local community, spatial planning maps by the municipal and regional state entities, and environmental management plans and vegetation assessments by the infrastructure and housing developers. In the empirical case, we are able to show differences of orders and classifications between the stakeholder groups, which drive the conflicts being analysed. Furthermore, the spatial extent of the orders and their respective classifications was a conflict driver. Moreover, the imbalanced power relations between the stakeholder groups and the exclusion of the local communities’ orders and classifications from the project plans also exacerbated the conflicts. The differences within the stakeholder groups’ orders and classifications as well as the different methods for measuring the environment and the land use in El Morro were not noted as conflict drivers.