Local Knowledge
A workshop, “Local Knowledge and its Global Consequences: New Perspectives on Environment and Development,” took place at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University on April 7 and 8. Sheila Jasanoff, Marybeth Long-Martello, Clark Miller and Charis Thompson were the organizers. Support for the workshop came from a NSF grant Global Environmental Assessment Project based at the Kennedy School.
Prior to this workshop, a weekly seminar on local knowledge took place at Harvard during autumn 1999. Participants in the seminar explored the meanings, uses and implications of “local knowledge” in many settings. They discussed lay-expert clashes regarding agriculture and deforestation in Thailand (Tim Forsyth); the Convention to Combat Desertification (Elisabeth Corell, MIT); computer modeling of agriculture in the Great Plains (David Cash); the AIDS blood crisis in France and the United States (Jessie Saul), international forestry programs (Cathy Fogel), the Human Genome Diversity Project (Jenny Reardon); the Biosafety Protocol under the Convention on Biological Diversity (Aarti Gupta); and “quality of life” estimates under the World Health Organization (Dele Ogunseitan). Whereas local knowledge is often assumed to be place-based, these seminars elucidated ways in which local knowledge can be tied to particular communities, histories, institutional settings and expert cultures, as well as to geographic locations.
Building on the seminar series, the workshop on April 7 and 8 examined “local knowledge” as it relates to various environment and development contexts. The conference opened with case studies on the creation and commodification of local knowledge through parataxonomy training programs in Costa Rica (David Tackacs) and bioprospecting arrangements in Mexico and the United States (Cori Hayden). A second set of case studies examined local responses to the Orissa Cyclone disaster in India (Shiv Visvanathan) and the Thailand case (Forsyth). Constructions of locality and identity connected papers on elephant hunters and gun design in nineteenth century South Africa (William Storey); the role of missing expertise in the Bhopal gas disaster as a way to understand risk societies (Ravi Rajan); environmental discourses in the European Union (Brian Wynne); and interactions between local identity and pollution numbers in the United States (Alastair Iles).
On the second day, presentations on local knowledge and global politics explored various approaches to understanding and conserving biodiversity. These papers discussed the pastoral practices of the Masaai in conserving Kenyan savanna (David Western); how the new field of genomics localizes and universalizes DNA (Stephen Hilgartner); the Biosafety Protocol (Gupta); and constructions of local knowledge and indigenous identity under the Convention on Biological Diversity (Marybeth Long-Martello). Three papers on “disciplining the local” addressed monitoring practices for climate change and acid rain (Stephen Zehr); the roles of standards in North-South technology transfer (Judith Reppy); and the development by the World Wildlife Fund of sustainability indicators which neglect national boundaries (Clark Miller).
As the workshop presentations and discussions illustrated, local knowledge inhabits environment and development discourses, appears as an organizing principle in policy processes, features in the construction of identity for certain groups, provides a basis for asserting voices in political debates, and is part of material culture such as markets. In their diverse empirical material and theoretical approaches, the papers collectively suggest new conceptions of local (and global) knowledge, highlight previously overlooked sites of knowledge creation, draw attention to knowledge as a commodity, and investigate new interactions between local knowledge and local, national and transnational systems of governance. Notions of local knowledge are embedded in much theory and practice in environment and development arenas. Yet the varied meanings and implications of this concept remain largely under-theorized. This situation provides an opportunity for S&TS scholars to engage with new and diverse audiences, and to investigate issues outside the realms of most S&TS research.
The organizers plan to pursue an edited compilation of workshop papers and thus to continue exploring new forms of critical thought about local knowledge. The book’s organizing themes will likely address the role of technology in constructing, embedding and mobilizing local knowledge. It will focus on the means by which people in environment and development fields define and translocate the “local” and “global.” In addition, the book will examine international institutions as previously unrecognized sites for local knowledge creation.
author’s address: marybeth_long@harvard.edu