The Politics of Knowledge in Inclusive Development and Innovation

David Ludwig, Birgit Boogaard, Phil Macnaghten, Cees Leeuwis, David Ludwig, Birgit Boogaard, Phil Macnaghten, Cees Leeuwis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000478785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book develops an integrated perspective on the practices and politics of making knowledge work in inclusive development and innovation.

While debates about development and innovation commonly appeal to the authority of academic researchers, many current approaches emphasise the plurality of actors with relevant expertise for addressing livelihood challenges. Adopting an action-oriented and reflexive approach, this volume explores the variety of ways in which knowledge works, paying particular attention to dilemmas and controversies. The six parts of the book address the complex interplay of knowledge and politics, starting with the need for knowledge integration in the first part and decolonial perspectives on the politics of knowledge integration in the second part. The following three parts focus on the practices of inclusive development and innovation through three major themes of learning for transformative change, evidence, and digitisation. The final part of the book addresses the governance of knowledge and innovation in the light of political struggles about inclusivity.

Exploring conceptual and practical themes through case studies from the Global North and South, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners researching and working in development studies, epistemology, innovation studies, science and technology studies, and sustainability studies more broadly.

Part I

Crossing epistemic boundaries

1
MAKING TRANSDISCIPLINARITY WORK

An epistemology of inclusive development and innovation

David Ludwig and Birgit K. Boogaard

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112525-1

Introduction

‘Development’ and ‘innovation’ are concepts in perpetual crisis. After almost 30 years of post-development discourse (Asher and Wainwright, 2019; Escobar, 1991; Sachs, 1992), there is little shock value in challenging development as a concept that has contributed to global inequality and environmental destruction by pushing agendas of economic growth and modernisation onto the Global South. The concept of innovation has also long lost its innocence. While innovation narratives often appeal to depoliticised and supposedly neutral notions of progress, it has been widely argued that innovation discourses strategically highlight certain practices and technologies that reinforce growth- and modernisation-oriented development agendas (Blok and Lemmens, 2015; Ludwig and Macnaghten, 2020).

There is no shortage of attempts to reimagine both development and innovation by making them more inclusive, responsible, participatory, social, and sustainable (Heeks, Foster, and Nugroho, 2014; Pansera and Owen, 2018; Siddiqi and Collins, 2017; Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten, 2013). Despite this diversity of frameworks, development and innovation scholars commonly emphasise the need to shift target outcomes from an exclusive focus on economic growth to the inclusion of societal and environmental concerns (Chataway, Hanlin, and Kaplinsky, 2014; Gupta and Vegelin, 2016). At the same time, it is not sufficient to swap target outcomes in a top-down process that fails to include affected stakeholders in the negotiations of these targets and the pathways of achieving them. This chapter focuses on the epistemic conditions of this process of reimagination by addressing different forms of knowledge and their interactions in transdisciplinary approaches to development and innovation.

Attempts to reimagine development and innovation have become closely connected to wider debates about inclusive strategies for knowledge production that are framed through ‘collaboration,’ ‘co-creation,’ ‘citizen science,’ ‘intercultural dialogue,’ ‘interdisciplinarity,’ ‘multi-stakeholder platforms,’ ‘participatory design,’ ‘participatory action research,’ ‘science society dialogue,’ ‘transdisciplinarity,’ ‘public engagement,’ and ‘open science.’ While all of these notions have different genealogies, they are connected through an overall concern with opening up knowledge production and research processes for input from heterogeneous actors. This chapter focuses on transdisciplinarity as arguably the most developed framework for reimagining the epistemology of inclusive development and innovation beyond a mere change of target outcomes.

The need for transdisciplinary approaches has been widely emphasised in the development domain and is commonly motivated by social-environmental challenges that are not suited for narrow disciplinary solutions but require negotiation and heterogeneous forms of situated knowledge (Brown, Harris, and Russel, 2010; OECD, 2020; Pohl, Truffer, and Hadorn, 2017). The following section motivates this move towards transdisciplinarity by interpreting two case studies of agricultural development projects as studies of epistemic failures. The section thereafter builds on this analysis through introducing transdisciplinarity as an inclusive epistemology that has the potential to integrate heterogeneous forms of situated knowledge in the negotiation of social-environmental change. While transdisciplinarity takes knowledge diversity seriously, we argue that its integrationist agenda has been limited by both methodological, political, and historical factors, in which there continues to be a hegemony of Global North epistemologies over Indigenous and local epistemologies on account of a complex fusion of colonial legacy, scientism, and unequal power relations. For decades ‘decolonisation’ of knowledge has been addressed by post-development scholars (amongst many, see Escobar, 1991) and African philosophers (amongst many, see Wiredu, 1995), and over the past years is gaining increased attention by a wider audience in academia and beyond (see, for example, Brahma et al., 2018). However, the underlying questions of how to bring a diversity of epistemologies, ontologies, and values together are far from straightforward. Making transdisciplinarity work requires moving beyond an integrationist agenda that recognises knowledge diversity only insofar as it can be accommodated in a shared academic framework. Knowledge integration matters, but a critical transdisciplinarity also needs to engage with its limitations through transformative dialogues about epistemology, ontology, and values.

Epistemic failures in agricultural development projects

The agricultural modernisation paradigm in which ‘traditional’ ways of farming are viewed as in need of transformation to more ‘modern’ ways of farming—with improved productivity, increased specialisation, at larger scale, leading to increased farmer incomes—has been imposed on smallholder farmers across the globe. This paradigm has been widely criticised, because the arsenal of agricultural modernisation innovations—machines, fertilisers, pesticides, seed varieties—often opened countries to a global agri-food industry that left environments degraded, traditional agricultural practices eroded, and smallholder farmers dispossessed (Van der Ploeg et al., 2000; McMichael, 2015). These critiques led to the desire to move away from the agricultural modernisation paradigm, and instead focus on community-led rural development (Van der Ploeg et al., 2000). In this line, there have been numerous approaches to make agricultural development more inclusive—ranging from participatory action research (PAR) to the formation of multi-stakeholder platforms—focused on agriculture’s contributions to ensuring food security and improving livelihoods. However, the ideal of agricultural modernisation has not disappeared from the stage entirely and is still reflected in present-day agricultural development approaches and programmes, ranging from large-scale industrial agriculture initiatives to ‘sustainable intensification’ by smallholders. The aim of this section is not to provide an in-depth analysis of all critiques on agricultural modernisation, but rather to focus on the epistemic dimension of it, while recognising that this is but one mode of analysis and critique.

The wider characterisation of the agricultural modernisation paradigm as a neo-liberal perspective on development dominated by market institutions and formal market logic (van der Ploeg, 2009) interacts with a more specific assumption of an epistemic hierarchy between academic researchers and local communities. The ‘firm belief in technological solutions and economic progress’ (Boogaard, 2019, p. 275) in the agricultural modernisation paradigm often remained unquestioned because modern science and technology were positioned as the only valid source of knowledge for improving livelihoods, while at the same characterising local communities in terms of a knowledge deficit. This section will focus on how this assumption of an epistemic hierarchy created and reinforced epistemic failures by marginalising local forms of knowledge that are of crucial importance for responding to social-environmental challenges and for developing innovations that reflect the needs and perspectives of local communities. Epistemic failures can therefore be understood as symptoms of an underlying hierarchical epistemology that is inadequate for recognising and integrating a diversity of knowledges. In this sense, agricultural modernisation can be interpreted as producing: (1) epistemic failures that over-focus on academic knowledge while excluding the knowledge of local communities; and (2) a hierarchical epistemology that generates these failures through an assumption of the superiority of Global North epistemologies that structurally excludes Indigenous and local epistemologies. Two case studies are used to underpin these arguments: Lansing’s (2009) study of rice farming in Bali, and Boogaard’s (2021) study on epistemic injustice in a livestock development project in Mozambique.

Lasing’s case study of agricultural modernisation discusses the effects of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ on rice farming in Bali that was organised around water temples that would regulate the flow of water to subaks, systems of terraced paddy fields, through religious rituals. Green Revolution engineers, guided by a narrow focus on scientific knowledge, not only failed to recognise the functions of these religious practices but also dismissed the system as a whole as inefficient and in need of modernisation through agricultural innovations ranging from novel rice varieties to externally introduced pesticides to more efficiently organised irrigation schedules. Lansing (2009, p. 115) summarises this attitude by quoting a ‘frustrated American irrigation engineer’ claiming that ‘these people don’t need a high priest, they need a hydrologist!’

The narrow focus on externally produced scientific knowledge and the exclusion of local epistemic resources motivated a modernisation programme th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Making knowledge work differently: The politics of knowledge in inclusive development and innovation
• PART I Crossing epistemic boundaries
• PART II Decolonising knowledge integration
• PART III Learning for transformative change: Creating space for diversity and dialogues
• PART IV Rethinking evidence in development
• PART V Negotiating technological change and digitalisation
• PART VI Governing knowledge and innovation
• Index