Pursuing plurality: Exploring the synergies and challenges of knowledge co-production in multifunctional landscape design

Knowledge co-production has emerged as an important conceptual and processual tool in sustainability research addressing the needs of equity and inclusion. Indigenous communities and local people have engaged with the process of knowledge production, foregrounding their historical relationships with landscapes, based on their unique worldviews and knowledges. However, knowledge co-production, especially for multi-functional landscapes remains a contentious and complicated affair with enduring issues of power-sharing related to the different socio-political positions of stakeholders. This work explores the synergies and challenges in knowledge co-production for landscape re-design in the south Island of Aotearoa NZ through an assessment of the work done at the Centre for Excellence, Lincoln University. At this center, a multi-stakeholder team is grappling with designing a farm, through a transdisciplinary framework that attempts to include multiple worldviews. This work explores the various stages of the co-production process, analyzing the exchanges between various members as they prepare for co-production, the knowledge produced through this engagement, and how this knowledge is being utilized to further the goal of sustainability. Our results show that significant gaps remain between co-production theory and co-production practice which are a result of the mismanagement of the co-production process, the mismatch in the time and spatial scales of project goals, and the differences in the values and objectives of the different stakeholders. However, the process of co-production, though flawed, leads to the building of more open relationships between the stakeholders, and leads to some very meaningful knowledge products that address the multi-temporal and multi-spatial aspirations of multi-functional landscapes in Aotearoa NZ, while contributing to the broader scholarship on co-production in sustainability. Finally, both synergies and challenges prove meaningful when challenging the roadblocks to the inclusion of a diversity of worldviews, by clearly highlighting the places of engagement and why they were made possible. We suggest that knowledge co-production attempts in multi-functional landscapes around the world should attempt a similar assessment of their process. This can help build better relationships between scientists and IPLC, address disciplinary bias and marginalization of non-expert opinions, while also ensuring the relevance of the research to the multiple stakeholders of the land

Book Review: Designs for the Pluriverse

Book review of Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds by Arturo Escobar, published by Duke University Press

From climate adaptation to climate justice: Critical reflections on the IPCC and Himalayan climate knowledges

The IPCC reports represent a powerful discursive and institutional undertaking. However, the IPCC has faced criticism for its different organizational and functional biases which include a geographical bias favoring experts from the global north, a gender bias in favor of men, a disciplinary bias in favor of the natural sciences over the social sciences and humanities, and finally, a cosmological bias favoring western science over indigenous knowledges. In recent years, scholars have noted changes in the IPCC, pointing at the inclusion of social science/humanities perspectives and a growing engagement with plural worldviews. Despite such forays, all aspects of knowledge production within the IPCC still echo the aspirations of nation states and quantitative models of attribution and detection. Climate knowledge production in the Himalayan region reflects this reality. In this essay, we focus on our personal experiences with local communities from the Himalayas and bring it in dialogue with our experiences with the IPCC knowledge production process. In doing so, we have two objectives: first, to highlight marginalized stories of climate-society relationships that challenge normative climate science/policy and, second, in light of these stories, suggest some salient considerations required to foreground justice and equity in future engagements with the IPCC, which explores the production of democratic knowledge and how such knowledge can be wielded to achieve regional climate justice

Does awareness of climate change lead to worry? Exploring community perceptions through parallel analysis in rural Himalaya

Human dimensions of climate change (HDCC) research overwhelmingly presents community perspectives on climate change and its impacts through single epistemic frameworks. This limits the possible platforms that community voices can access within scientific scholarship. Many HDCC interdisciplinary collaborations pursue the goal of data triangulation and attempt to address complex social-ecological problems through analytical integration. This raises questions about the comparative validity of different epistemologies and often leads to unequal power sharing between the different disciplinary practitioners. Our research addresses both of these issues by operationalizing a plural epistemological framework that depends on parallel analysis. This framework consists of a quantitative approach, inspired by hazards theory and land-change science research, and a qualitative approach, from political ecology. We explored perceptions of climate change in rural households in Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayan region. While the results reveal a high awareness of climate change within the community, most individuals and households do not consider the impacts of climate change to be a significant worry. The results for each approach complement each other. They provide the community with more than one platform to voice their experiences and reveal the complex relationships producing climate change knowledge in the region. Future research should attempt such parallel analysis in other locations to validate its utility in addressing issues of equity and marginalization between research epistemologies, as well as between experts and local communities

Mountains of inequality: encountering the politics of climate adaptation across the Himalaya

There has been a widespread call for the development of transformative adaptation knowledge and strategies in the Himalayan region because of the intensifying onset of climate change impacts. But such transformative thinking is absent in much of Himalayan climate knowledge production, which builds on environmental deterministic and techno-managerial renditions of exceptional precarity; advocates for an increase in the scientific and expert driven projects on the ground; and remains rooted in the scalar realities of the nation-state. This paper contributes to the rich scholarship that counterbalances depoliticized renditions of climate change adaptation, by presenting “everyday stories of adaptation” that have emerged from the authors’ work alongside Himalayan communities. In this work we ask, who is the subject in Himalayan climate adaptation discourse and policies? And how can their stories help us envision an adaptation praxis, which challenges regional narratives of crisis and provides alternatives to climate reductionist thinking/planning, by foregrounding the intersectionality and plurality of communities and ecologies? The stories come from three parts of the Himalaya: Uttarakhand, Khumbu, and Assam, and highlight the daily labor for adaptation and its mercurial relationship with the labor for survival. We find that intertwined with changing climate-society relationships are, historical caste privileges and changing generational relationships to land; the complicated engagements between indigeneity, communal sovereignty, and exclusionary institutional mandates; and life with ethnoreligious othering in an aqueous and geopolitically fluid borderland. Together these stories witness the relational social-ecological worlds of regional inhabitants, challenging their powerless and pejorative depictions through climate reductive framings. We conclude with a set of objectives to enable more hopeful and just adaptation futures

A plural climate studies framework for the Himalayas

The production of climate change knowledge is mired in issues of equity and justice. Decision-making and governance are often deeply biased towards dominant scientific/market-driven frameworks, excluding plural place-based perspectives. The characterization of the Himalayas as ‘exceptionally precarious’ to climate change builds on the enduring legacy of the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation. This ignores how climatic transformations, both material and discursive, remain embedded within historic relationships of power. Recent critical scholarship has challenged such dominant, elite techno-managerial narratives. Our paper engages with such critiques to democratize Climate knowledge production pertaining to the Himalayas. Through a synthesis of scholarship in post/anti/de-colonial studies, political ecology and environmental justice we reveal the power-knowledge hierarchies undergirding climate change in the Himalayas, and draw lessons from the agency of marginalized communities. We argue for a socially just and scientifically plural framework that highlight issues of geo-political insecurity, narratives of the Anthropocene and the place-based experiences of socio-ecological change

A relational vulnerability analytic: Exploring hybrid methodologies for human dimensions of climate change research in the Himalayas

Vulnerability assessments are critical tools when exploring the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Global South. Additionally, Social Ecological Systems research utilizes such assessments to describe and predict potential spaces/tools of policy intervention. However, much of the assessment methodology fails to address the coupled structural processes underlying vulnerability and the experience of climate change. First, most scholarship does not operationalize mixed-methods research using plural epistemologies. Second, it fails to incorporate the communally produced knowledge of marginalized regional populations. Ultimately, power inequalities and their impact on vulnerability within complex adaptive systems, are overwhelmingly ignored. This project attempts to address these issues through a ‘Relational Vulnerability Analytic’ (RVA). We utilize a plural epistemological approach to construct an analytic that envisions the various relationships, processes and tools that need to be cultivated and managed in order to empower the community as co-producers of knowledge, while challenging the disciplinary bias in explorations of climate change risk and adaptation. Our method brings top-down spatial analysis tools, mathematical models, grounded ethnographic fieldwork and participatory feminist epistemologies into productive tension to reveal the sources of vulnerability and the agency of subjects, in rural Himalayan households. Additionally, we addresses the appeal for long term, collaborative, multi-dimensional research mobilization in the Himalayas. While the analytic is parameterized for the Himalayan region, it can be implemented in other regions with certain salient customizations. The project concludes that future efforts should be to operationalize this analytic for different regions and populations

Cross-chapter paper 5:mountains

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