Abstract
Increasing attention has been given to “indigenous” knowledge in Third World rural societies as a potential basis for sustainable agricultural development. It has been found that many people have functional knowledge systems pertaining to their resources and environment, which are based on experience and experimentation, and which are sometimes based on unique epistemologies. Efforts have been made to include such knowledge in participatory research and projects. This paper discusses socio-political, institutional, and ethical issues that need to be considered in order to understand the actual limitations and contributions of such knowledge systems. It reviews the nature of local knowledge and suggests the need to recognize its unique values yet avoid romanticized views of its potential. Local knowledge and alternative bottom-up projects continue to be marginalized because of the dominance of conventional top-down R&approaches, pressures of agrochemical firms, scientific professionalism, and for other political-economic reasons. It is argued that the exploitation of local knowledge by formal institutions should be avoided; instead, people need to establish legitimacy of their knowledge for themselves, as a form of empowerment.
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Additional information
Lori Ann Thrupp is presently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California Berkeley (in the Energy and Resources Program), pursuing work on sustainable agricultural development strategies. She received her doctoral and masters degree in Development Studies from the University of Sussex (U.K.), and her bachelors from Stanford University in Human Biology and Latin American Studies. Her interests are natural resource management, sustainable development, political ecology, agricultural technology transfer, indigenous knowledge, and environmental policy issues in developing countries. Her doctoral dissertation research was on “The Political Ecology of Pesticide Use in Costa Rica,” supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. She has also received grants from the National Wildlife Federation, Marshall Foundation, and Dudley Seers Fund. Her professional experiences include consulting, teaching, and research on natural resource issues and agroecology for organizations such as CATIE (a Tropical Agriculture Institute) in Costa Rica, the Pragma Corporation, USAID, the Organization of Tropical Studies, the International Institute for Environmental and Development (on a fuelwood energy project in Kenya), the Intermediate Technology Development Group, the Worldwatch Institute, Resources for the Future. She has published in both Spanish and English (including co-authorship of a book on “EI Uso de los plaguicidas en Costa Rica”, and co-editing a book with Robert Chambers and Arnold Pacey on “Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research).
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Thrupp, L.A. Legitimizing local knowledge: From displacement to empowerment for third world people. Agric Hum Values 6, 13–24 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217665
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217665