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1 I acknowledge lively discussions with Peter Dixon, Piers Blaikie, Kate Brown, Lisa Tang and
Louise Shaxon on the issues discussed in this paper, and also the participants at both a Department
for International Development, then an Overseas Development Administration workshop, on
socio-economic methodologies in renewable natural resources research (Farrington 1996), and at
Edinburgh University Anthropology Department’s demi-centenary conference ‘Boundaries and
identities’, at which I presented parts of this paper to the ‘Development, ecology and environment’
session.
W h a t is local knowledge?
Local knowledge in development contexts may relate to any knowledge held col-
lectively by a population, informing interpretation of the world. It may encompass any
domain in development, particularly that pertaining to natural resource management
in particular. It is conditioned by socio-cultural tradition, being culturally relative
understanding inculcated into individuals from birth, structuring how they interface
with their environments. According to this definition, it is difficult to see where local
knowledge differs from anthropology as studied for the greater part of this century
(Brookfield 1996). While grandly defined in dictionaries as ‘the study of humankind’,
the discipline has largely concerned itself with the documentation and understanding
of socio-cultural traditions worldwide, which encompasses local knowledge by
default. In this event, what is the difference between them? It would appear to be one
of emphasis. Research in local knowledge relates to development issues and problems;
its objective is to introduce a locally informed perspective into developmenq to
promote an appreciation of indigenous power structures and know-how. Research in
anthropology, on the other hand, is more of an intellectual pursuit, its objective being
to further our understanding of the human condition, ultimately to elucidate how our
socio-cultural and biological heritage contribute to our uniqueness among animals. In
2 All manner of other acronyms are to be found in the literature for LK, such as RPK (rural people’s
knowledge), ITK (indigenous technical knowledge), TEK (traditional environmental knowledge),
and IAK (indigenous agricultural knowledge). I prefer LK as the simplest acronym of widest
currency.
Anthropology’s opportunity: p a r a d i g m a t i c s h i f t s i n
development praxis
The emergence of the second development strand in the evolution of local knowledge
ideas and practice has depended crucially on a sea-change recently in the paradigms
that structure conceptions of development: a change that affords social anthropology
the opportunity to appear respectable in development contexts instead of maverick.
The dominant development paradigms until a decade o r so ago were modernisation,
the classic transfer-of-technology model associated with the political right, and
dependency, the Marxist-informed model associated with the political left. They are
both blind to local knowledge issues, as captured in a witty rejoinder scrawled under
Chad’s ‘no natives’ query, to the effect ‘no, they’re all post-modernised’, a pun which
also intimates the limitations of more recent grass-roots paradigms, with current
questioning of the status of others’ knowledge and the extent knowable to outsiders.
The new bottom-up oriented development paradigms that have recently emerged to
challenge these top-down perspectives are the market-liberal and neo-populist. Both
give more credence to local perspectives but otherwise mirror the same political divide,
the former associated with the political right, and the latter associated with the political
left (Farrington 1996; Blaikie et al. 1996). The correspondence between this paradig-
matic shift and the end of the Cold War is improbably coincidental, overseas aid no
LOCAL K N O W L E D G E I N D E V E L O P M E N T 218
have over many external factors that impinge on their lives, notably the wider political
arena where decisions are made that affect them. It is this arena that the empowerment
lobby target, giving rise to innumerable other problems, not least the unwillingness of
the powerful to relinquish any authority. Another problem with this approach is its
local focus. Successes are often community specific and cannot be replicated on a large
scale. This again suits it to non-government organisations rather than bilateral and
multilateral aid agencies which target large regions and strive for tangible results in short
time-frames. This time perspective is another problem. Participatory approaches can
take a considerable time to show any results - albeit these may be more sustainable in
the long term - whereas national and international agencies have political imperatives to
disburse resources and show almost immediate returns.
These different development paradigms are not mutually exclusive, and are often
mixed up in policy and projects. Sometimes those who subscribe to one view of the
development process borrow ideas from others, maybe intentionally making an alli-
ance, other times unintentionally with confused o r fortuitously beneficial results.
Regarding the more recent market-technical and populist-empowerment approaches
that allow for a grass-roots perspective and advocate local knowledge research, both
technological and socio-political issues feature to an extent, inextricably entwined. It is
a matter of emphasis. And participation, facilitated by outsiders, does not accommodate
cultural diversity but rather encourages people to enter the modern capitalist world,
sharing here modernisation’s assumptions, albeit shifting responsibility locally for
decisions and ultimately project failure (Stirrat 1996). The eclectic mixing of assump-
tions is applaudable, striving to reach a consensus between two extremes, symbolised
initially by the right and left political poles. There is perhaps nothing new here in the
ying and yung of development, further represented by the association o n the one hand
of technological advances and improvements with natural scientists and hard systems,
and on the other empowerment of the poor and disadvantaged with social scientists and
soft-systems approaches. While there is nothing novel in applauding attempts to
encourage a rapprochement between these two positions, promoting creative tension
and synergistic space, facilitating allowance for, and understanding of, the issues raised
by each, this in no way diminishes the perennial difficulties and frustrations of such
work, which at root come down to differences in values and priorities.
4 The issues are large and beyond investigation within the limits of this paper (Mettrick 1993;
Fairhead n.d.). I take them up elsewhere, in a paper entitled ‘The development of indigenous
knowledge: a new applied anthropology’, in Current Anthropology. They include the need to
develop a coherent local knowledge intellectual framework to interface effectively with western
science; the promotion of facilitatory anthropological research methods to foster meaningful
dialogue between natural resources scientists and local people to establish what research may have
to offer; and advancement of a methodology that recognises that local knowledge is not static nor
uniform, but subject to continual negotiation berween stake-holders, part of the globalisation
PAULSillitoe
Department of Anthropology
University of Durham
43 Old Elvet
Durham D H 1 3 H N
England
process. This involves on-going revision of knowledge and understanding, and people interpreting
and modifying for themselves any information that reaches them in the light of their socio-cultural
tradition and experience. Research methods need to anticipate this, facilitating adoption of
interventions by promoting partnership and an awareness of local perspectives. This negotiation
will be difficult, not only because of cross-cultural communication and difficulties of under-
standing, but also because it will inevitably have a political aspect.
Local knowledge is not locally homogenous. Differences exist along gender, age, class,
occupational and other lines, and between individuals of similar social status (Scoones and
Thompson 1994), and the interpretation that people put on shared knowledge may differ,
depending on how it affects their interests (Mosse 1994). The implications of variations in
knowledge within local communities demand assessment and the advancement of appropriate
methodologies to gauge them. We have to address the issue of whose knowledge we are going to
privilege. Can we represent everyone’s knowledge, and if so, what is the intellectual status of such
all-encompassing knowledge? The local knowledge movement, engaging with peoples’ lives in
ways not heretofore anticipated by anthropology, needs to address some contentious ethical issues,
for contributing to development which aims to assist certain people over others it inevitably
interferes in their lives. Local knowledge research is not socially neutral. The time-scale involved in
ethnographic research presents problems too in development contexts, with their short-term
orientation and politically driven considerations demanding immediate returns. This will require
some compromises. The difficulties encountered in formulating generalisations applicable on a
large scale also present a considerable barrier to local knowledge research in development, and there
is a need to evolve methods and formulate principles that will allow some reliable anthropological
input into policy debates.
216 PAUL S l L L l T O E
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