Unsettling knowledge hierarchies?

While my informants were aware of the influence of northern science on national policy processes and local knowledge systems, they seemed to have difficulty in discerning the level and forms of influence of positivist ontological assumptions (e.g. the nature- culture dualism).

In this regard, the point made by a UN technical adviser from a former colonised African country is highly relevant:

We don’t feel that international science is imposed from the Global North to the South. We feel it as ours. Lots of professionals and scientists in developing countries don’t look back indeed, they don’t appreciate where they come from, and this is mainly because of the educational structure that embeds characteristics of Western sciences and knowledge systems. We really need to think about how to revise our education system (Interview, 13 February 2012).

His words reflect how Western conceptualisations of science and objectivity (and the worldview they are based upon) have been instilled in many professionals, scientists and decision makers from the South through the colonial education system (Whitehead 1981; White 1996).

Despite the debates on educational reforms that started in south-eastern Africa after colonial independence and continued when neoliberal development policies were implemented, teaching and research curricula do not seem to have been substantially altered (Goodman

et al. 2009; Heleta 2016). As noted by Heleta (2016), South Africa’s higher education curriculum has not been significantly changed since the end of apartheid in 1994. It has remained largely Eurocentric, promoting Western standards of rationality through stereotyped representations of the African continent, skills, and figures, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. In Chapter 6, I will discuss some stereotyped views of natural resource management dating back to colonial British rule that keep emerging in farmers’ narratives in Kasache.

The pervasiveness of both the colonial British education system and the bureaucratic development machine help to understand why it is so hard to pinpoint the influence of global scientific institutions on the process of knowledge generation and acquisition in the South. As argued by PCSTS and FSTS scholarship (Harding 2008), positivist science has deep roots and foundations in many cultures and places around the globe, making traditional Western science more pervasive, even outside Europe and North America. Goodman et al. (2009) and Heleta (2016) suggest that a critical rethinking of the education curriculum will stem from reframing the history of Africa as the outcome of entrenched histories of patriarchy, slavery, imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. Simply placing ‘Africa’ (or African countries) at the centre of teaching, learning and research may, however, reproduce positivist binary thinking, and hence Goodman et al. (2009) propose an approach that looks at how race, ethnicity, gender, class and nationality interacted to determine marginalisation and erasure of local knowledge systems. This could unveil the colonial legacies and deep biases that keep permeating methods, formulations and substantive positions in African academy (Lugones 2010; Heleta 2016). In Chapter 7, I will further reflect on the possibility of ‘decolonising’ (Lugones 2010) gender mainstreaming and participatory approaches in development, by analysing women’s experiences in Kasache within co-constituting systems of power relations (colonialism, neoliberalism, patriarchy).

Similarly, the key open question in the climate change domain is how to ensure recognition of non-Western systems in the knowledge production and validation

processes. Among the suggestions made by the decision makers I interviewed was the creation of national and transnational interdisciplinary research communities or national and sub-regional IPCC working groups. Their assumption was that the main challenge facing research communities in the Global South is to develop local knowledge products and make them accessible to policymakers through national or regional networks. This perspective emphasises the technical and mechanistic nature of the knowledge integration process, portraying knowledges as a set of discrete intellectual products that can be separated from the place that originated them. Access, collection and translation of local knowledge into a suitable form for decision-making are then perceived as the key challenges to knowledge integration.

This approach is problematic, since it fundamentally ignores the political dimensions and underlying assumptions of the knowledge integration process. Critical feminist scholars (see Chapter 4) claim that scientific knowledge, especially when used in the public policy domain, should be deconstructed and negotiated among a wider group of social actors with different epistemological and ontological commitments (Wynne 1992; Shackley and Wynne 1996; Charlesworth and Okereke 2010). Several crucial questions may facilitate this political analysis (Nadasdy 1999), such as: who is going to benefit from specific knowledge? What narratives and agendas are facilitated or limited by specific knowledges? How are thought and actions constrained or directed by those meanings? The answers to these questions may unveil the hidden power relations and cultural biases (the ontological aspects) masked behind well-established knowledge claims and open them to contestation.

The solutions proposed by the interviewees focus on promoting South-South Cooperation (SSC) through the establishment of regional (South-East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa) or sub-regional (e.g. the Greater Horn of Africa) working groups in the IPCC. This approach emerged in 1955 from the Bandung Conference, held under the auspices of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to create a

network of mutual assistance between the most disadvantaged countries of the North- dominated world system (Gosovic 2016; Gray and Gills 2016). Since its establishment, the SSC concept and practice have been the subject of several revisions (Gosovic 2016; Gray and Gills 2016). One of the major critiques concerns the actual ability of SSC to challenge the vertical relations and dependency path between the Global North and South (the former colonised countries) through mutual solidarity (in the form of trade, financial support, training, capacity building).

In light of the heterogeneity of the ‘Global South’, some authors have argued that a classification of countries according to this definition may reproduce hegemonic and neocolonial politics in the South itself: China, for instance, may use international aid to secure the rights to resource extraction (Gray and Gills 2016; Muhr 2016). Muhr (2016) has criticised the dichotomies underlying the SSC approach, especially the concept of national interest vs. international solidarity, which hinder the full emancipatory power of SSC. Such power has instead been increasingly emerging in the experiences of non- state actors, such as transnational or grass-root movements (e.g. the Landless People’s Movement) that overcome the spatial, cultural or societal hierarchies underpinned by SSC ontological categories (‘nation’ or ‘South’).

Helpful insights may be drawn from both the critiques and the experiences of SSC, so as to accurately identify and challenge the South’s knowledge and power dependency. Malawian decision makers, for instance, should not limit themselves to proposing the creation of IPCC sub-regional working groups (e.g. collaborating on technical and procedural issues such as data dissemination and sharing between neighbouring countries or including experts on the basis of geographical representation). Cooperation could be expanded beyond homogeneous and unified classifications (by region or by discipline) to include joint efforts on specific vulnerability issues (e.g. malaria outbreaks in distinct societal groups) or multi-dimensional societal impacts (e.g. climate change gendered impacts).

In this section, I highlighted some of the difficulties faced by national decision makers in Malawi who are looking to challenge mainstreaming approaches to climate change, as well as pointing out alternative modes by which policy actors can exercise their agency and re-signify and question North-driven climate change knowledge. Decision makers in Malawi expressed alternative views about usability of climate science (grounding it in local cultural values) or deployed mainstreaming narratives (evidence- based policy) to mobilise international financial support for NAPA implementation. As further explored in the following chapters, the possibility of acknowledging and challenging the established orthodoxy may arise from the recognition of the multiplicity of views that produce climate change knowledges and experiences.