One of the ways that the value of place and the local have been highlighted in recent decades has been through the notion of place-based, or local, knowledge. There are many ways that local knowledge has been promoted recently. During the COVID pandemic, for instance, arguments were made that blanket policies originating from central, national, governments were not sensitive enough to local conditions to be effective and that lockdown measures, school closures, and other aspects of managing the pandemic would be better handled locally with sensitivity to local conditions. More generally, there has been an increased willingness to take what has been called “Indigenous and Local Knowledge” seriously when dealing with a range of environmental management issues. Often, this has been done hand-in-hand with “science” – the prime example of a body of knowledge that is defined by its “non-local” or universal nature. The Indigenous knowledge of the Inuit in Greenland has been combined with the algorithmic sciences of Danish scientists to set annual hunting quotas for caribou. Before cooperation, biologists would declare an end to hunting for a year at a time based on a few caribou-spotting flights in aircraft and some numerical modelling. Local Indigenous hunters objected to this based on their ongoing and intimate knowledge of the landscape and the behavior of the herds.[1] In Hawai’i, the Olohana Foundation brings scientists and Indigenous islanders (including Indigenous islanders who are scientists) together to produce and manage food forests, promote the growing of breadfruit, and understand the local effects of climate change, among other things.[2] UNESCO has launched a Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) program to advance the use of Indigenous local knowledge in biodiversity management.[3] Local knowledge is clearly having a moment.
This development is both welcome and surprising. Advocates of local knowledge have their work cut out as the alternative – universal knowledge, or just “science” – has claimed for itself, the status of valid knowledge whereas local knowledge, it has long been argued, is merely a form of belief, folklore, or superstition – belief that may or may not be true. The idea of local knowledge carries with it the general negative senses of the local as “limited”, “parochial”, “subjective” or worse. There are any number of instances in history where local knowledge simply meant entrenched forms of conservatism that were thankfully transformed by the arrival of more enlightened forms of knowledge from elsewhere. Think for instance, of what it would have meant to celebrate local knowledge in the American South in the years before the Civil War. Local knowledge might be what you turn to if you are a tourist looking for authenticity, but not when you are person with cancer looking for treatment or a NASA scientist trying to figure out how to land a probe on an asteroid.
Despite the apparent limitations of local knowledge, it has always had appeal as knowledge that is closer to the ground and is more practical in nature, compared to the abstractions of bodies of knowledge such as science or philosophy. Local knowledge advocates come from wildly different political perspectives. On the right we famously had the spectacle of seeing the British MP and then Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, during the Brexit debates declaring that “I think the people of this country have had enough with experts….” – a view that has been increasingly mirrored among right wing populist movements in the US and elsewhere. In a more thoughtful, philosophical mode, the conservative (and Conservative) British philosopher Roger Scruton defended an older form of Conservatism in his arguments for Conservative environmentalism based on “oikophilia” – or the love of home. To Scruton, it is local society that provides the best place to work on conserving the natural world, not the spaces of global thinktanks or pseudo governments. People are drawn to environmental action, he argues, when they can see it at work – such as in “adopt-a-highway” programmes in the US or in “Keep Britain Tidy” campaigns.
This is why the true environmentalist is also a conservative. For the desire to protect the environment arises spontaneously in people, just as soon as they recognise their accountability to others for what they are and do, and just as soon as they identify some place as “ours”.[4]
Scruton’s argument for place-based environmentalism is remarkably close to the writing of the anarchist thinker James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State where he took what he called “high modernist” planning to task for applying techne – formal, scientific, epistemic knowledge – to problems that were locally variable in nature. Working through examples of high modernist urban planning, Soviet collectivization, and agricultural modernization, he revealed how large-scale plans which give little or no thought to local realities often ended in failure. He counterposed techne with metis – a kind of informal, practical, local knowledge that arises from the complexity of specific places rather than the desire to arrive at a universal and utopian plan.
While something can indeed be said about forestry, revolution, urban planning, agriculture, and rural settlement in general, this will take us only so far in understanding this forest, this revolution, this farm. All farming takes place in a unique space (fields, soil, crops) and at a unique time (weather pattern, season, cycle in pest populations), and for unique ends (this family with its needs and tastes), A mechanical application of generic rules that ignores these particularities is an invitation to practice failure, social disillusionment, or most likely both.[5]
While advocates of local knowledge from the right of left question the applicability of “place-free” science and planning to specific local contexts, there has been another process at play in some forms of decolonial thought. Decolonial thinkers make it clear that knowledge that claims to be universal is also “local” and “place-based”.
Western philosophy, like science, sees itself as the culmination of inevitable progress – a process in which all other kinds of knowledge experience “becoming local”. As Western philosophy and Western science became twinned with the ravages of colonialism in a series of claims to universalism, so, other forms of knowledge became seen as local and specific. Science and philosophy both aspired to what philosopher Thomas Nagel called “the view from nowhere”.[6]Once this view was claimed, and the specific places it arose from denied, then all other views became views from “somewhere”. This then became part of the structure of Western universities where disciplines with no geographical markers – like biology, literary studies, or geography itself, were accompanied by geographically specific areas such as “Latin American Studies” or “South Asian Studies”. Decolonial theorists Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh reflected on the Western habit of localizing all knowledge other than itself back on itself. What if we started to call work on Heidegger “German Studies” rather than “philosophy” they asked?[7] The challenge has important consequences as, by localizing bodies of thought such as science and philosophy we insist in seeing them in context and, in the case of forms of knowledge emanating from Europe over the last three centuries, that means seeing them as forms of knowledge produced in places that were at the heart of empire. In the end, all knowledge is “local knowledge” – it is just that some forms accept this, while others do their best to deny it.
[1] Frank Sejersen, "Local Knowledge in Greenland: Arctic Perspectives and Contextual Differences," in Cultivating Arctic Landscapes, ed. G. Anderson David and Nuttall Mark (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004).
[2] http://olohana.org/index.php/indigenous-knowledge-systems/
[3] https://www.unesco.org/en/biodiversity/knowledge
[4] https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/416-environmentalism-starts-with-loving-our-own-the-conservative-online-jan-2017
[5] James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1998), 318.
[6] Thomas Nagel, The view from nowhere (New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[7] Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On decoloniality : concepts, analytics, praxis (Durham: Duke University Press,, 2018).