Over recent years the concept of ‘knowledge’ in the singular has been increasingly challenged by ideas of differentiated, contextualized ‘knowledges’. In this paper we propose the concept of ‘knowledge-cultures’ as a way of exploring the fluidity of diverse forms of knowledge and the rules, norms, and values that enable or constrain their production. Elaborating on Shotter's idea of knowledge-from-within, we argue that knowledge-cultures are social achievements that equip those who embody them with a relational–responsive kind of understanding of events and surroundings built on multiple knowledge-forms. To explore this contextual nature of knowledge-culture construction and illustrate our arguments, we draw on detailed empirical research of farmers' experiences with the precision-farming technique of yield mapping in the English counties of Lincolnshire and Suffolk.
Agriculture around the world needs to become more environmentally sustainable to limit further environmental degradation and impacts of climate change.
Many governments try to achieve this through enrolling farmers in agri‐environment schemes (AES) that encourage them to undertake conservation activities.
Studies show that AES can suffer from low uptake, meaning their environmental objectives remain unattained. To succeed for people and nature, policy‐makers are increasingly adopting multi‐actor approaches in the ‘co‐design’ of AES to make them more attractive and inclusive of a full range of stakeholders, including ‘harder to reach’ farmers.
To address why some land managers (principally farmers) may be harder to reach in the context of co‐designing England's new Environmental Land Management (ELM) approach, we undertook a quick scoping review of the literature, conducted 23 first‐round and 24 s‐round interviews with key informants, and held a workshop with 11 practitioners.
We outline why farming stakeholders may be harder to reach and how policy‐makers can adjust the engagement process to make co‐design more inclusive.
Based on the results, we make recommendations that could help policy‐makers to design better, more inclusive AES that would attract greater uptake and increase their chances of success.
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How can the politics of nature be envisioned for an age conscious of the complexity, contingency, and relationality of the world? What new practices are required to do justice to the recognition that the potential to act, shape, and change emerging worlds lies within complex epistemological and ontological relations? This paper describes an interdisciplinary study conducted between 2007 and 2010 in Loweswater, the English Lake District, that addressed these questions. Here, for three years, a 'new collective' as described by Latour emerged that carried out its own epistemological and ontological experiments: the Loweswater Care Project (LCP). The LCP was shaped by ideas about 'new collectives' and the commitment to understanding material 'intra-action' in situ. This inspired an appreciation of the radical relationality of people and things, and an approach to doing politics with things that we term 'intra-active collective politics'. In this paper we highlight the consequences of this approach for knowing, but also for action and 'management'. The research and the experimental forum of the LCP lie at a crossroads between the preoccupations of environmental management (particularly catchment management), the concerns of science and technology studies, and posthumanist thinking.
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