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DOES GLOBALISED SCIENCE WORK FOR THE POOR? FOREST PERSPECTIVES

By Melissa Leach and James Fairhead

What effects has the globalisation of science and policy around forests and biodiversity had on the lives of land users in the forests of West Africa and the Caribbean? How has international policy around forests and biodiversity influenced national moves towards greater local authority and resource control? A recently completed study of nine cases in Ghana, Guinea and Trinidad tracks the unfolding relationships among international perspectives, national research traditions, policy processes, media, and local knowledge and livelihood concerns. Despite concurrent processes of decentralisation and participation, local considerations are being reinterpreted within globalised frames. Will this lead to further impoverishment and exclusion for poorer forest users, or are there ways - through public critique and citizen science - to counter these trends?

Science and policy processes
The perspectives and values that frame international scientific and policy debates strongly shape national and local science and policy practices in all three countries. This derives in part from funding flows and dependence on international donors for forestry and biodiversity projects, sectoral budget support and research. In this respect Guinea and Ghana are notably more dependent than Trinidad, which has stronger nationally-funded institutions. However, this international influence also raises wider questions of epistemic relevance: the need for national and local academics and policy actors to present their work as in tune with topics of global importance and with international best practice. This applies in Trinidad as much as in West Africa.

International engagement also interlocks with particular national institutions and their political constituencies, with science playing into, and at times amplifying existing institutional schisms and turf battles.

Yet although the international research and policy world revitalises national research practices and debates, it tends to cast these within a globalised, universal, rather than a national or local frame and transforms their meaning in the process. Rather than consider the centralising and decentralising forces in science and policy processes as contradictory, then, it is evident that the latter can extend the influence of the former.

The need for true participation
Participation has become central to forestry and biodiversity planning amongst governments, donor agencies and NGOs alike, in national consultations as much as local projects. However in practice, such 'invited' participation frequently is merely an invitation to comply with pre-set objectives within frames of debate that obscure the experiences, perspectives and political and material interests of poorer forest users.

Several problems result as the values and experiences of land users are eclipsed.

• First, interventions can be justified that are inappropriate to local circumstances, reducing local resource control and worsening poverty.
• Second, forest management continues to rest on particular ideas of nature as separate from society, and as stable and predictable. By obscuring historical experiences that reveal both the intertwining of ecological and social processes and the non-equilibrium forces shaping environments (e.g. in climate history), forest management may pursue illusory goals and miss opportunities to adapt to emergent trends.
• Third, science and policy debates continue to invoke and reproduce particular ideas of society, including positive social categories (e.g. 'traditional' hunter, 'modern' environmentally literate citizen) and negative ones (e.g. squatter, charcoal-maker, slash-and-burn farmer, poacher, drug grower). Such caricatures contribute to simplified stories, and influence who gains and loses from intervention. They also shape and sharpen social fault lines that have a strong bearing on processes of governance and social change. As such categories become globalised, there is less opportunity for clashes of values to be negotiated locally.

The role of mass media
Mass media and education institutions are closely integrated with international science and policy institutions and processes. The institutional practices and narrative styles in media and education (and the popular culture they inform) amplify and reinforce dominant policy framings, narratives and social categorisations. This is as true in West Africa, where media and education are directed to reforming the perpetrators of rural environmental problems, as in Trinidad, where it creates more environmental literacy among urban-based and other populations less dependent on forest livelihoods. While media can help create a mutually supportive field of messages, in Trinidad, they have also been an important vehicle for public contestation of both policy and science.

Whatever the direct effects that international agreements and deliberations may have, it is important to recognise their indirect effects in shaping scientific and policy communities. The institutionalised aspects of these agreements are only a small part of a much more extensive field of transformation. They alter the questions that are posed about the environment, and influence the social categories through which it is understood, serving to naturalise and stabilise them.

Building pro-poor forest science
How can poorer forest users genuinely shape forestry and conservation agendas in an increasingly globalised world of science and policy? Through strengthening participation not just in policy but also in science, and here there is a role for participatory research strategies and deliberative procedures in which poorer forest users help to set agendas and questions. To be effective, however, such procedures need to be opened up to a diversity of problem-framings, and to pay particular attention to the inclusion of those social groups delegitimised by conventional, globalised analytics.

Broader means for forest users' perspectives to influence science and policy are also important. These include promoting aspects of political and legal culture that enable critique, building citizen scientific confidence and skills, and making space for people's own science, knowledge and interests to shape and inform research and policy debates. Media and educational strategies could be directed to making explicit the evidence, values, and uncertainties underlying particular scientific and policy positions, enhancing and empowering public capacity to critique and engage in scientific and policy debate.

To balance the dependence of national and local research on the international agendas and values that are shaping them, donor support for independent, critical research within national and local institutions is needed. This could enhance capacity to respond to and engage with forest user's own agendas, and help build alternative discourse coalitions to promote the perspectives of the poor - perhaps linking university researchers, NGOs and citizens' groups. At the same time, building better-informed and more reflexive international scientific and policy processes is important, requiring new procedures that allow perspectives from local settings to feed into and shape the terms of debate.

Reference:
Fairhead, J. and M. Leach (2003) Science, society and power: environmental knowledge and policy in West Africa and the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further information:
Prof. Dr Melissa Leach
Institute of Development Studies
BN1 9RE Brighton, UK
E-mail: m.leach@ids.ac.uk

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