Ethnosciences - A step towards the integration of scientific and non-scientific forms of knowledge in the management of natural resources for the future

Integration of indigenous knowledge and ethnoscientific approaches into contemporary frameworks for conservation and sustainable management of natural resources will become increasingly important in policies on an international and national level. We set the scene on how this can be done by exploring the key conditions and dimensions of a dialogue between ‘ontologies’ and the roles, which ethnosciences could play in this process. First, the roles which ethnosciences in the context of sustainable development were analysed, placing emphasis on the implications arising when western sciences aspire to relate to indigenous forms of knowledge. Secondly, the contributions of ethnosciences to such an ‘inter-ontological dialogue’ were explored, based on an ethnoecological study of the encounter of sciences and indigenous knowledge in the Andes of Bolivia, and reviewed experiences from mangrove systems in Kenya, India and Sri Lanka, and from case-studies in other ecosystems world-wide.

Ethics in science: enhancing the democratisation of knowledge production in transdisciplinary research partnerships for sustainable development

Better access to knowledge and knowledge production has to be reconsidered as key to successful individual and social mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change. Indeed, concepts of sustainable development imply a transformation of science towards fostering democratisation of knowledge production and the development of knowledge societies as a strategic goal. This means to open the process of scientific knowledge production while simultaneously empowering people to implement their own visions for sustainable development. Advocates of sustainability science support this transformation. In transdisciplinary practice, they advance equity and accountability in the access to and production of knowledge at the science–society interface. UNESCO points to advancements, yet Northern dominance persists in knowledge production as well as in technology design and transfer. Further, transdisciplinary practice remains experimental and hampered by inadequate and asymmetrically equipped institutions in the North and South and related epistemological and operational obscurity. To help identify clear, practicable transdisciplinary approaches, I recommend examining the institutional route – i.e., the learning and adaptation process – followed in concrete cases. The transdisciplinary Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme (1998–2013) is a case ripe for such examination. Understanding transdisciplinarity as an integrative approach, I highlight ESAPP’s three key principles for a more democratised knowledge production for sustainable development: (1) integration of scientific and “non-scientific” knowledge systems; (2) integration of social actors and institutions; and (3) integrative learning processes. The analysis reveals ESAPP’s achievements in contributing to more democratic knowledge production and South ownership in the realm of sustainable development.

Knowledge as a resource: enhancing the democratisation of knowledge production in transdisciplinary research partnerships for sustainable development

Better access to knowledge and knowledge production has to be reconsidered as key to successful individual and social mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change. Indeed, concepts of sustainable development imply a transformation of science (Lubchenco 1998; WBGU 2011 and 2012) towards fostering democratisation of knowledge production as a contribution to the development of knowledge societies as a strategic goal (UNESCO 2005). This means to open the process of scientific knowledge production while simultaneously empowering people to implement their own visions for sustainable development. Advocates of sustainability science support this transformation. In transdisciplinary practice, they advance equity and accountability in the access to and production of knowledge at the science–society interface (Hirsch Hadorn et al 2006; Hirsch Hadorn et al 2008; Jäger 2009; Adger and Jordan 2009; KFPE 2012). UNESCO (2010) points to advancements, yet Northern dominance persists in knowledge production as well as in technology design and transfer (Standing and Taylor 2007; Zingerli 2010). Further, transdisciplinary practice remains experimental and hampered by inadequate and asymmetrically equipped institutions in the North and South and related epistemological and operational obscurity (Wiesmann et al 2011). To help identify clear, practicable transdisciplinary approaches, I recommend examining the institutional route (Mukhopadhyay et al 2006) – i.e., the learning and adaptation process – followed in concrete cases. The transdisciplinary Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme (1998–2013) is a case ripe for such examination. Understanding transdisciplinarity as an integrative approach (Pohl et al 2008; Stock and Burton 2011), I highlight ESAPP’s three key principles for a more democratised knowledge production for sustainable development: (1) integration of scientific and “non-scientific” knowledge systems; (2) integration of social actors and institutions; and (3) integrative learning processes. The analysis reveals ESAPP’s achievements in contributing to more democratic knowledge production and South ownership in the realm of sustainable development.

Enhancing Food Sovereignty and Food Security through the Revitalization of Indigenous Knowledge: Experiences from the Bolivian Andes

Endogenous development is defined as development that values primarily locally available resources and the way people organized themselves for that purpose. It is a dynamic and evolving concept that also embraces innovations and complementation from other than endogenous sources of knowledge; however, only as far as they are based on mutual respect and the recognition of cultural and socioeconomic self-determination of each of the parties involved. Experiences that have been systematized in the context of the BioAndes Program are demonstrating that enhancing food security and food sovereignty on the basis of endogenous development can be best achieved by applying a ‘biocultural’ perspective: This means to promote and support actions that are simultaneously valuing biological (fauna, flora, soils, or agrobiodiversity) and sociocultural resources (forms of social organization, local knowledge and skills, norms, and the related worldviews). In Bolivia, that is one of the Latin-American countries with the highest levels of poverty (79% of the rural population) and undernourishment (22% of the total population), the Program BioAndes promotes food sovereignty and food security by revitalizing the knowledge of Andean indigenous people and strengthening their livelihood strategies. This starts by recognizing that Andean people have developed complex strategies to constantly adapt to highly diverse and changing socioenvironmental conditions. These strategies are characterized by organizing the communities, land use and livelihoods along a vertical gradient of the available eco-climatic zones; the resulting agricultural systems are evolving around the own sociocultural values of reciprocity and mutual cooperation, giving thus access to an extensive variety of food, fiber and energy sources. As the influences of markets, competition or individualization are increasingly affecting the life in the communities, people became aware of the need to find a new balance between endogenous and exogenous forms of knowledge. In this context, BioAndes starts by recognizing the wealth and potentials of local practices and aims to integrate its actions into the ongoing endogenous processes of innovation and adaptation. In order to avoid external impositions and biases, the program intervenes on the basis of a dialogue between exogenous, mainly scientific, and indigenous forms of knowledge. The paper presents an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of enhancing endogenous development through a dialogue between scientific and indigenous knowledge by specifically focusing on its effects on food sovereignty and food security in three ‘biocultural’ rural areas of the Bolivian highlands. The paper shows how the dialogue between different forms of knowledge evolved alongside the following project activities: 1) recuperation and renovation of local seeds and crop varieties (potato – Solanum spp., quinoa – Chenopodium quinoa, cañahua – Chenopodium pallidicaule); 2) support for the elaboration of community-based norms and regulations for governing access and distribution of non-timber forest products, such as medicinal, fodder, and construction plants; 3) revitalization of ethnoveterinary knowledge for sheep and llama breeding; 4) improvement of local knowledge about the transformation of food products (sheep-cheese, lacayote – Cucurbita sp. - jam, dried llama meat, fours of cañahua and other Andean crops). The implementation of these activities fostered the community-based livelihoods of indigenous people by complementing them with carefully and jointly designed innovations based on internal and external sources of knowledge and resources. Through this process, the epistemological and ontological basis that underlies local practices was made visible. On this basis, local and external actors started to jointly define a renewed concept of food security and food sovereignty that, while oriented in the notions of well being according to a collectively re-crafted world view, was incorporating external contributions as well. Enabling and hindering factors, actors and conditions of these processes are discussed in the paper.

A picture is worth a thousand words--the utility of 3D visualization illustrated by a case of survived pancreatic transection

It is one of the most important tasks of the forensic pathologist to explain the forensically relevant medical findings to medical non-professionals. However, it is often difficult to comment on the nature and potential consequences of organ injuries in a comprehensive way to individuals with limited knowledge of anatomy and physiology. This rare case of survived pancreatic transaction after kicks to the abdomen illustrates how the application of dedicated software programs for three-dimensional reconstruction can overcome these difficulties, allowing for clear and concise visualization of complex findings.

Combining Bottom-up and Top-down Generation of Interactive Knowledge Maps for Enterprise Search

Our research project develops an intranet search engine with concept- browsing functionality, where the user is able to navigate the conceptual level in an interactive, automatically generated knowledge map. This knowledge map visualizes tacit, implicit knowledge, extracted from the intranet, as a network of semantic concepts. Inductive and deductive methods are combined; a text ana- lytics engine extracts knowledge structures from data inductively, and the en- terprise ontology provides a backbone structure to the process deductively. In addition to performing conventional keyword search, the user can browse the semantic network of concepts and associations to find documents and data rec- ords. Also, the user can expand and edit the knowledge network directly. As a vision, we propose a knowledge-management system that provides concept- browsing, based on a knowledge warehouse layer on top of a heterogeneous knowledge base with various systems interfaces. Such a concept browser will empower knowledge workers to interact with knowledge structures.

Neural patterns underlying social comparisons of personal performance

Humans often evaluate their abilities by comparing their personal performance with that of others. For this process, it is critical whether the comparison turns out in one's favor or against it. Here, we investigate how social comparisons of performance are encoded and integrated on the neural level. We collected functional magnetic resonance images while subjects answered questions in a knowledge quiz that was related to their profession. After each question, subjects received a feedback about their personal performance, followed by a feedback about the performance of a reference group who had been quizzed beforehand. Based on the subjects' personal performance, we divided trials in downward and upward comparisons. We found that upward comparisons correlated with activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Downward comparisons were associated with increased activation in the ventral striatum (VS), the medial orbitofrontal cortex and the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The extent to which subjects outperformed the reference group modulated the activity in the VS and in the dorsal ACC. We suggest that the co-activation of the VS and the dorsal ACC contributes to the integration of downward comparisons into the evaluation of personal performance.

The World of Indicators. The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification

The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance. Combination of insights from anthropology of law, history of science, science and technology studies, sociology of quantification, economics and geography will appeal to those who are uncomfortable with the separation between 'theoretical' and 'empirical' approaches and with the current weakness of critique that address the main trends shaping the relations between capitalism, markets, law and democracy Theoretical discussion of the nature and historical formation of quantification will appeal to those who ask questions such as, 'What is new or different about our contemporary reliance on quantitative knowledge?' Groundbreaking empirical case studies uncover the social work and politics that often go into the making of indicators and explore the far-reaching effects and impacts of these numerical representations in specific settings