Mobilization of experts and expertise in environmental matters
Keywords:
expertise, expert activists, environmental conflicts, agrochemicalsAbstract
At its core, environmental politics are epistemic politics: contests over what is known or unknown about nature and who gets to speak for it. This paper’s main focus is the politics of expertise that inevitably ensues from these battles. Discussion of extant work highlights how expert activists are organized and what effects expert mobilization has on science, environmental conflict, and socio-ecological change more broadly. We begin by describing some of the conceptual and methodological challenges involved in studying experts in environmental movements. Next, we present a case study of experts and expertise in Argentina’s two-decades long agrochemicals conflict to highlight gaps in current knowledge. A third section distills several lessons from the case study and our concluding section identifies directions for future research.
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