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Paper short abstract:

Sustained water quality monitoring of the Kinabatangan river wetlands by indigenous villagers, foregrounds local agency. Analysis reveals duty of care towards human and non-human subjects and social learning generated by intergenerational trust and learning networks including citizen science.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is a case study that contributes to the conceptualisation of and methodology for studying caringscapes/carescapes that are oriented to nonhuman subjects. It concentrates upon how some local villagers along the lower Kinabatangan River express their ‘duty of care’ toward the river by their sustained local participation in assessing changing water quality in their wetlands and their sense of responsibility to foster care for the river among fellow villagers along the river. Making sense of this duty of care entails examining not only how the local sense of place centres upon the river, but also how local communal and personal identity derives from association with the river – peoples who inhabit this stretch of the river generically identify as Orang Sungei (river people). In analysing the importance of learning networks, intergenerational trust and local agency to the development of social learning, this case study highlights the agency of those experiencing the process of social and ecological change as a social concern, in which community participation in citizen science derives from their strong river-focussed sense of place and their care they express toward the river, which contextualised as a two-way interaction between society and ecology. Examining the sense of their duty of care also requires studying how their techniques of assessment mesh with scientific methods for assessing water quality. Consequently, the presentation contributes to the literature on participatory development practices and transdisciplinarity in studying social learning initiatives in contexts of environmental care.

KEY WORDS: Ethics of care, non human context and political and cultural economies