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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how environmental instabilities actualise ways of knowing among scientists and farmers in Costa Rica. Can a nation-wide plan to 'decarbonise' the agricultural sector make way for new forms of techno-science-society interactions?

Paper long abstract

Environmental instabilities and notions of ecological alterations are challenging scientists and non-scientists to think anew about what they know about "natural" environments. Although its causes were complex, the coffee rust epidemic in Central America in 2012-2013 which caused massive yield losses, is one example of such instabilities.

During fieldwork in Costa Rica, I found that in dealings with coffee rust, small-scale coffee farmers increasingly combined experiential and technique-based knowledge with chemical products and tools developed by science compared to before the epidemic. In a similar manner, agronomists relied on both technological tools and technique-based knowledge in efforts to understand the rust-epidemic. Despite such interchanges between knowledge practices, the production of scientific knowledge has remained in the hands of scientists, and only to a small degree included farmers.

With the recent launch of a nation-wide plan to decarbonise Costa Rica (i.e. make carbon neutral, sustainable) by 2050, this paper asks whether new forms of techno-science-society interactions may emerge in efforts to produce and disseminate knowledge about how to relate to the environment and non-human beings (e.g. coffee rust) in new manners. The "decarbonisation plan" challenges the dominance of the agro-industrial model and the scientific knowledge on which it is primarily based, as the model has long contributed to destabilise environments by emitting high levels of Greenhouse Gasses. Simultaneously, small-scale farmers in Latin America and globally take steps to reclaim ownership of food production and knowledges based in "traditional agriculture". Can these circumstances open up for a new science "in the wild"?