Paper short abstract:

Livelihood experiments aimed to improve practitioner’s living have gained low attention in the ‘experimental turn’. We explore the role of particular livelihood experiments, farmers’ experiments, in the creation of local and hybrid knowledge and their implications for environmental governance.

Paper long abstract:

Experiments are gaining momentum in contributing to sustainability transitions especially in the face of climate change. The rapidly increasing experimenting literature tends to focus on formally designed local experiments paying little attention to the incremental experimenting performed by various entrepreneurs with the motivation to improve their livelihood. Our paper focuses on these livelihood experiments and explores their role in knowledge coproduction and implications for environmental governance. Livelihood experiments bring forward the issues of connecting local and scientific knowledge, power asymmetries and contributing to developments in participatory (transdisciplinary) science. We review the literature on one type of livelihood experiment, farmer's experiments, in order to find out how they are contributing, and could potentially contribute in the future, to the creation of new knowledge and innovations. We argue that scientific and local knowledge get mixed in farming practices and experiments form a site of hybridizing knowledge. Integration of formal scientific knowledge with local knowledge goes beyond the naïve assertion that local knowledge has value and that science is abstract and disconnected from local context. A major challenge of leveraging knowledge produced through livelihood experiments is unlocking such knowledge from the typically isolated contexts in which it occurs. We argue that new institutions may need to be formed that can tap into local knowledge, organize it, and integrate it with top-down knowledge. The acknowledgement of the role of livelihood experiments in mediating between different types of knowledge allows for improving the ways of spreading and re-localizing sustainability innovations developed elsewhere.