Paper short abstract:

Knowledge production in Khumbu is re-evaluated by questioning so-called "local" climate-based narratives derived from the Sherpas. I study the difference between multiscale discourses, and how different sources of knowledge reconfigure "local knowledge", and the part researchers play in this.

Paper long abstract:

The Khumbu region (Everest) has become emblematic of scientific and media discourses on climate change. Pictures of glaciers melting have led to alarmist rhetoric about the future of water resources. For the Sherpas, experiencing climate change seems a minor concern compared to the international alarm it has raised. This paper addresses two debates from a social constructivist approach to local knowledge production: firstly, the difference between the local and the global scale, and the ongoing discursive bias that contributes to the tension in this region which is attracting many researchers, journalists and international experts; secondly, the multiple sources of "local" knowledge since the onset of tourism in the 1950s, since the Khumbu and its Sherpa population stepped into the globalized world and became an interconnected society. My arguments are based on long-term fieldwork and two hundred interviews with local people and institutions, and reveal that climate change discourses here are framed by "agents", especially researchers. I discuss the role scientists play in changing local knowledge. The Everest region has been instrumentalized in research and in environmental policies since the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation (Ives and Messerli, 1989); today a new climate change paradigm exists. It seems relevant to explore the way Sherpas interpret, reappropriate this global climate change discourse and what this form of interpretation, adaptation, consists in, which economic interests, which social and power relations, lie behind this form of reappropriation.