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Paper short abstract

We rethink notions of rural smartness through a case study of human-carnivore coexistence technologies. Rural smartness includes traditional pastoral practices shaped by (more-than-human) social innovation, while co-design can connect old and new technologies for wider uptake and better use.

Paper long abstract

Smartness typically tends to be associated with urban spaces and/or technologies that are indebted to the digital turn, including but not limited to wildlife cameras, machine learning and artificial intelligence, drones, satellite-based tools, eDNA, management platforms, optimization algorithms, or more recently, Digital Twins. In our presentation we explore how alternative dimensions of smartness can be read off rural social innovation practices that emerge in the context of traditional, established, and emerging human-carnivore coexistence technologies. Specifically, using the context of human-carnivore coexistence, we present a mixed-methods approach to the study of rural innovation that aims to supplant current uses of ‘smart’ in rural areas, and discuss uses of and interactions with particular technologies. Empirically, we rely on a pan-European survey of ~1 000 European pastoralists and farmers, five focus group discussions with pastoralists, agricultural advisors and conservation scientists, and an analysis of conservation public software code co-production on the Github platform. We present two main results. Firstly, we extend established notions of rural smartness to include mid- and low-tech practices by noticing how traditional pastoralist and farming practices are enabled by (more-than-human) social innovation in rural landscapes. Secondly, in a more speculative manner, we present how co-design-based approaches to rural smartness can enable interoperability between traditional and emerging technological practices leading both to wider adoption and more successful operationalization.

Key words

Conservation technology; mixed-methods; Github; carnivores; wolves; bears; co-design