Lived Experience and the Advocates of Local Knowledge

Abstract

Local knowledge is promoted by many as a key component of designing and implementing interventions on climate change, especially interventions that aim to adapt to changing climatic conditions. It is seen to result in interventions that are appropriate to and work in local contexts. It also demonstrates to policy makers that poor and vulnerable communities have innovative agency, and are thus empowered by their local knowledge. Nowhere are these facets better illustrated than in the annual Community-based Adaptation Conferences that are organised by the International Institute of Environment and Development. Challenges arise, however, when locals and outside professional experts attempt to share their different forms of knowledge to design and implement interventions on climate change. Formal participatory processes are intended to meet these challenges, but they are not immune from enduring power relations between insider and outsider and possible exploitive uses of local knowledge. Beyond practical intervention, local knowledge may be seen as linked to the identity of, especially, vulnerable groups in rural areas of poor countries. Here there are particular issues of passing local knowledge from one generation to the next. Finally, local knowledge is a manifestation of lived experience. Local knowledge may also, with care, be sometimes appropriate as a proxy indicator for lived experience, but should not be viewed as synonymous with it. Lived experience is not necessarily restricted to local circumstance and it extends beyond practical application in, say, climate change interventions.