Agricultural Futures - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 842

Chapter 35
Agricultural Futures
The Politics of Knowledge
Ian Scoones
Introduction
Global assessments have become central to international debates on a range of key
policy issues.1heInternationalAssessmentofAgriculturalKnowledge,Scienceand
TechnologyforDevelopment(IAASTD)isoneofmany,followinginthewakeofthe
InternationalPanelonClimateChange(IPCC),theMillenniumEcosystemAssessment
(MA),andtheMillenniumProject'sMillenniumDevelopmentGoal(MDG)taskforces,
amongothers.heIPCCevenwontheNobelPeacePrizein2007,theirstassessment
to do so.2 All of these efforts attempt to combine “expert assessment” with processes
of “stakeholder consultation” in what are presented as global, participatory assess-
ments on key issues of major international importance. Such assessments contribute
to a new landscape of governance in the international arena, offering the potential for
linksbetweenthelocalandtheglobalandpresentingnewwaysofarticulatingcitizen
engagementwithglobalprocessesofdecisionmakingandpolicy.Inmanyrespectssuch
assessments respond to the critiques of the top-down, Northern-dominated expert
assessments of the past and make attempts to be both more inclusive and more par-
ticipatoryintheirdesignandprocess,oferingnewopportunitiesformobilizationand
the articulation of alternative knowledge in the global policy domain. But how far do
they meet these objectives? Do they genuinely allow alternative voices to be heard? Do
they create a new mode of engagement in global arenas? How are local and global pro-
cesses articulated? And what are the power relations involved, creating what processes
of mediation, inclusion, and exclusion?
TakingthecaseoftheIAASTD,thischapterexplorestheseissuesthroughafocus
on the underlying knowledge politics of a global process. Four intersecting questions
at the heart of contemporary democratic theory and practice are posed: How do pro-
cesses of knowledge framing occur? How do different practices and methodologies get