Envisioning Emergent environments

Negotiating Science & Resource Management in Rural Communities

ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant 2017-18

Belize is a small country on the Caribbean coast of Central America, currently addressing the challenge of developing effective policies to manage its vulnerability to environmental hazards. As part of efforts towards sustainable development goals, governmental and non-governmental bodies are undertaking data-led 'watershed management' projects to assess and manage not only water but also land, ecosystem and human aspects of resource stewardship. Belize's history of rural development and conservation interventions involves legacies of colonialism, indigenous land rights struggles, territorial disputes and past failed projects. Given this context, my research examines what contemporary watershed management interventions mean and entail for rural residents whose lives and livelihoods depend on the environments in question.

 Using methods and theoretical tools from anthropology, science & technology studies, and political ecology, the analysis traces interactions between rural residents and the scientists, government representatives, land developers, NGOs and civil society organisations with whom they negotiate environmental knowledge. The study examines the processes of translation and participation that may or may not occur during scientific environmental assessments and management interventions. It asks whether emerging technologies and scientific practices including remote data collection and 'citizen science' raise new challenges and/or opportunities for effective and equitable human-environment engagements in small developing countries. The ultimate aim is to advance original understandings of how tensions between different ways of knowing and valuing environments can generate new social and environmental outcomes.

Project workshop: Negotiating Environmental Knowledges, Oxford 12-13 Dec 2018. More info

Di Giminiani, P. & Haines, S. 2020 Introduction: Translating environments. Ethnos 85(1):1-16

Taddei RR & Haines S 2019 When climatologists meet social scientists: ethnographic speculations around interdisciplinary equivocations, Sociologias 21(51):186-209 (simultaneously published in Portuguese)

Haines, S. 2019 Reckoning resources: political lives of anticipation in Belize’s water sector. Science & Technology Studies 30(4):97-118

Haines, S. 2019 Managing expectations: articulating expertise in climate services for agriculture in Belize. Climatic Change 157(1):43-59

Haines S, Cano A, Hislop A & Williams T 2019. Water: environmental knowledge and rural life in Belize. Report of a multi-stakeholder workshop. Working paper.