Affiliation:
1. 1Department of Environmental Studies, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
2. 2Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Abstract
As agroecologists worldwide explore pathways for food systems transformations, “evidence” is in high demand. But what is evidence? How is it used? By whom and for what audiences? What does evidence support and why? We contend evidence is inherently political and thus relational. In our article, we connect Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship on evidence with critiques of colonialism, capitalism, and empire, offering a framework to analyze evidence via interlinked levels of practice, political economy, and ontological foundations. Reviewing 3 historical waves in scientific and technological (S&T) evidence, we show how the production and use of evidence has evolved within the capitalist and colonial/modern world to imbue specific food futures with legitimacy and power. We then turn to our case: gene editing of crops for carbon drawdown. Over the past 5 years, university researchers, start-ups, governments, and intergovernmental agencies have asserted that gene-edited crops will sequester carbon, benefit farmers with nutrient-rich soils, and save Earth from runaway climate change. What evidence do they offer? Using the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI) as an example, we explore how HPI generates and uses 3 main types of evidence—institutional and human evidence, scientific and technical evidence, and financial/economic evidence—to identify problems, propose solutions, attract funds, and make plans to scale technologies worldwide. We then analyze the political economy factors that drive the production of HPI evidence and the assumptions about evidence etched into its colonial/modern worldview. A relational evidence approach, we find, illuminates how elite actors mobilize resources to actualize futures for which empirical evidence today is thin. Finally, we suggest strategies agroecologists might pursue in a pluriversal transition toward multiple evidentiary terrains: “a world of many worlds” for knowledge, land, and life.
Publisher
University of California Press
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