“When it smells, it pays”: How a global environmental crisis influenced epistemic shifts in local science

• In Event: 3540 - Development and Global Environmental Change: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The 1973 collapse of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery, the largest marine fishery in the world, precipitated not only a socio-ecological crisis but also an epistemic crisis as international and local scholars sought to understand how the collapse happened and how to prevent it from happening again. The impacts of nearly three decades of unchecked development were felt by coastal communities as thousands were jobless and pollution contaminated fishing ports. The combination of severe crisis, environmental organizing, and increased scientific capacity propelled new Peruvian research projects that intersected with a global environmental movement.

Drawing from 12 months of historical and ethnographic data collection, this paper, which is a chapter in my dissertation, makes two arguments. First, the environmental movement in Peru found its institutional home in local NGOs, which supports previous research on the “Green Revolution” in Latin America. However, this case differs from the majority of examples studied because it was not anti-extractivist, conservation-oriented, or focused on indigenous rights, but was pro-extraction, technology-oriented, and focused on public health. Second, beginning in the mid-1990s, the environmental movement in Peru was influenced by the global turn towards sustainability, prompting a shift in the expertise mobilized by local NGOs from fisheries engineering to fisheries biology. Alongside the re-prioritization of expertise, I show a shift in actors involved: before the global turn, the movement was comprised of local NGOs, industry, and engineers, while following the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the movement included international NGOs, governmental agencies, and biologists. Together, these phenomena show how epistemic responses to environmental crises depend on highly contextual, variegated factors that determine the way in which scientific expertise is put into practice--conclusions that can be applied to current and future crises around the world.

Author

• Apollonya Maria Porcelli, Brown University