After the collapse: Evaluating undone science in the wake of a global environmental crisis

Abstract

This study deepens our understanding of environmental knowledge production under varying political-economic regimes. While the extant scholarship on undone science, that is the systemic non-production of knowledge, is largely based in liberal democracies in the US and Europe, it elides important differences in the making and unmaking of science elsewhere. Using the case of Peru’s left-leaning military dictatorship (1968–1980), I show how undone science contributed to the 1973 collapse of the world’s largest fishery and one of the most studied fisheries on the planet: the anchoveta (Engraulis ringens). In an effort to reconstruct the fishery and resolve undone science, I also demonstrate how the state collapsed established boundaries by brokering research between previously antagonistic scientific fields and enabling South-South coalitions across Latin America. The evidence presented here illustrates how, during times of crisis, states can nationalize fisheries science, meaning they promote novel scholarship from domestic data sources, among local scientists, and between endemic research institutions. Thus, the main drivers of epistemic change, in this case, are state actors exercising “conventional” practices, undermining the assumption that only bottom-up and “contentious” pressure can do so. This research offers important lessons for future research on state-science relations in the Global South.