Is there Room for Other-than-Human Agency in Transdisciplinary Research? An Ethnographic Reflection

Abstract

The article argues that most of the debates on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and co-production focus solely on human actors and human agency and, as a result, fail to acknowledge the role of other-than-human agency in fields where it plays a central role, environmental governance being one of them. Two cases are presented and analyzed. In the first, climate scientists and technicians in South America co-produce solutions for an environmental crisis brought about by a drought. The article argues that the drought was what enabled coproduction to happen meaningfully. The second contrasts the thinking of Yanomami Indigenous author and shaman Davi Kopenawa about the environment and the agencies involved in shamanistic action with the ontological basis of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in which the integration of Indigenous knowledge has been a goal for over a decade. Based on the analysis of these cases, it is argued that other-than-human agencies need to be recognized in environmental governance.