Weaving strands of knowledge. Learning about environmental change in the Bhutan Himalayas

Abstract

Climate change is a complex phenomenon, so much so that even those with expert knowledge on the scientific data struggle to understand the impacts of climate change on their everyday lives. Contradictions across systems of knowledge make clear that climate change is not just a problem of scientific understanding but is also simultaneously a problem of global coordination as well as a sociopolitical problem of connecting domains of knowledge that are seldom valued equitably. The project described in this paper is a prototype effort to put knowledge from community members in two culturally distinct rural areas of the world at equal footing with scientific knowledge. The overarching project aim was to design partnership-based inquiry into environmental and climate change that coordinated the aforementioned three facets of climate change (a) scientific understanding, (b) cross-cultural coordination among globally dispersed communities, and (c) sociopolitical equity in bringing nondominant perspectives to the table.