Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros84Dossier : Les nouvelles normativi...Data & the Seed: From Extractive ...

Dossier : Les nouvelles normativités transformatrices des systèmes semenciers

Data & the Seed: From Extractive Epistemology to Emancipating Agrobiodiversity Research Methods

La donnée et la graine : De l’épistémologie extractive aux méthodes de recherche émancipatrices sur l’agrobiodiversité
Veronica Limeberry et Garrett Graddy-Lovelace

Résumés

Cet article est issu d’un projet collaboratif transrégional visant à imaginer et à incarner des méthodes de recherche émancipatrices pour les pratiques et les politiques en matière d’agrobiodiversité. L’objectif de la recherche émancipatrice - contrecarrer les projets qui extraient des données et du temps des communautés - est intentionnellement ambitieux. Nous analysons les pratiques de recherche et de collecte de données extractives et la manière dont elles ont façonné la recherche et la gouvernance actuelles en matière d’agrobiodiversité. Nous soutenons que la recherche égalitaire est nécessaire pour des politiques, des pratiques et une gouvernance équitables. Nous posons donc la question suivante : qu’est-ce que cela implique sur le plan méthodologique ? Quel rôle les données, en tant que processus et produit, jouent-elles dans la promotion de résultats émancipateurs ou extractifs, en particulier dans le contexte de la recherche sur l’agrobiodiversité ? En dialoguant avec des méthodes de recherche collaboratives, dirigées par des praticiens et décoloniales, cet essai met l’accent sur les opportunités et les voies permettant de faire progresser des méthodologies de recherche et de gouvernance plus égalitaires, démocratiques et émancipatrices. Nous nous concentrons sur le cas de notre propre recherche de subvention pluriannuelle avec des leaders et des praticiens communautaires dans les Appalaches aux États Unis, le Yucatan au Mexique et le Pérou andin, afin de détailler les défis et les résultats des processus et des objectifs de recherche égalitaire potentiels liés à la recherche et à la gouvernance de l’agrobiodiversité.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

Introduction: Agrobiodiversity Communities of Practice

1This essay emerges from and aims to contribute to scholarship about community-based, practitioner-led research for agricultural biodiversity practice and policy. It focuses on methodology, as a central fulcrum for gathering and assessing knowledge about crop diversity, and thus also for informing governance about and for it. Analyzing the politics, processes, and methods of data collection and dissemination opens space to trace reductive, appropriative methods and envision and advance more egalitarian, democratic, and even emancipatory research and governance methodologies.

2We begin with the understanding, informed by critical and Indigenous worldviews, that extractivist research enables extractive policies, political economies, and ecologies. Accordingly, egalitarian research is needed for equitable policies, practices, and governance. This pertains directly to research on, with, and for agrobiodiverse food and land use systems. What would this entail methodologically? What role does data—both as process and product—play in fostering either emancipatory or extractive outcomes, particularly in the context of agrobiodiversity research?

  • 1 Alder Keleman Saxena et al., “How Agrobiodiversity Nourishes: Mapping Causal Webs That Generate Agr (...)
  • 2 “Agrobiodiversity Nourishes Us/La Agrobiodiversidad Nos Nutre: Action Research for Agroecological T (...)

3This methodological intervention reflects on the process of implementing a multi-rural-site project that builds out from a National Science Foundation (NSF) Socio-Ecological Synthesis Center (SESYNC) Pursuit to synthesize existing datasets on agricultural biodiversity and food security: Diverse Pathways to Nourishment: Understanding How Agrobiodiversity Enhances Food Security and Nutrition. The 2018-2021 NSF SESYNC Pursuit deliberately included agrobiodiversity expert-practitioners and community leaders, as well as interdisciplinary scholars committed to rigorous, community-based research on and for pathways connecting agrobiodiversity and food security/sovereignty and nutrition (“FS/SN” – see Pursuit Team members’ review invited essay for Global Food Security1). Faced with logistical and epistemic challenges of synthesizing existing data on agrobiodiversity, Pursuit members embarked upon a series of ‘encuentro’ shared analysis sessions with communities and coalitions with long histories of upkeeping and expanding in situ agrobiodiversity, in: Appalachian US (in Fall 2019), Yucatan Mexico (Spring 2020), Andean Peru (delayed by Covid-19, now happening virtually and iteratively), and beyond. This encuentro series has since expanded into a multi-media, multilingual Special Feature, “Agrobiodiversity Nourishes Us/La Agrobiodiversidad Nos Nutre: Action-Research for Agroecological Transformation” for the open access journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene2. This essay contextualizes the SESYNC Pursuit, encuentro series, and Special Feature collaborations within ongoing literatures and debates regarding big data, Indigenous data sovereignty, the politics of knowledge, place-based methodologies and communities of practice for crop diversity management.

  • 3 Sélim Louafi et al., “Crop Diversity Management System Commons: Revisiting the Role of Genebanks in (...)
  • 4 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and (...)

4The concept of crop diversity communities of practice has evolved from terrains of collective situated learning to organizational tactics for knowledge management; but it is being re-expanded back to original goals of collaborative situational learning by such initiatives as the CoEx project.3 This expansive reclamation of the concept recognizes the collective, situated process of learning and meaning-making; as such it centers the ‘practice’ aspect of communities-of-practice. The SESYNC Pursuit, encuentros, and Special Feature likewise strive to center mutual learning and diálogo de saberes (dialogue of knowledges). The participants come from deliberately diverse realms of experience, language, epistemology, and even ontology and worldview–realms that have historically been hierarchized, and racialized in their devaluation: “Producing equitable and responsible data not only means taking into account the plurality of knowledge systems but also overcoming the epistemic injustice to which they are subject.”4 The work of countering such epistemic inequities needs to proactively prioritize the expertise of those doing the work of seed upkeeping.

  • 5 See: Orlando Fals-Borda, “The Application of Participatory Action-Research in Latin America,” Inter (...)
  • 6 For example:Christopher D. Gerrard, Marco A. Ferroni, and Ashoka Mody, eds., Global Public Policies (...)

5There is a robust history and geography of participatory action research spanning from emancipatory 5to technocratic 6contexts. This project, like the CoEx initiative, aims to expand the discourse of participation to encompass community-based and practitioner-led dialogue and shared analysis as the foundation for collaborative data collection moving forward. Rather than selecting participants for a pre-designed research investigation, the encuentro series and public Feature serve as spaces for collectively deliberated articulations of community-based research needs, parameters, goals, and ethics. Aiming to democratize research methods requires upending dominant hierarchies of scientific, professional expertise so as to center and support place-based, practitioner expertise, needs, agency, and vision. Embedded in the technical linguistics of the endeavor, we found the need to interrogate the process and methods of data collection itself: how is it usually done, by whom, for whom, and to what ends? If we commit to create participatory community research, we must ask: what is ‘participatory’ and why? Who are communities? How and to what ends do these methods enable--or even envision--emancipatory research outcomes for those involved?

6Crop diversity management is inherently a collective effort, with stakeholders ranging from indigenous and campesinx communities to gene bank officials, from researchers to policy makers, but also to all those who save, grow, keep, swap, sell, eat, and love seeds and food. Focusing on the dynamics of collaboration within crop diversity management becomes all the more crucial in light of crises of climate disasters, malnourishment, land dispossession, and (agri)cultural appropriation. Within this broader context, we focus on the policy aspect of crop diversity management; we examine the role of community-partnered research and participatory shared analysis as important steps in laying the groundwork for conceptualizing and enacting collective agrobiodiversity self-governance.

7We recognize that emancipation as a research goal is bold and difficult--vague and even presumptuous. We do not intend it to be a metaphor, but the ideal experience and outcome of shared research processes; while it may be impossible to achieve fully, the emancipatory research framework fosters the struggle to learn better with less extractive, more egalitarian research methods. The use of the word is to highlight not only the active struggle of creating liberatory methodologies, but the sovereignty of heavily researched people and communities in determining research processes and outcomes. Emancipatory research aims to take ideas such as participatory analysis and democratized research to the next level, wherein community shared analyses are part of a larger goal for research that fosters pathways for people’s liberation.

8Regarding the role of emancipatory methodologies for agrobiodiversity and nourishment, we ask what research methods and deliverables would be of use to practitioners and frontline community organizations who are seeking to inform and transform policy. (How) could data on agrobiodiversity and food security simultaneously meet the needs of rural communities, counter colonial extractive tendencies in academia, and inform transformative governance? Through analysis of data collection methods, policy outcomes, and dialogic analysis perspectives, we theorize pathways for non-extractive research methods with and for rural communities that could lay the groundwork for equitable policy to agricultural biodiversity renewals.

Agrobiodiversity Governance

9While there are numerous policies, legal frameworks, conventions, and regimes that impact agrobiodiversity, food sovereignty, and seed conservation, we argue that there is little attention specifically to the practice of agrobiodiversity governance. In this section we lay out a brief framework to define agrobiodiversity governance along with examples of multiple types of institutions, policies, frameworks, and movements that shape it. Even from a preliminary overview, the throughline emerges: dominant agrobiodiversity governance paradigms are structured around techno-scientific perspectives and practices.

  • 7 Karl S. Zimmerer et al., “Mountain Ecology, Remoteness, and the Rise of Agrobiodiversity: Tracing t (...)

10Agrobiodiversity, understood as the ‘biological diversity of plants and animals for food and livelihoods’ which ‘incorporates production and consumption networks, cultural knowledge and resource systems, social relations and institutions’7 encompasses the multitude of seeds, plants, practices, landscapes, ecologies, geographies, and communities that impact agrarian production and reproduction. Agrobiodiversity governance includes local, national, and global regimes, including policies, manifestos, conventions, and dialogues that foster outcomes for agrobiodiversity.

  • 8 Ananya Roy, “Strangely Familiar: Planning and the Worlds of Insurgence and Informality,” Planning T (...)
  • 9 Roy, “Strangely Familiar.”pg 8

11We identify institutional, legal, official frameworks that shape agrobiodiversity supports, practices, and regulations in ways considered ‘top down,’ as well as grassroots movements, demands, manifestos, and frontline coalitions that shape agrobiodiversity supports, practices, and (hoped for) regulations via ‘bottom up’ frameworks–though we deliberately aim to upend the vertical hierarchy in this respect. Here we imperfectly classify these two types of agrobiodiversity governance structures as ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. There exists astute scholarship on formal and informal institutions, and how informality denotes a racialized and gendered feature structured by exclusion of specific peoples in ‘formal’ frameworks. Urban geographers have chronicled the class-based and racialized politics of rendering markets and spaces ‘informal’.8 ‘Informal’ spaces comprise communities on the frontline of environmental injustices and insecurities, yet without access to official or formal channels of power (that is: peripheral). Roy argues “the uneven cartographies of access and power within which the periphery is at once marginalized and yet able to put forward a counter-politics” comprises a crucial aspect of the dialectic between “formal/informal”.9

  • 10 Philippe Aghion and Jean Tirole, “Formal and Real Authority in Organizations,” Journal of Political (...)
  • 11 Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, eds., Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin (...)
  • 12 Regine Andersen, Governing Agrobiodiversity Plant Genetics and Developing Countries, Routledge, 200
  • 13 Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions and Democracy.

12Our framework of formal and informal is also informed by scholarship in International Relations, wherein ‘formal’ authority, by definition, carries the ‘right to decide’ outcomes 10and formal institutions are those that serve as official-legal channels of political decision making.11 Regine Andersen identifies structural power along with norm creation and diffusion as elements of formal regimes, going on to define formal agrobiodiversity governance as the intersections of power regarding biological issues with politics, culture, and socioeconomics.12 Informal institutions are “rules and procedures that are created, communicated, and enforced outside the officially sanctioned channels of power”13. Informal institutions shape and inform formal institutions, just as formal institutions shape and inform informal regimes. In other words, formal and informal do not exist in dichotomy against each other, but rather as dialectical processes that co-construct the other. Importantly, as mentioned, informality is often a recourse of the dispossessed: those without access to official channels of power are often excluded from legal political processes and institutions, so informality becomes a form of agency and survival in otherwise vulnerable conditions.

  • 14 Louise Sperling et al., “Informal Seed Traders: The Backbone of Seed Business and African Smallhold (...)
  • 15 Karl S. Zimmerer and Stef de Haan, “Informal Food Chains and Agrobiodiversity Need Strengthening—No (...)
  • 16 Laurel Bellante, “Double Exposure, Dispossession, and Farmer Resistance in the Cornfields of Chiapa (...)
  • 17 Marcia M. Croft et al., “Formal and Informal Seed Systems in Kenya: Supporting Indigenous Vegetable (...)
  • 18 Tamara Wattnem, “Seed Laws, Certification and Standardization: Outlawing Informal Seed Systems in t (...)

13By this measure, informal agrobiodiversity governance regimes often thwart, redirect, contest, or challenge formal agrobiodiversity regimes; however, they may also seek to become formalized or to collaborate in partnership with formal regimes. This dynamic parallels and correlates with the dynamic between formal and informal seed markets and seed systems. Scholars have chronicled how informal seed systems are “the backbone of smallholder seed security” as well as systems across Africa14, and have become increasingly crucial across South America amidst Covid-1915; they have also shown how informal seed systems suffer from lack of support and broader forces of dispossession, in Mexico16, Kenya17, and elsewhere, including outright criminalization18. Understanding the dynamics between and across formal and informal seed systems (with all of their complexity and variability across time, space, and perspective), however, requires analyzing the dynamics between formal and informal agrobiodiversity governance.

  • 19 See: Andersen, Governing Agrobiodiversity Plant Genetics and Developing Countries.

14Most of the major formal mechanisms–international treaties, conventions, and official channels of policies impacting agrobiodiversity governance globally deliberately. Below is a brief list of examples of high-level ‘official’ agrobiodiversity governance treaties, conventions, and policies.19

  • The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), adopted in 2001 and entered into force on 29 June 2004 

  • Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), adopted in 1992 entered into force 1993. And within this, the Nagoya Protocol on ABS.

  • The Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), adopted 1994 and entered into force 1995

  • The International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, establishing the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), adopted 1961, entered into force 1968, been updated 3 times (Andersen, 2008)

  • Various relevant state-level laws and policies

15In the same vein we examined popularized and visible campaigns, demands, and manifestos from grassroots organizations, communities, non-profits, and other groups to provide insight into examples of various so-called ‘informal’ regimes. These efforts and initiatives are multifaceted, evolving, emergent, and continually in process. This makes the naming and listing of these demands, campaigns, and manifestos difficult (and sometimes contentious). Instead, we provide a bit of depth for a few examples, including:

    • 20 La Via Campesina, “DECLARATION OF NYÉLÉNI - Nyeleni - Via Campesina - Newsletter, Bulletin, Boletin (...)

    The 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, where ‘more than 500 representatives from more than 80 countries, of organizations of peasants/family farmers, artisanal fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers, environmental and urban movements gathered together in the village of Nyéléni in Sélingué, Mali to strengthen a global movement for food sovereignty’20;

    • 21 Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, Mass: South End Pres (...)

    Navdanya’s declarations for Earth Democracy and The Thimphu Declaration for Ecological Organic Agriculture in Mountain Agro-Ecosystems, which both contribute to sustaining the necessary biodiversity of earth’s living systems through human connection with land and seed21;

    • 22 Indigenous Terra Madre, “THE SHILLONG DECLARATION (A Living Document Based on the Sessions Held at (...)

    Indigenous Terra Madre’s Shillong Declaration of 2015, where ‘representatives of 170 Indigenous food communities and delegates from 62 countries in Africa, the Americas, the Arctic, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific, who gathered in Shillong’ affirmed the land rights of indigenous communities and associated responsibility to protect agrobiodiversity and seeds for food sovereignty22;

  • Numerous other local, regional, and transnational manifestos and declarations by such groups and organizations.

  • 23 Virginia D. Nazarea, Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers: Marginality and Memory in the Conservation o (...)
  • 24 Brendan Coolsaet, “Transformative Participation in Agrobiodiversity Governance: Making the Case for (...)

16Of note, formal-official agrobiodiversity-centered regimes tend to remain in the realm of techno-scientific goals (genetic diversity, property rights, environmental conservation, technological solutions, ex-situ gene banks, etc.), while informal regimes more often focus on the interconnections between human rights and community protections alongside biodiversity protections. For example, the concepts of seed sovereignty, food sovereignty, and earth democracy are articulations that emerge from these informal regimes—advocating for community autonomy and agency vis-à-vis the protection of agrobiodiversity. Nazarea highlights these types of relational work between seeds and community as ‘in-vivo’, or ‘conservation [of seed biodiversity] as a way of life’.23 Herein, agrobiodiversity emerges as a ‘tool for political, cultural and economic autonomy’.24 In the tension between formal/informal global agrobiodiversity regimes, the selection of using traditional varieties or landraces can be seen as a ‘political statement’ (ibid). For example, in the Declaration of Nyéléni, La Via Campesina argues that:

  • 25 La Via Campesina, “Declaration of Nyéléni - Nyeleni - Via Campesina - Newsletter, Bulletin, Boletin (...)

“Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just incomes to all peoples as well as the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social and economic classes and generations”. 25

17While in the Shillong Declaration, the peoples of Indigenous Terra Madre call upon:

  • 26 Indigenous Terra Madre, “The Shillong Declaration (A Living Document Based on the Sessions Held at (...)

“Governments and other constitutional bodies to make certain that Indigenous Peoples and local communities who care for and maintain their lands and territories be allowed to continue to protect, sustainably use, restore and enrich the variety of seeds, breeds, fish, bees and other living organisms they host. They must be respected and acknowledged in appropriate ways for their stewardship role and capacity to generate marvelously diverse food for people and cultures. They must be encouraged to nourish and strengthen the languages and traditional knowledge, practices and institutions that evolved with their agrobiodiversity, and be secured in their spiritual domains, collective governance, and management of relevant land, water and natural resources”.26

  • 27 La Via Campesina, “United Nations: Third Committee Approves the UN Declaration on the Rights of Pea (...)

18Of note is the degree to which the needs and claims of such informal regimes are incorporated, challenge, and/or directly shape formal regimes. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas was advanced by La Via Campesina, while the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was informed by the work of Indigenous peoples globally. 27While both of these formal regimes address issues of biodiversity conservation and food access/agency, neither is included specifically in formal-legal conventions or treaties on biodiversity. While these declarations clearly have implications for agrobiodiversity governance, they formally fall under legal human rights structures. Herein we see the tension that exists--especially in formal-legal channels--when extricating environment, biodiversity, agri-food systems, and human rights. Below is a diagram based on content analysis of the above listed formal and informal documents, highlighting keywords, narratives, and perspectives of each category of governance.

Tableau 1: Content analysis of keywords for above mentioned governance Tableau 1 : Content analysis of keywords for above mentioned governance documents, ranked from most to least used terms

Tableau 1: Content analysis of keywords for above mentioned governance Tableau 1 : Content analysis of keywords for above mentioned governance documents, ranked from most to least used terms

19Evident in the keywords and language of formal and informal governance documents, formal-legal channels rely on techno-scientific and legalistic language of ‘parties’ ‘members’ ‘breeder’ ‘property’ and so on; Indigenous and community terms are ranked among the least used in all of these documents. In the informal, grassroots-published documents, ‘people’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘communal’, ‘rights’, ‘Indigenous’, ‘women’, and so on are predominant terms to frame agrobiodiversity governance frameworks; of note, profits and commodities rank among the least used words in these documents. This brief analysis of only four key documents per category is of course not exhaustive, but instead illustrative of the ways in which the language, narratives, and thus ideas of these regimes are framed. Often in official-legal conventions and treaties, environmental issues are seen as techno-scientific, while human rights are often separated into socio-economic frameworks, whereas in informal governance manifestos, human and cultural rights are inseparable from environmental and agrobiodiversity conservation.

  • 28 FAO, “Farmers’ Rights | International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture |  (...)

20However, despite this trend in separating environmental and human rights in formal-legal frameworks, increasing inclusion of grassroots voices and pressures have opened up dialogue in the ITPGRFA on how to best actualize its landmark Farmers’ Rights and benefit-sharing provisions.28 Nevertheless, the recent biennial ITPGRFA meeting in Rome, in November 2019, continued to stagnate regarding Farmers’ Rights.

21Existing agrobiodiversity regimes demonstrate the unruly complexity of agrobiodiversity, the risks of stagnation for formal channels of policy that do not make room for robust farmer practitioner engagement, and yet the promising pathways for shared and possibly emancipatory governance structures.

  • 29 Virginia D Nazarea, Robert E Rhoades, and Jenna E Andrews-Swann, Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope (...)
  • 30 ibid

22Inherent tensions exist within the conceptualization of agrobiodiversity governance and conservation as something that ‘formally trained, or well-positioned people ought to get less developed, informally educated, poorly positioned people to think about and do’.29 Yet, this erases the contributions, meaning-making, and agency of informal regimes and in-vivo conservation practices where or conservation as life, conservation as survival, conservation as relationship, and conservation as autonomy take shape.30

  • 31 Christopher M. Bacon et al., “The Social Dimensions of Sustainability and Change in Diversified Far (...)

23We ask how informal and/or customary ecological and agricultural knowledges fit into these governance systems. It is clear that agrobiodiversity and seed conservation are not only embedded in techno-scientific challenges, but also ‘wider socio-ecological processes’ such as local governance structures and practices, community norms, markets, systems of inequality, and so forth.31

Big data-ification and diverse epistemologies

  • 32 Jim Thatcher, David O’Sullivan, and Dillon Mahmoudi, “Data Colonialism through Accumulation by Disp (...)
  • 33 Tad Mutersbaugh, “‘The Other Mining’: Rural Communities, Autonomy and Data Production” (American As (...)

24‘Big data’ has emerged and proliferated as a commodity32 throughout the realm of agriculture, but specifically within agrobiodiversity conservation and PGRFA governance. Recently, scholars have chronicled the new frontier of agricultural big-data collection as ‘the other mining,’ with its impacts on rural communities, autonomy, and data production.33 Yet, even as digital data mining from farmers’ cell phones and satellites constitutes a new form of biopolitical surveillance and appropriation, some data remains important for farmers themselves. Drawing on environmental justice literatures and methodologies, data collection documents the scale and scope of injustices; it is needed for legal and political leverage. Accordingly, under what methodological conditions do data augment visibility—or exacerbate erasure?

25This is an ongoing question, with no fixed answer. Researchers of crop diversity rightfully focus on the world’s major Centers of Crop Origin and Crop Diversity: likewise, our Pursuit and encuentros began with southern Mexico Mayan milpa growers as well as southern Peruvian Andean tuber and grain growers. But, even then, much research and development efforts focus on the product of agrobiodiversity: the impressive germplasm itself; meanwhile the Indigenous, often female, growers of the germplasm are rarely consulted or remunerated as experts themselves. All the while, the many regions of the world that are micro-Centers of Diversity remain largely overlooked. Our project focused on one such region: Appalachian United States.

26Within the context of a research project on, with, and for Appalachian agricultural biodiversity initiatives, the politics of data are particularly fraught—yet generative. What data exists regarding how agrobiodiversity has nourished or could nourish communities in this region? What data could be gathered to help understand what is thwarting its potential to do so? Data collection in the mountains and foothills of the Appalachian region has been a colonialist tool of land surveying, genocidal displacement, and extractive industries, and the apoliticized mapping of pain, hunger, and poverty. But focusing on agrobiodiversity helps shift the narrative—from deficits to assets, from Anglo white-washing to the honesty of ancient and ongoing cultural diversity. Focusing on seeds helps ground data collection that traces trauma and displacement alongside survival and regeneration. Archiving seed varieties and how they have been used to feed people helps constitute an archival knowledge that is of use to current community initiatives for food sovereignty and agroecology. In this way, data collection could be used to counter long-standing scholarly disdain for this region--and others like it--and for the agrarian knowledges and agrobiodiverse practices therein. Data and research for agrobiodiversity policy has historically obscured or objectified the Indigenous, African Diaspora, immigrant, and female expertise, but has the potential to demonstrate and support it.

Collective policy governance and participatory shared analyses: pathways to emancipatory research?

27In the face of tensions surrounding the big-datification of seed and agriculture, we ask: in what ways can data and research for agrobiodiversity policy 1. amplify the voices of peoples challenging unjust or oppressive structures and 2. actively serve to further emancipatory projects? By emancipatory projects we do not mean metaphorical emancipation, but tangible outcomes for the healing, connection, and liberation of communities through research processes. To confront the monolith of big-data, erasure of crucial micro-regions, and structural harms against Indigenous, Afro-Descendant, and peasant communities, research by and for these communities must exist as a site of reclamation, sovereignty, and community agency. The use of emancipation is intentionally an aspirational term: a place to uncover fault lines between research that reproduces extractive and oppressive systems and research that can serve as radical liberatory praxis. We are only in the beginning stages of learning what this may look like and we acknowledge this is an iterative process of learning and unlearning along the way.

  • 34 Robert Chambers, “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal,” World Development 22, (...)
  • 35 David Brown and Agricultural Research and Extension Network, Participatory Methodologies and Partic (...)
  • 36 Rachel Pain and Peter Francis, “Reflections on Participatory Research,” Area 35, no. 1 (March 2003) (...)
  • 37 Sara Kindon, Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation (...)
  • 38 Ibid

28In this section we analyze the potential for what we term Participatory Shared Analysis (PSA) and collective policy governance to foster democratized research goals. We identify Participatory Shared Analysis (PSA) as an evolution of Participatory Action Research (PAR), wherein PAR focuses on community participation in research lenses and goals, PSA furthers this dynamic, arguing for participation not only in research itself, but analysis as well. PAR for agricultural research emerged out of a complex intersection of activist participatory research, agroecosystem research, farmer field research, and applied anthropology, spanning the decades from the 1960s through the 1990s.34 The idea of community and individual participation in research evolved as a methodological resistance to the practices where urban-based researchers would drop in to rural areas for the purposes of ‘development’, collect data, and leave without any tangible benefits seen by the communities being researched.35 This in-and-out research and accompanying data extracts knowledge, time, and experience from communities and uses it to promote policies, grants, or other work that have little to no benefit for the communities being studied.36 Counter to this, goals of PAR include: recognizing ‘the existence of a plurality of knowledges in a variety of institutions and locations’ while operating from the assumption that ‘those who have been most systematically excluded, oppressed or denied carry specifically revealing wisdom about the history, structure, consequences and the fracture points in unjust social arrangements’.37 Fundamentally, PAR ‘represents a counter-hegemonic approach to knowledge production’.38

  • 39 Engel, Facilitating Innovation. Pg 175.
  • 40 David Brown and Agricultural Research and Extension Network, Participatory Methodologies and Partic (...)

29Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)--one of the earliest forms of PAR– is ‘a family of participatory approaches and methods which emphasize local knowledge and enable[s] local people to do their own appraisal, analysis and planning.39 From the global recognition of participatory approaches to research, the idea and use of ‘participation’ as both a theory of change and conceptual focus has become a guiding motif in international work on development and practice.40 According to Chanie,

  • 41 Yazie Chanie, “Review of Participatory Agricultural Research Approach and Its Importance in Ethiopi (...)

“the salient feature of the [participatory research] approach is the reversal of learning, where researcher and extension workers are learning from farmers. The key elements of the new paradigm are to put emphasis on people rather than “things”, to decentralize, empower the participants, to value and work on what matters to participants and to learn from the beneficiaries rather than to teach them”.41

  • 42 Chambers, “Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)”; Engel, Facilitating Innovation.
  • 43 Pain and Francis, “Reflections on Participatory Research”; Wilmsen, “Extraction, Empowerment, and R (...)
  • 44 Bina Agarwal, “Participatory Exclusions, Community Forestry, and Gender: An Analysis for South Asia (...)

30However, critics point out that the goal of empowering participants through their role in the co-creation of knowledge and data is difficult to attain. Many scholars and activists highlight that PAR is often directed by NGOs and conducted within top-down institutional frameworks; participants themselves are rarely involved in the actual creation of participatory research methodologies and some scholars and activists worry that PAR has become a gloss to give an image of democratic data collection without true commitment to community empowerment.42 Other scholars and activists argue that PAR can also be used by elites (donors, organizations, leaders) to co-opt local knowledge and movements.43 Finally, other critics highlight the potential of ‘participatory exclusion’, wherein despite the goals of PAR, specific groups (often women) are excluded from participation unintentionally.44 Hence, relying on PAR as just another tool in a methods toolbox is unlikely to lead to data and research as emancipatory for communities. Given this, 1) what is emancipatory data and 2) what methods would foster such a high-level goal for agrobiodiversity research?

  • 45 Bal Krishna Jamarkattel et al., “Democratising Terai Forestry Governance: Emerging Innovations in t (...)

31To begin answering these questions we present the emergence of collective policy governance, which arose predominantly in the early 2000s as a framework for multiple actors to participate in the creation, implementation, and unfolding of policies that impact them.45 The World Bank defines collective policy governance as:

  • 46 Jeff Thindwa, “What Is Collective Governance? | World Economic Forum,” 2015, https://www.weforum.or (...)

“...an innovative model of governance that is solutions-oriented with a focus on public value, where diverse stakeholders can work in partnership to improve the management of public resources and delivery of services…Most of the public collective governance initiatives are anchored on facilitating transparency, accountability and (stakeholder) participation... [Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives] are an attempt to place citizens more at the center of change processes and development 46

  • 47 Anna Lawrence, Taking Stock of Nature: Participatory Biodiversity Assessment for Policy, Planning a (...)

32The emphasis of collective policy governance is still on top-down institutions (namely government structures), but works to center citizen participation and needs, and importantly attempts to hold institutions accountable to these needs. Codified in both the Rio Declaration and the Aarhus Convention, public participation in agrobiodiversity and environmental governance has been an increasingly critical goal for legitimating, adapting, and creating innovative agrobiodiversity policy regimes globally.47 Collective policy governance as both a research framework and goal lends itself to the potential to be emancipatory; however, it still maintains many of the same criticisms leveraged at PAR. The challenge is to truly decenter knowledge construction, fostering shared goals and analyses while also enabling community capacity to re-orient power structures equitably between the people being researched and the researcher(s).

  • 48 Bacon et al., “The Social Dimensions of Sustainability and Change in Diversified Farming Systems.” (...)
  • 49 Coolsaet, “Transformative Participation in Agrobiodiversity Governance.” Pg 1091

33The combined goals of PAR and collective policy governance envision re-orienting power relationships so that learning is shared and benefits are centered on those most impacted by issues. The underlying goals of these practices have the potential to become emancipatory when viewed through a critical justice lens. As Bacon et al. highlight, ‘agriculture itself is an integral nexus of society and ecology over time, a coevolution of culture and nature, humans and landscape’.48 People, communities, and land are ‘at the core of contemporary biodiversity policy’, which implies the need for governance structures embedded in ‘justice, empowerment and democracy’.49

  • 50 David Brown and Agricultural Research and Extension Network, Participatory Methodologies and Partic (...)

34Taking this critical social justice approach, we push the methodologies and practices of collective policy governance and participatory shared analysis beyond their institutional-formal centers of power and knowledge. Our vision of emancipatory collective research decenters the idea that research can only be produced by the researcher as arm of formal-legal institution; instead, power and knowledge emerge as co-creation from the people most impacted by issues and their shared work with researchers.50 The researcher acknowledges and dissects their own positionality and privilege and partners with communities to develop research methodologies, data, so that findings serve not only the researcher’s goal, but rather primarily benefit communities in their missions for liberation. Herein, PSA becomes a methodological tool that fosters not only community involvement in research, but also research design, implementation, and its analysis and outcomes.

  • 51 Lesley-Ann Noel, “Promoting an Emancipatory Research Paradigm in Design Education and Practice,” 20 (...)
  • 52 Ibid.
  • 53 Davydd J. Greenwood, William Foote Whyte, and Ira Harkavy, “Participatory Action Research as a Proc (...)
  • 54 “Agrobiodiversity, Food Security, and Nutrition | SESYNC,” accessed January 6, 2023, https://www.se (...)

35A key goal for emancipatory research is ‘a political action that aims to move the control of the research into the hands of the community being researched’51; methodologies emphasize shared visioning of goals, participation and leadership by the community at all levels, accountability, transparency, and reciprocity.52 Emancipatory data follows as data that emerges from emancipatory research, enabling communities to build their capacity and advocate for their own goals.53 In a grant pursuit from 2018-2020 through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) and NSF entitled ‘Diverse pathways to nourishment: Understanding how agricultural biodiversity enhances food security and nutrition’, our goals is to build and support forms of emancipatory collective research in the realm of seeds, food, agricultural practices, and agrobiodiversity governance.54

36This Pursuit specifically asks: where, how, and in what contexts does agrobiodiversity contribute to food security and nutrition? In this project we aim to go beyond asking whether a relationship between agrobiodiversity and food security exists, and instead synthesize a framework of pathways by which agrobiodiversity and FSN may relate to each other in specific agroecological, sociocultural, and policy contexts. Drawing from participants’ existing datasets, we undertake a comparative analysis of the roles played by diverse cropping systems and endemic crop species in agriculture, nutrition, and local food cultures. Additionally, we examine the enabling or constraining policy environments affecting biodiverse food supplies. In comparing this data, we synthesize not just cross-regional trends, but also a series of multi-disciplinary questions, methods, and policy instruments to guide future research and intervention.

37Specifically, the tenants of PSA and emancipatory collective research as part of this endeavor have appeared in different ways throughout the project. The research design of the project originated in a technical-scientific grant to synthesize existing data on the intersections of agrobiodiversity and food security/nutrition (FSN). We immediately recognize the tension between FSN and food sovereignty and identify this as one limitation in the technical pursuit. However, communities that our member-team originate from and have been working with for collective decades have identified a need to address lack of data and larger contextual underpinnings linking forms of agrobiodiversity (such as seed saving, land rights, food access, farmer and land-worker rights, and culturally-embedded nutritional meals). We ask why these specific agrobiodiversity-rich communities are often food-and-nutrition poor. The technical-scientific approach renders images of these communities primarily as poverty-ridden, without capacity or access to food, and without education on nutrition. Yet, from our work and time (and sometimes as members of) on these same communities, we recognize that despite poverty, there is much more happening than lack of education and access to food and nutrition. The original goal of the grant endeavor was to identify and synthesize data to begin piecing together this much more complicated picture of simultaneously resilient, innovative, impoverished, and undernourished communities. Why, for example, are communities in agrobiodiversity hotspots often chronically undernourished? Much more is involved than big data in this picture.

38Our team consists of academics across countries, continents, and disciplines, alongside prominent community leaders and practitioners such as Alejandro Argumedo from Parque de la Papa in Andean Peru and Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Appalachian Virginia. What began as a data synthesis research pursuit (encompassing the Appalachians of the US, the Yucatan of Mexico, the Andes of Peru, and central West Africa including southern Senegal and the regions of Guinea Bissau where the fonio cereal is cultivated) which evolved and expanded into a multi-region effort supporting local community leaders in facilitating encuentros, collecting and assessing data (and co-deciding what data is needed). After the encuentros, we moved in the direction of the Special Feature to advance multilingual dialogue on how agrobiodiversity can actualize its potential for nourishment and agrecology, and how is needed for future research and policy to support this on-the-ground work.

Encuentros of Shared Analysis

39From these original conversations, concerns, and goals, a committee of activist-researcher-community leaders from these regions emerged. These community leaders are embedded in social justice struggles around agrobiodiversity conservation, seed activism, food access, land security, and food sovereignty in their regions. They have historical and deep connections to these communities and land/agrobiodiversity practices, and are key advisors in the design, implementation, and outcomes of this project. From these leaders’ networks and connections, we collectively envisioned gatherings and sessions that allow communities to physically come together to discuss the intersections of agrobiodiversity, food access, poverty, and justice in their region; it is during these gatherings that communities identify their research needs, capacities, data, and pathways both open and blocked in reaching their needs.

  • 55 Jeremy Auerbach et al., “Displacement of the Scholar? Participatory Action Research Under COVID-19, (...)

40We were able to design and implement two in-person gatherings (one in Appalachia, United States and one in Yucatan, Mexico) before the Covid-19 pandemic prevented additional gatherings and forced us to reimagine ways in which we can work collectively.55 Despite this, community leaders with seed and agrobiodiversity groups organized their networks and connections, leading to a first gathering with community representatives from across the Appalachian mountains (from New York to South Carolina) in the fall of 2019 [See Figure 1.] The goal is to keep the meetings intimate, so we collectively agreed to cap attendance (based on time and location) to foster deeper engagement and more time for participants to work and share together. The second meeting in the Yucatan, in early 2020, was hosted in partnership with Indigenous Mayan community leaders, local universities, and local agroecology organizations. The meeting was held in Spanish and Mayan, with a day-and-a-half long gathering. For these gatherings, members of the project team (including community members themselves) held pre-calls and meetings with participants to discuss each participant’s individual goals, needs, concerns, and comments [See Figure 2]. Key questions and themes emerged from these calls and meetings, shaping the agenda for each gathering based on participants stated shared needs and goals.

41The meetings sought to establish data collection methodologies, research questions, and available/missing data for communities working for agrobiodiversity. These are not meetings or focus groups for data-collection but rather encuentros--reunions, encounters, gatherings--with the intention to create emancipatory methodologies to then analyze and solve problems. Communities collectively mapped their current agrobiodiversity practices and linkages to food access, and identified disjunctures or missing links between these pathways. From this early mapping exercise, we then discussed needs and next steps in the research process. This foundational engagement lays the groundwork for future co-designed data-collection, after community representatives have determined needs for their own regions. Furthermore, community leaders themselves determine in partnership with researchers how data is collected and where it will be published/made accessible. The goal herein is to maintain community-centered leadership and data collection for communities to co-construct methodologies and data that directly address their needs to build emancipatory structures around seed, food, and land.

42Based on input from Appalachian and Yucatan practitioners, we ultimately decided on a public, peer-reviewed forum for practitioners and community organizations to articulate their own research visions, goals, ethics, and policy visions. This open-access forum allows organizations and community practitioners to speak on their work through their own voices, articulating both their individual and collaborative policy and practice needs. In addition, co-authored scholarly articles support the knowledge co-creation process. This forum was originally proposed as a guidebook or website, but it was ultimately decided that a multimedia, multilingual, online forum would be more accessible. This is not emancipatory in and of itself, but contributes to fostering dialogues of research, data, community voices, needs, and advocacy that will enable steps toward broader emancipatory models of research.

43Despite our focus on community-centered emancipatory research and data, we still struggle with the challenges of privilege, language accessibility, and misunderstanding community needs. Transparency on these issues is a key component of the emancipatory goal, and through our efforts we increasingly build better methodologies that rise to these challenges. Along with these identified challenges, a remaining hurdle to our goals includes the systemic issue that global funding, development, and capacity-building institutions focus on ‘big datafication’. The tension between maintaining funding by ‘data-fying’ the project and measuring ‘deliverables’ while also staunchly supporting community leadership, sovereignty, and needs is evident. Given the situatedness of this project in a techo-scientific, formal institution of power, we recognize that the project itself is more along the lines of collective policy governance than emancipatory collective research. Resources and capacity are filtered through academic researchers via formal institutional structures. As we move through this project in practice we ask: how can we re-imagine these structures and disentangle them from arms of power in a way that truly constructs this work from the needs and goals of communities themselves? Each step of this project is an attempt, with communities, to create new models and ways of researching to foster liberatory practices.

Re-imagining data, pathways to emancipatory methodology

  • 56 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (London New Y (...)

44The central question of the research project is how agrobiodiversity for food security and nutrition can evolve as an emancipatory research project, offering emancipatory data to participating communities – and beyond. Even in this question, we see the tension between formal-legal big-data emphasis on ‘food security’ and community goals toward food sovereignty. Yet, as a step toward decentering techno-scientific limitations at the expense of lived practices and knowledges, we ask the critical question, initially raised by de Sousa Santos (2014): is it even possible for extractivist and colonial systems to learn from and research with non-colonial systems and forms of knowledge?56 If we believe that it is, then we must take the decolonial process seriously in our quest for developing agrarian emancipatory methodologies.

  • 57 Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Fernwood Publishing Co., Ltd, 2009 (...)
  • 58 Jeff Corntassel, “Digadatsele’i,” Unsettling America (blog), November 27, 2013, https://unsettlinga (...)

45Indigenous scholar Shawn Wilson argues that research is ceremony, or ‘the ceremony of maintaining accountability to relationships’.57 These relationships include the researcher’s connection to knowledge, ideas, communities involved in the research, the data, the outcomes of the research, and its impacts. Instead of abstract or intangible imaginaries, all aspects that go into research become mindful relationships; an acknowledgement of one’s own role and connection to the creation and dissemination of knowledge itself. In many indigenous beliefs, there is a concept of ‘all our relations’; for example, in Cherokee (Tsalagi) there is the concept of digadatsele’i or the idea that ‘we all belong to each other’58 This idea expands beyond our connection to our families, but to our places, ways of knowing, ways of learning, knowledge creation, and the effects it has on the world around us (which is also part of us). ‘All our relations’ is a statement of connectivity to all that goes into knowing and being in shared relationship with other peoples and the earth. As Betasomasake Simpson articulates

  • 59 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellioustransformatio (...)

“Meaning then is derived not through content or data, or even theory in a western context, which by nature is decontextualized knowledge, but through a compassionate web of interdependent relationships that are different and valuable because of that difference. Individuals carry the responsibility for generating meaning within their own lives–they carry the responsibility for engaging their minds, bodies and spirits in a practice of generating meaning”59.

46When applied to research, this extends our understanding of data as not something we produce without bias, but rather an extension of our relationship to our knowledge and our quest for knowledge. In an attempt to decolonize research and build emancipatory relationships with data, our quest for methodologies includes mindfulness on our roles as researchers and our connection to the research itself.

  • 60 Miguel Zavala, “What Do We Mean by Decolonizing Research Strategies? Lessons from Decolonizing, Ind (...)

47Beginning with a positionality that all research is connectivity–that research exists (physically and intellectually) in community with those around them, researchers can begin the process of internal decolonization of how they approach the research process. This is not a romantic essentialized process–decolonization entails actively challenging oneself, one’s institution, accepted practices and methodologies of research, and one’s own ontologies and epistemologies. This involves deep listening to communities, sitting in the tensions between data and lived experience, and fully engaging with the discomfort of one’s privileges. Zavala captures this, stating ‘it is thus how we begin to reclaim our research: by first decolonizing the spaces that make research possible, our identities are also transformed’.60 In other words, we must transform ourselves as researchers to decolonize and transform the ways and institutions in which we research.

  • 61 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, (...)
  • 62 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University o (...)

48This act of decolonizing the self and research process is an act of resurgence.61 To de-construct, decolonize, and de-value rigidity and limitations of Western epistemologies is simultaneously to create, construct, and generate new ways of knowing and being. ‘Resurgent politics of recognition’—that is ‘Indigenous peoples empowering themselves through cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning that seek to prefigure radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power’ is a framework for detailing research as not recognition of communities and groups within existing research frameworks (such as PAR), but beyond these frameworks.62 Research itself must not be held accountable to colonial-Western frameworks, but to the ontological practices and wellbeing of communities invested and involved in research processes themselves. New spaces of recognition and accountability, as well as deeper ethics of well-being and emancipatory goals become the core of this methodology of research.

49What would these processes look like in practice? The encuentros and public Forum we are currently in process of building is an evolving dialogue with practitioners and community leaders on exactly this question. What we have learned and heard from Appalachian community leaders and participants themselves is:

  1. Value participants’ time and efforts – not only symbolically, but financially as well. Honorariums, inclusion in grants for stipends and other forms of payment, and payment for other involvement is necessary for many organizations, leaders, and grassroots practitioners to both become and remain involved in shared research.

  2. Both processes and products of research must be mutually beneficial, as defined in partnership with communities.

  3. Visibility and actively uplifting the work and experiences of communities is crucial; supporting community leadership of events, co-authoring articles, and maintaining community guidance and leadership throughout the research process is fundamental to attempting emancipatory research.

  4. On a larger scale, issues such as open source intellectual property – the shared knowledge of seeds, academic knowledge (journals), and even policy are necessary to foster and stimulate emancipatory forms of data.

  • 63 Ian Scoones et al., “Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism,” The Journal (...)

50The increasing privatization and patenting of seeds, academic knowledge bases, and access to policy shuts out and excludes those without access to these privileges. Moving forward, the next questions in our forum focus on intellectual property rights, Indigenous data sovereignty, and the critical underpinnings of knowledge-sharing regimes. Both access to and protection of community data are central to fostering democratized data systems. Other academic initiatives, such as the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative63 also undertake similar questions and push for such systemic changes in knowledge production and access. It is our hope that initiatives such as these continue to gain momentum and challenge the status quo of academic research, while continuing to struggle in solidarity with communities to create and foster emancipatory methodological tools for ethical research.

Groundwork for Collective policy governance: shared analysis of data synthesis

51We foreground the methodological process of shared analysis, with practitioner/community review. As discussed earlier, from our collective decades of research with (and of) these frontline communities, we identify and include agrobiodiversity practitioners and community leaders from each project area. In this way, the process and the product of this pursuit is guided by local community-led expertise, resulting in shared analysis and tangible outcomes. One important outcome in progress is the creation of an open-access collective policy governance forum, which includes dialogues on accessible data for policies relating to agrobiodiversity and FSN, educational tools which communities can use for self-advocacy, support, capacity building, and increased participation in policy creation and implementation. The forum (hosted online) is a tangible source created by, for, and with the communities of this project to address how encuentro-meetings have been and could be structured to foster emancipatory research methods, what data we collectively have as well as what we need, and resources communities currently have, can share, and need–Critically, all aspects of this grant Pursuit–from the initial identification of goals, the creation and use of research methodologies, data collection, and final products—include shared analysis and community-based leadership. While we recognize that an online forum in and of itself is not emancipatory, the communities we work with have specifically engaged with us on what deliverables they need–this forum serves as one concrete take-away that enables communities to access and share data for their needs and emancipatory processes.

52This project aims to help decolonize standard academic epistemologies and methodologies that treat practitioners as mere objects of research—not rightful experts. We recognize that there are still many challenges in this methodology for achieving the goals of emancipatory research and data; however, through the process itself we hope to uncover and learn from these encounters. Grounding these consultations is the understanding that robust data emerges from dialogue (in the form of surveys or focus groups for instance), which leads to informed dialogue, which then informs and enhances future data collection, all to advance and deepen ongoing dialogue.

Conclusion

53In conclusion, we challenge the datafication of research on seed and agrobiodiversity so as to expand its mission for justice; to act as a forefront where emancipatory research methodologies and data evolve not only to engage, but also deeply include communities where research happens. We know that seeds and agrobiodiversity are inherently landed and embodied; they grow in specific soils in specific communities, cultivated and nurtured by specific peoples. In our sustained efforts to improve the accessibility and generation of ‘knowledge’, it is necessary to create collective, collaborative spaces where historical hierarchies are probed and disassembled in regenerative ways. By understanding and examining the potential for Participatory Shared Analysis, collective policy governance, and our relationships to data, we strive to counter classist and colonialist approaches to research and data to help foster community resilience and autonomy through decolonization and (seed) diversity. Our current project analyzing the links between agrobiodiversity and food security/nutrition is embedded in these ideals and practices; our culmination of community-led collective policy governance data and guidebooks may become one tool of emancipatory research. There remain multiple challenges and both transparency and accountability are key to evolving our work as we move forward. Yet, with a steadfast goal of understanding the depth of emancipatory potential, we hope that this project opens up new dialogues and methods in seed and agrobiodiversity studies. Digadatsele’i.

Figure 1: "Veronica Limeberry facilitating Appalachian Encuentro, Harvest Heritage Festival, 2019"

Figure 1: "Veronica Limeberry facilitating Appalachian Encuentro, Harvest Heritage Festival, 2019"

author: Garrett Graddy-Lovelace

Figure 2 "Bilingual Report from Yucatán Encuentro, Mexico, 2020"

Figure 2 "Bilingual Report from Yucatán Encuentro, Mexico, 2020"
Haut de page

Notes

1 Alder Keleman Saxena et al., “How Agrobiodiversity Nourishes: Mapping Causal Webs That Generate Agrobiodiversity, Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Nutrition,” Global Food Security, Forthcoming 2023.

2 “Agrobiodiversity Nourishes Us/La Agrobiodiversidad Nos Nutre: Action Research for Agroecological Transformations | Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene | University of California Press,” accessed January 7, 2023, https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/pages/agrobiodiversity_nourishes_us?

3 Sélim Louafi et al., “Crop Diversity Management System Commons: Revisiting the Role of Genebanks in the Network of Crop Diversity Actors,” Agronomy 11, no. 9 (September 21, 2021): 1893, https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy11091893; Selim Louafi et al., “Communities of Practice in Crop Diversity Management: From Data to Collaborative Governance,” in Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage: Data Challenges for Agricultural Research and Development, ed. Hugh F. Williamson and Sabina Leonelli (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023), 273–88, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13276-6_14.

4 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, Studies in Feminist Philosophy (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Pg 4

5 See: Orlando Fals-Borda, “The Application of Participatory Action-Research in Latin America,” International Sociology 2, no. 4 (December 1987): 329–47, https://doi.org/10.1177/026858098700200401; Paulo Freire, “Creating Alternative Research Methods and Learning to Do It by Doing It.,” in Creating Knowledge: A Monopoly? Participatory Research in Development, Participatory Research in Asia (New Delhi, India, 1982), 29–37.

6 For example:Christopher D. Gerrard, Marco A. Ferroni, and Ashoka Mody, eds., Global Public Policies and Programs: Implications for Financing and Evaluation: Proceedings from a World Bank Workshop (Washington, D.C: World Bank, 2001).

7 Karl S. Zimmerer et al., “Mountain Ecology, Remoteness, and the Rise of Agrobiodiversity: Tracing the Geographic Spaces of Human–Environment Knowledge,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 2 (March 4, 2017): 441–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1235482.

8 Ananya Roy, “Strangely Familiar: Planning and the Worlds of Insurgence and Informality,” Planning Theory 8, no. 1 (February 2009): 7–11, https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095208099294; Malini Ranganathan and Carolina Balazs, “Water Marginalization at the Urban Fringe: Environmental Justice and Urban Political Ecology across the North–South Divide,” Urban Geography 36, no. 3 (April 3, 2015): 403–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1005414; Malini Ranganathan, “Rule by Difference: Empire, Liberalism, and the Legacies of Urban ‘Improvement,’” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50, no. 7 (October 2018): 1386–1406, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X18781851; Jonathan Darling, “Forced Migration and the City: Irregularity, Informality, and the Politics of Presence,” Progress in Human Geography 41, no. 2 (April 2017): 178–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516629004.

9 Roy, “Strangely Familiar.”pg 8

10 Philippe Aghion and Jean Tirole, “Formal and Real Authority in Organizations,” Journal of Political Economy 105, no. 1 (1997): 1–29.

11 Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, eds., Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

12 Regine Andersen, Governing Agrobiodiversity Plant Genetics and Developing Countries, Routledge, 2008

13 Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions and Democracy.

14 Louise Sperling et al., “Informal Seed Traders: The Backbone of Seed Business and African Smallholder Seed Supply,” Sustainability 12, no. 17 (August 30, 2020): 7074, https://doi.org/10.3390/su12177074.

15 Karl S. Zimmerer and Stef de Haan, “Informal Food Chains and Agrobiodiversity Need Strengthening—Not Weakening—to Address Food Security amidst the COVID-19 Crisis in South America,” Food Security 12, no. 4 (August 2020): 891–94, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-020-01088-x.

16 Laurel Bellante, “Double Exposure, Dispossession, and Farmer Resistance in the Cornfields of Chiapas, Mexico (Tesis de Doctorado)” (University of Arizona, 2019).

17 Marcia M. Croft et al., “Formal and Informal Seed Systems in Kenya: Supporting Indigenous Vegetable Seed Quality,” The Journal of Development Studies 54, no. 4 (April 3, 2018): 758–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2017.1308487.

18 Tamara Wattnem, “Seed Laws, Certification and Standardization: Outlawing Informal Seed Systems in the Global South,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 4 (July 3, 2016): 850–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2015.1130702.

19 See: Andersen, Governing Agrobiodiversity Plant Genetics and Developing Countries.

20 La Via Campesina, “DECLARATION OF NYÉLÉNI - Nyeleni - Via Campesina - Newsletter, Bulletin, Boletin,” February 27, 2007, https://nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290.

21 Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2005).

22 Indigenous Terra Madre, “THE SHILLONG DECLARATION (A Living Document Based on the Sessions Held at ITM 2015 Shillong, Meghalaya, North East India),” November 2015, https://www.sametinget.se/105301.

23 Virginia D. Nazarea, Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers: Marginality and Memory in the Conservation of Biological Diversity / Virginia D. Nazarea (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005). Pg x

24 Brendan Coolsaet, “Transformative Participation in Agrobiodiversity Governance: Making the Case for an Environmental Justice Approach,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28, no. 6 (December 2015): 1089–1104, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-015-9579-2.

25 La Via Campesina, “Declaration of Nyéléni - Nyeleni - Via Campesina - Newsletter, Bulletin, Boletin.”

26 Indigenous Terra Madre, “The Shillong Declaration (A Living Document Based on the Sessions Held at ITM 2015 Shillong, Meghalaya, North East India).”

27 La Via Campesina, “United Nations: Third Committee Approves the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas - Via Campesina,” Via Campesina English, November 20, 2018, https://viacampesina.org/en/united-nations-third-committee-approves-the-un-declaration-on-the-rights-of-peasants-and-other-people-working-in-rural-areas/; United Nations, “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples | United Nations For Indigenous Peoples,” 2007, https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html.

28 FAO, “Farmers’ Rights | International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” 2019, http://www.fao.org/plant-treaty/areas-of-work/farmers-rights/en/.

29 Virginia D Nazarea, Robert E Rhoades, and Jenna E Andrews-Swann, Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope Place and Agency in the Conservation of Biodiversity (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2013). Pg ix

30 ibid

31 Christopher M. Bacon et al., “The Social Dimensions of Sustainability and Change in Diversified Farming Systems,” Ecology and Society 17, no. 4 (2012): art41, https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05226-170441.

32 Jim Thatcher, David O’Sullivan, and Dillon Mahmoudi, “Data Colonialism through Accumulation by Dispossession: New Metaphors for Daily Data,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 6 (December 2016): 990–1006, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816633195.

33 Tad Mutersbaugh, “‘The Other Mining’: Rural Communities, Autonomy and Data Production” (American Association of Geographers (AAG), Washington DC, 2019).

34 Robert Chambers, “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal,” World Development 22, no. 7 (July 1994), pp. 953-969, https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-750X(94)90141-4; Robert Chambers, “Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Analysis of Experience,” World Development 22, no. 9 (September 1994), pp. 1253-1268, https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-750X(94)90003-5; Paul G. H. Engel, Facilitating Innovation: An Action-Oriented Approach and Participatory Methodology to Improve Innovative Social Practice in Agriculture, 1995; David Brown and Agricultural Research and Extension Network, Participatory Methodologies and Participatory Practices: Assessing PRA Use in the Gambia (London: Agricultural Research and Extension Network, 2002); Örjan Bodin, “Collaborative Environmental Governance: Achieving Collective Action in Social-Ecological Systems,” Science 357, no. 6352 (August 18, 2017): eaan1114, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan1114.

35 David Brown and Agricultural Research and Extension Network, Participatory Methodologies and Participatory Practices.

36 Rachel Pain and Peter Francis, “Reflections on Participatory Research,” Area 35, no. 1 (March 2003): 46–54, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4762.00109; Carl Wilmsen, “Extraction, Empowerment, and Relationships in the Practice of Participatory Research,” in Towards Quality Improvement of Action Research, by Ben Boog et al. (SENSE PUBLISHERS, 2008), 135–46, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789087905941_011; Heather Castleden, Vanessa Sloan Morgan, and Christopher Lamb, “‘I Spent the First Year Drinking Tea’: Exploring Canadian University Researchers’ Perspectives on Community-Based Participatory Research Involving Indigenous Peoples: Researchers’ Perspectives on CBPR,” The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 56, no. 2 (June 2012), pp. 160–79, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2012.00432.x.

37 Sara Kindon, Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2007), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203933671.

38 Ibid

39 Engel, Facilitating Innovation. Pg 175.

40 David Brown and Agricultural Research and Extension Network, Participatory Methodologies and Participatory Practices.

41 Yazie Chanie, “Review of Participatory Agricultural Research Approach and Its Importance in Ethiopia,” Journal of Biology, Agriculture and Healthcare 5, no. 17, 2015, pp. 192-200. Pg 193.

42 Chambers, “Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)”; Engel, Facilitating Innovation.

43 Pain and Francis, “Reflections on Participatory Research”; Wilmsen, “Extraction, Empowerment, and Relationships in the Practice of Participatory Research”; Yazie Chanie, “Review of Participatory Agricultural Research Approach and Its Importance in Ethiopia.”

44 Bina Agarwal, “Participatory Exclusions, Community Forestry, and Gender: An Analysis for South Asia and a Conceptual Framework,” World Development 29, no. 10 (October 2001): 1623–48, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(01)00066-3.

45 Bal Krishna Jamarkattel et al., “Democratising Terai Forestry Governance: Emerging Innovations in the Western Terai Region of Nepal,” Journal of Forest and Livelihood 8, no. 2 (August 2009); Charles Conteh, Policy Governance in Multi-Level Systems: Economic Development and Policy Implementation in Canada (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2013); Coolsaet, “Transformative Participation in Agrobiodiversity Governance”; Johanna Speer, “Participatory Governance Reform: A Good Strategy for Increasing Government Responsiveness and Improving Public Services?,” World Development 40, no. 12 (December 2012): 2379–98, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.05.034; Bodin, “Collaborative Environmental Governance.”

46 Jeff Thindwa, “What Is Collective Governance? | World Economic Forum,” 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/what-is-collective-governance/.

47 Anna Lawrence, Taking Stock of Nature: Participatory Biodiversity Assessment for Policy, Planning and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

48 Bacon et al., “The Social Dimensions of Sustainability and Change in Diversified Farming Systems.” Pg 40

49 Coolsaet, “Transformative Participation in Agrobiodiversity Governance.” Pg 1091

50 David Brown and Agricultural Research and Extension Network, Participatory Methodologies and Participatory Practices; Chanie, “Review of Participatory Agricultural Research Approach and Its Importance in Ethiopia”; Maywa Montenegro de Wit et al., “Operating Principles for Collective Scholar-Activism: Early Insights from the Agroecology Research-Action Collective,” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, February 11, 2021, 1–19, https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.102.022.

51 Lesley-Ann Noel, “Promoting an Emancipatory Research Paradigm in Design Education and Practice,” 2016, https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.355. pg 5.

52 Ibid.

53 Davydd J. Greenwood, William Foote Whyte, and Ira Harkavy, “Participatory Action Research as a Process and as a Goal,” Human Relations 46, no. 2 (February 1993): 175–92, https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679304600203; Colleen Varcoe, “Doing Participatory Action Research in a Racist World,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 28, no. 5 (August 2006): 525–40, https://doi.org/10.1177/0193945906287706; Chanie, “Review of Participatory Agricultural Research Approach and Its Importance in Ethiopia.”

54 “Agrobiodiversity, Food Security, and Nutrition | SESYNC,” accessed January 6, 2023, https://www.sesync.org/research/agrobiodiversity-food-security-and-nutrition.

55 Jeremy Auerbach et al., “Displacement of the Scholar? Participatory Action Research Under COVID-19,” Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 6 (February 18, 2022): 762065, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.762065.

56 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (London New York: Routledge, 2016).

57 Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Fernwood Publishing Co., Ltd, 2009).

58 Jeff Corntassel, “Digadatsele’i,” Unsettling America (blog), November 27, 2013, https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/tag/digadatselei/.

59 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellioustransformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25.

60 Miguel Zavala, “What Do We Mean by Decolonizing Research Strategies? Lessons from Decolonizing, Indigenous Research Projects in New Zealand and Latin America,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 55–71.

61 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Indigenous Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

62 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

63 Ian Scoones et al., “Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 0, no. 0 (June 19, 2017): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1339693.

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Titre Tableau 1: Content analysis of keywords for above mentioned governance Tableau 1 : Content analysis of keywords for above mentioned governance documents, ranked from most to least used terms
URL http://journals.openedition.org/droitcultures/docannexe/image/8896/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 83k
Titre Figure 1: "Veronica Limeberry facilitating Appalachian Encuentro, Harvest Heritage Festival, 2019"
Crédits author: Garrett Graddy-Lovelace
URL http://journals.openedition.org/droitcultures/docannexe/image/8896/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 45k
Titre Figure 2 "Bilingual Report from Yucatán Encuentro, Mexico, 2020"
URL http://journals.openedition.org/droitcultures/docannexe/image/8896/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 103k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Veronica Limeberry et Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, « Data & the Seed: From Extractive Epistemology to Emancipating Agrobiodiversity Research Methods »Droit et cultures [En ligne], 84 | 2022-2, mis en ligne le 12 juillet 2023, consulté le 27 septembre 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/droitcultures/8896 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/droitcultures.8896

Haut de page

Auteurs

Veronica Limeberry

Veronica Limeberry est doctorante à l’American University School of International Service. Ses recherches portent sur les intersections entre la conservation de l’agrobiodiversité, la gouvernance environnementale et les souverainetés indigènes. Elle a obtenu une bourse Fulbright et une bourse Ford et a travaillé avec des agriculteurs, des gardiens de semences et des gardiens de la terre au cours des 15 dernières années en Inde, en Amérique latine, aux États-Unis et en Norvège. Elle occupe actuellement le poste de boursière pré-doctorale au Center for Environment, Community, and Equity de l’UA, où elle dirige une initiative de recherche sur les souverainetés indigènes et les écologies.

Garrett Graddy-Lovelace

Garrett Graddy-Lovelace researches and teaches agricultural policy and agrarian politics as Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service. She is Associate Director of AU’s Center for Environment, Community & Equity, and co-founder of AU’s Ethnography of Empire Research Cluster, the national Agroecology Research-Action Collective, and the disparitytoparity.org farm justice project. Born and raised in a Kentucky farming community, she has PhD in Geography from University of Kentucky and a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search