Socio-environmental conflict through a network perspective. The case of Argentina.

FLORENCIA ARANCIBIA

Cape Town

Workshop; Governance and Development in the Global South; 2017

University of Cape Town and BIARI, Brown University

In a time of growing technological hazards, there is widespread concern about the demise of citizen control over risk governance. Approved technologies are later found to produce unanticipated detrimental effects on both public health and the environment. The decisions to approve these technologies, though presented exclusively as ´scientific´, are often influenced by the political power of corporate interests and lobbyist. In this context, new social movements are emerging in the arena of regulatory science (Jasanoff 1990), as well as novel relationships between them and scientific expertise. This paper seeks to understand these relationships by exploring the production of expertise in the conflict over the governance of agricultural pesticides in Argentina. The case provides a good entry point to rethink the heretofore contrasting conceptualizations of social movements in the areas of Science and Technology Studies. I developed a portrait of expertise as the property of an ´actor-network´ (Callon 1987; Eyal 2013): an entity consisting of networked connections among disparate elements, including credentialed experts and social movement activists as well as texts, technologies, funds, and nature. This allowed me to see the active role of social movements in the production of counter-expertise, widening the notion of political agency. I consider that this symmetrical-relational approach will help us to develop a more consistent theory of the co-production of activism and expertise.