Expert Networks and Networks of Expertise: The Epistemic Politics of Argentina's Pesticide Conflict.

FLORENCIA ARANCIBIA ; SCOTT FRICKEL

Ginebra

Workshop; Science and Dissent.; 2018

Universidad de Ginebra

Argentina was a pioneer in adopting pesticide-resistant genetically modified (GM) soy in 1996 and is today the third largest world producer and exporter as well as a major agro-industrial economy, highly dependent on agro-exports. As pesticide use has grown exponentially since the adoption of GM seeds, three dynamics unfolded simultaneously: 1- the rise of a social movement that pointed at pesticides as the main factor associated with severe diseases experienced by rural communities and launched a national campaign to restrict pesticide use (2005); 2- the involvement of rural physicians, medical researchers, and scientists in the campaign and the foundation of a network of mobilized experts connected to social movement organizations; 3- the development of a field of knowledge on environmental health effects of pesticides in the country. Based on preliminary research, we learned the critical importance of expert activism and knowledge production in explaining the relatively positive outcomes achieved by the movement at the local level. We mark this change historically. When the conflict began, in 2001, only a few scientists in Argentina were actively assessing the health effects of pesticides and there were only a few published papers supporting their activities. Today, 1,068 studies on this topic have been published in scientific and medical journals by 1,803 contributing Argentinian researchers. We suspect that of the more than 90 mobilized experts who were actively involved in the social movement, some fraction also contributed to this growing bank of knowledge and circulated it, not only within the scientific community but also in legal and juridical domains leading to more protective local regulations. These preliminary findings open new questions that we explore in this paper: How have mobilized experts got connected to one another and to social movements? How has new expertise on the health effects of pesticides been produced and mobilized? What, if any, connections exist between the politically mobilized experts who joined the movement and the politically motivated experts who generated new knowledge on pesticide effects? What have been the broader consequences of these epistemic politics? Our hypothesis is that there is a connection among the three dynamics: as the network of experts interpenetrated social movements, new expertise was generated and carried through these networks, positively impacting social movement outcomes. Given the complexity of the interaction and cooperation of environmental movements and environmental sciences, we consider that there is a need for an original theoretical-methodological approach that explores this interaction within a broader scope than most case-study-based research. In order to do this, we propose: 1) bringing together two theories about expert activism and expertise that have never been brought into conversation, and by so doing, developing a symmetrical-network theory of expert activism; 2) implementing a new symmetrical network-organizational approach to data collection and analysis. These innovations will deepen our understanding of expert-movement interpenetration and the co-production of activism and expertise, as well as its political implications within different types of conflicts and settings.