This request for SGER funding describes an exploration of what happens when worldviews collide. Its backdrop is a recently initiated co-management regime in Chile that mandates partnerships between fishermen and scientists, effectively setting the competing knowledge systems of these two groups on a collision course towards a very uncertain outcome. The object of the proposed study is to examine this outcome and explore its relevance to the wider field of Science and Technology Studies. Through interviews with scientists participating in the Chilean program, the proposed study aims to discern scientists perceptions of differences in the two groups knowledge about the resources they are required to jointly assess and manage, as well as their perceptions about themselves and the fishermen they work with as creators and defenders of this knowledge. By examining scientists experiences, it aims to get a sense of discrepancies in what the two groups know about the biology of a single species, the loco (Concholepas concholepas), that may ultimately determine whether the forced knowledge collisions coalesce into productive partnerships or splinter into culture clashes with reverberations for the very concept of scientific resource management. Interview questions will elicit scientists estimations of differences in the substance, generation, transmission, substantiation, and validity of each groups knowledge of the loco and will discern possible contextual variables, such as temporal duration of each partnership, that might influence how these knowledge differences are dealt with by each partnership. Intellectual merit: This exploratory research into an innovative fisheries management program is premised on the notion that the outcomes of collisions between scientists knowledge and fishermens' knowledge are determined by fundamental epistemological issues elemental to Science and Technology Studies. In its consideration of processes of knowledge development and transmission and its focus on the philosophical underpinnings of different knowledge systems, it poses questions of paramount interest to the discipline and presents a unique opportunity to advance abstract inquiry through field research.
Broader impacts: In the immediate run, the proposed study has potential to contribute to better relations between users of competing knowledge systems in Chilean fisheries science and management. But the gains of the research will be applicable far beyond Chile and the field of fisheries. As an analysis of one of the worlds' most cutting-edge instances of two up-and coming natural resource management models -- co-management (the shared making of decisions about harvest and conservation by government and resource users) and cooperative research (the joint endeavor by resource users and professional scientists to characterize natural resources) -- this study promises to illuminate the multifaceted nature of knowledge conflicts that threaten these arrangements and to lay the theoretical groundwork for future research that will benefit all parties involved in these collaborative efforts.
Why SGER?: This proposal responds to a unique and fleeting opportunity to study knowledge conflicts as they emerge. As fishermen-scientist partnerships mature, the ability to observe the initial stages of these partnerships disappears. As a consequence both of this urgency and of a lack of comparable studies documenting knowledge collisions and examining what happens to them over time, the methods proposed for this study may be somewhat provisionary. An SGER is suitable to this project because it allows for flexibility and exploration. In addition, this project is considered preliminary because the interviews with scientists that it encompasses can be seen as a prelude and a compliment to a larger project involving systematic surveying of fishermen participating in the collaborations under scrutiny. The second, fishermen-focused phase of the larger project will be funded by a Fulbright grant awarded to the senior field researcher for the period of March to December 2006, which further limits the temporal window of opportunity available for this SGER project.
