Knowing and Caring for the Mangrove Ecosystem: the epistemic life of a sustainable development NGO in the Saloum Delta (Senegal)
Une thèse de Mathilde Gouin-Bonenfant, anthropologie sociale, Université de Cambridge
This thesis examines the epistemic life of a sustainable development NGO, based in the Saloum Delta, in Senegal. This coastal region, composed of rivers, islands, wetlands, and mangrove forests, is facing increasing environmental precarity. In response, a plethora of actors (state conservation agencies, international organisations, local associations, and non-governmental organisations) are undertaking multitudinous conservation and development projects. With them, different ways of knowing and caring for the ecosystem co-exist and sometimes conflict. This thesis – while building on insights from environmental and development anthropology, which have classically been more associated with such topics – is also firmly grounded in the anthropology and philosophy of science. It is an ethnography of the work of one group of NGO agents, focusing on their day-to-day epistemic activities, as they are entangled with the NGO’s different relationships, and the broader politics of climate change mitigation. It focuses on four different epistemic activities: the production of project management data (chapter 1), the production of mangrove monitoring data (chapter 2), the production of “endogenous knowledge” (chapter 4), and the communication of scientific knowledge about the mangrove forest (chapter 3). It also examines the ethical components of the NGO’s epistemic life, through the notion of “care” (Chapter 5).
Through these chapters, the thesis explores the distinctive “epistemic culture” of the NGO; the impact of Results-Based Management on the NGO’s knowledge production; the linguistic and semiotic components of knowledge authorisation; the systemic nature of the circulation of misinformation about the mangrove forest; the ethnographic challenges to the “traditional” versus “scientific” knowledge binary division; the relationship between epistemic practices and practices of care; and the enactment of competing environmental projects. Finally, a series of ethical concerns also runs throughout the thesis. The overarching concern is the desire, first communicated to me by the director of the NGO, to remain a “Field NGO” rather than becoming a “Paper NGO.” I mobilise these ethnographic archetypes, throughout the thesis, to shine a light on the NGO agent’s ethical ideals regarding what constitutes good knowledge, good relationships, and good care; as well as the disconnections between their epistemic practices and their ethical ideals.