Cultural Hybridity and the Environment

This book highlights the importance of diversity in overcoming issues of social and environment degradation. It presents conceptual and practical strategies to celebrate local and Indigenous knowledge for improved community development environmental management.§§David Harvey has proclaimed, The geography we make must be a peoples geography . This clarion call challenges geographers everywhere to consider the power and potential of geographic knowledge as basis for social action. This book answers Harvey s call. It provides its readers theoretical and conceptual tools to understand the social world and empowers them to mobilize social change.§§The author uses empirical case studies of two environmental management and community development projects, to document how knowledge generation is essentially locally situated and socially derived . In doing so she charts a path to move to beyond what Vandana Shiva so aptly describes as monocultures of the mind . The book argues that local and Indigenous knowledge must not be seen in opposition to scientific knowledge as none of these knowledge traditions hold all the answers to localised socio-environmental problems. Rather, as the author explores through a set of processes and strategies to enable, support and celebrate cultural hybridity at the local environmental governance scale, these respective knowledge systems can learn to speak to each other. Such dialogue has the potential to support more sustainable outcomes at multiple environmental governance locales.§§This book will be of interest to everyone involved with environmental policy, planning, politics and for those wanting to make this planet a more sustainable and just place.§