Interview with Diego Muñoz Elsner

Tags: Small Producers Agency
Additional tags: Diego Muñoz Elsner , Small producers , Knowledge and change

Bio: Diego Muñoz Elsner is the coordinator of the Global Learning Network on Small Producer Agency in the Globalised Market, part of the Knowledge Programme run by Mainumby in Bolivia, IIED in the UK and Hivos in the Netherlands. He is also an international fellow of the International Institute of Economic Development (IIED) and a researcher-partner and Executive Director of the Centro Mainumby-Ñakurutú. He holds a degree in Agricultural Engineering from Texas A&M University (USA) and a postgraduate qualification in Environmental Management and Planning from the Latin American Environmental Sciences Faculty (FLACAM) in La Plata, Argentina.

How do you define knowledge?

 

“Everyone, from the moment they are born until the end of their life, is constantly accumulating knowledge. This knowledge evolves based on life experiences, lifestyle and the dedication the person decides to devote – or has the opportunity to devote – to a certain topic or topics in particular. The knowledge may be practical – based on learning (often repeatedly) from everyday life – or abstract, based on collective learning processes structured by various different cultural codes of teaching and learning, depending on cultural characteristics.

 

Within these codes of more abstract knowledge, over the course of several centuries western culture has developed a code of learning and knowledge that has become “universal.” However, access to these forms of teaching and learning and these knowledge codes is still forbidden to the majority of the world’s population. We are therefore talking about a restricted and elitist knowledge that is still limited to privileged groups in global society.

 

This differentiation means that “empirical” knowledge is just as important as “academic” knowledge, or even more important, because it is the knowledge that the majority of the world’s people use and based on which they analyse and take decisions.”

 

How do you see the gap between academics and practitioners? How do you think this gap can be bridged (if at all)?

 

“Global culture, which has maintained its hegemony for centuries due to western culture, has given priority to academic knowledge and underestimated not just empirical knowledge but also the knowledge that comes from other cultures and other systems and forms of learning. So, anything that didn’t come out of academic settings in the most influential western societies was not even considered culture, let alone recognised as knowledge.

 

This situation has created an increasingly unfavourable environment for knowledge production outside the western viewpoint. It has led western societies to believe that they have the responsibility to solve all of humanity’s problems, and that this responsibility falls naturally to them. By the same token, non-western cultures, or individuals and groups who have not had the opportunity to go to university, have been led to believe that they know nothing, and that every solution to humanity’s problems must be left in the hands of academics and people who have studied at university. Nevertheless, this viewpoint is increasingly being challenged because, in terms of dealing with the problems humanity is facing today, that western “scientific” knowledge is less and less trustworthy and more and more responsible for what is happening. The gap can be reduced if there is a significant change of attitude among academics, if they genuinely open up to other types of knowledge and other ways of learning and acquiring knowledge, and if they support people coming from empirical settings to systematise their knowledge, so that each can learn from the other. There needs to be a process of mutual learning, based on different ways of learning.”

 

How does the academic-practitioners relationship hang together with the knowledge exchange?

 

“There needs to be a change of attitude, especially among academics, to be able to work with people whose knowledge is empirical. That empirical knowledge needs to be systematised to understand how it operates, the purpose of it, and how knowledge production is organised. But, again, my opinion is that academics are the ones who need to change their attitude and enter into a completely different type of relationship with non-academics. There is always an elitist attitude on the part of academics which throws up barriers against practitioners.”

 

How do you think knowledge triggers change?

 

“Knowledge production must be combined with an idea of what it is for. If the idea of what it is for is unclear, it will be difficult for that knowledge to trigger change because, in addition to knowledge, you need to develop the instruments required to bring about change. So, right from the start, when you are producing knowledge, you need to think what it is for and to what extent it is going to be useful for change. That is part of knowledge itself, and if that combination of stages in knowledge building is lacking, the knowledge is not going to be useful for change. Therefore, right from the start of the knowledge production process, you have to think what it is for, what change it aims to bring about, and who it is going to benefit. That’s the only way knowledge – as knowledge per se – can trigger change.”

 

How do you relate your work on local realities to global problems?

 

“All research work, especially on issues linked to public policies, must be connected to and interact with an entity of some sort: this might be a producer organisation, or a public policy in a government ministry, for example. So, our research on small-scale producers, agency, markets and globalisation must be linked to the activities going on in the organisations we will work with. And once you make the link with those organisations, you need to analyse together with them how the work is going to have a more global impact.

 

In our network, one of the most important thematic elements, theme 1, is the relationship with regional markets or wider markets. So, we need to analyse how the work we are doing in this network can be linked with broader settings, and how to enable the institutions who are participating through the network members to use this information to connect with those more global markets more effectively.”