High-TEK: Using beekeepers' environmental knowledge to enhance sustainable agriculture and land management

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Building on my PhD research, this Fellowship will explore how to successfully incorporate beekeepers' traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) into sustainable land management. In the current era of climate change, environmental breakdown, and post-Brexit plans for radical restructuring of agriculture and land use throughout the UK, the plight of pollinators is but one of many challenges to be addressed. Pollinators are central to both biodiversity and food security (Potts et al 2010). Significant declines of all pollinators, as well as other species, are a cause of immense concern amongst both the academic and wider community (Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019). Recent years have seen an international response to pollinator decline, with many countries drafting pollinator policies. Throughout these policy responses is an acknowledgement that beekeepers are key stakeholders in monitoring, and reversing, pollinator decline (Maderson and Wynne-Jones, 2016). Given the urgency of the problem, and the recognition of beekeepers as key stakeholders, one could assume that beekeepers' insights would be consistenly supporting initiatives to ensure the radical reforms needed in the food system, as well as wider land management developments and strateges needed for pollinator wellbeing. My doctoral research examined the environmental knowledge of long-term beekeepers, and discovered a wealth of under-utilised knowledge that spanned both tacit and scientific understanding. My research finds that beekeepers' unique knowledge has significant potential to enhance environmental governance, thus supporting biodiversity and food security. Currently, this knowledge is not achieving its environmentally transformative potential. Historically, such tacit knowledge has been undervalued by policy-makers and the scientific community.This fellowship will provide me with the necessary time to communicate my PhD findings in academic and other contexts, thus maximising the impact of the important insights of my research at this key time of rappraisal of current land management approaches. It will also allow me to operationalise my findings, by carrying out a series of interviews with policy and decision makers. Discussing my findings with these key audiences will maximise the potential for my research to bring about necessary improvements in land management and sustainable agriculture. The fellowship will also allow me to meet and work with international experts studying, and using TEK to support sustainability. TEK can broaden our understanding of environmental and social factors that can ultimately increase our resilience to environmental challenges (Berkes, Colding and Folke, 2000).This fellowship will support the aims and objectives of the UK's Industrial Strategy, as I will work with Apis Consulting, who advise private and public land managers as to how best to support pollinator wellbeing on their lands. I will prepare relevant educational material based on my research which will increase the impact of their consultancy work. Apis Consulting and I will collaboratively develop successful methods to maximise land management strategies for pollinators, and resultant wider biodiversity.Effectively engaging with beekeepers' knowledge and recommendations requires thoughtful negotiation through epistemological tensions, and an interdisciplinary understanding of factors affecting pollinators and the wider environment. Yet these issues are not only relevant to beekeepers' knowledge. The issue of diverse knowldges, and what counts as expertise, is important politically and environmentally (Riley, 2009). As the global community struggles to respond to challenges to our food systems, and our environment, developing more inclusive methods of engaging with diverse knowledge will be a crucial part of navigating the 21st century.