Generating and managing local knowledge

This chapter discusses how local knowledge is generated, codified and managed in real time, by real actors, in real political-economy contexts. It describes how interaction and adaption with the local environment shapes and continuously constructs local knowledge. This trajectory raises issues about locality and origin of local knowledge. Since local knowledge evolves in a dynamic interaction between conflicting interests and actors, the chapter discuss the political-economy dimensions of local knowledge, including potential abuse of local knowledge, how it contributes to equality or inequality, how inclusive it is, who benefits from holding local knowledge and who loses by being left out. The last sections of the chapter describe methods and instrument to codify and manage local knowledge and common trends and shocks in which the utility and maintenance of local knowledge is challenged.