Knowledge plurality in collective agroecology: Recognition as cognitive justice

Agroecology is said to be a knowledge-intensive agricultural practice. Most agroecological initiatives in Europe today hence are built around a plurality of knowledge systems. Farmer and community-driven knowledges are increasingly being used to develop new, plural forms of agriculture. While the practical goals of this knowledge-intensity are straightforward (i.e. replacing external inputs with environment-specific knowledge), this paper highlights another, less obvious, objective: the pursuit of cognitive justice as a form of cultural recognition. While not necessarily wrapped in an explicit justice discourse, the reliance on knowledge plurality in collective agroecology can be understood as a struggle for recognition. In today’s ‘knowledge society’, this struggle is largely influenced by our knowledge systems. In the agricultural context, misrecognition is characterized by the subordination of alternative forms of agriculture (e.g. agroecology) to conventional agriculture, which represents the agricultural norm in Western societies. Challenging the latter requires an active recognition and engagement with different ways of ‘knowing’ agriculture. Cognitive justice, a concept originating from postcolonial and inter-cultural theory, encompasses not only the right of different knowledge forms to co-exist, but entails an active counter-hegemonic engagement across them. Based on the idea of an ‘ecology of knowledges’, cognitive justice allows for interaction between different knowledge systems, based on a principle of equivalence, and provides both normative and practical solutions for the future of agriculture in Europe. Using two examples of participatory breeding in Europe, and borrowing from the above concepts, the paper illustrates how agroecology movements in Europe organize to create what can be called an ‘agroecology of knowledges’