Gestión de cobranzas de la cartera de crédito

The idea of capacity building endorsed by the UNFCCC is underpinned by the belief that human progress is linear and positive and reflects the conceptualisation of development as ‘modernisation’, first articulated in the late nineteenth century and then updated in the 1950s when the post-World War II development apparatus was established (Escobar 1995; Everett 1997).

Postcolonial Studies of Science (PCSTS) are central to unveiling how several scientific and policy narratives in the climate change debate are often considered universally valid (see Chapter 6 on soil conservation theories) despite being in fact very partial and selective and originating in particular historical contexts such as European colonialism (Feierman 1994; Edge 2001; Restivo 2001; Roosth and Silbey 2008).

More specifically, the modernisation ideal is grounded in rationalist and evolutionary explanations: just as the human species evolves from childhood to maturity, societies – as well as the “nonhuman world” (Plumwood 1991) – progress from tradition to modernity through stages of economic growth, increasingly separating the public and private spheres in the social domain (Escobar 1995). The notion of modernisation underpins the idea of time and evolution as linear and progressive and, as argued by critical feminist and STS scholars (Haraway 1988; Plumwood 1991; Latour 2000; Blaser 2014), along with the internal great divide (nature/culture) and the external great divide (modern/traditional), it is one of the core features of Western scientific and policy thought.

Blaser (2014), in particular, notes how the history of European culture is traditionally represented against a background of linear time, a pathway of progressive evolution, where modernity is equated with the present. Interestingly, approaches to climate

change and development substantially share a linear conception of time, too, although focusing on different time scales. While scientific analyses of climate change extend into the unknown future (e.g. projections target multi-decadal to centennial time scales) to include possible outcomes that are hardly perceived by most, development policies focus on the transformation of present issues such as poverty, malnutrition, health, etc., on the assumption that it will endure in the future.

According to Cannon and Müller-Mahn (2010), this discrepancy in time frames hinders the integration of climate change into development policies. For instance, while development involves an imminent promise of improvement, adaptation renders life possible under unknown though expected climatic changes (Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010). This perspective may help to understand the challenges faced by NAPA in Malawi (Chapter 5), where a short-term focus on adaptation – reminiscent of the short time span of neo-liberal development efforts (Pepper 1999) – did not succeed in fundamentally challenging some of the root causes of climate vulnerability grounded in the historical experience of colonialism (Chapter 7).

The epistemology of climate change seems to have embraced the key features of the great divides in positivist thinking: a focus on predicting and mastering climate change (nature) through scientifically advanced human capacities; the modernisation ideal, through which societal abilities to adapt to and mitigate climate change are built via technology and capacity transfers; a linear and short-term conception of time (i.e. a focus on the present), especially in the programmatic approach to climate policy planning (e.g. NAPAs).

What emerges from this and previous chapters is an overall disconnect between the time frames characterising IPCC science (substantially multi-decadal and centennial) and the temporal spans addressed through UNFCCC policy mechanisms (annual or decadal) (Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010). Thus, while the positivist perspective endorsed by the IPCC has played a major role in situating climate change within the neutral realm of

science, UNFCCC climate policy decisions are not automatically informed by longer- term scientific time frames, especially at the national and subnational levels. In that regard, the Paris Agreement (2015, sub-paragraph 7c), its subsidiary bodies, and the multilateral Green Climate Fund (GCF Board decisions 2014/07 and 2018/19) have recently called for an increase in the use of climate science and information – also defined as ‘climate rationale’ – in adaptation decision-making (WMO 2018; see Chapter 5 for further discussion).

From an STS perspective, this could point to political actors within the scientific and policy bodies using science for their own ends and exploiting only those parts of positivist discourse that would generate political benefits (e.g. the depoliticisation of climate change and an increase in aid flows) (Demeritt 2001; Sarewitz 2011; Weisser et al. 2014; Eriksen et al. 2015; Hulme 2015). On the contrary, the elements of climate science that could produce critical outcomes (long-term perspectives) have been mostly overlooked (Demeritt 2001). In fact, a long-range view of the past or outlook on the future could magnify historically grounded causes of climate change or fundamentally question future development pathways.

STS has particularly highlighted the key feature of traditional European thinking: the epistemological and ontological divides support each other in connecting political projects that would seem otherwise unconnected (Blaser 2014). For instance, the homogeneity of global space was deployed during colonialism to categorise the world into ‘civilisations’ and ‘barbarians’ (Feierman 1994, quoting McNeill, 1963, The Rise of the West). At the same time, the linearity of time served to define African societies as timeless and static products deriving from and dependent on encounters with the main Euro-Asian civilisations. According to this view, African development spreads from the North southwards, where ‘civilisation’ is seen as originating in European science and culture. The non-Western Other or barbarian was defined (negatively and in opposition) as lacking rationality and civilisation, backward and locked out of history. As argued

by critical feminist thinkers (section 4.3), the binary polarisation and the superiority of the upper-side (the North or the West) were achieved by rejecting and denying the characteristics of the non-Western.

With the introduction of historical, cultural and geographical dimensions in social constructivism, postcolonial STS emphasises how culture’s position in regional and global political and economic hierarchies plays a relevant role in controlling the ways in which knowledge is generated, included or excluded in dominant scientific paradigms (Harding 2008, 139). For example, Harding (2008) highlights the tendency of Western rationalities to forget and repress scientific borrowings from other cultures and the fact that European sciences benefitted from the knowledge of the natural world accumulated by indigenous cultures.

PCSTS considerably elaborated on the idea of ‘indigenous knowledge’, a tool theorised by conventional European iconography to frame Western knowledge and identity (Broch-Due and Schroeder 2000; Neumann 2000; Ingold 2010). Historically, the concept of indigenous knowledge has been deployed strategically by colonial élites to represent stereotyped ‘traditional’ and pristine models of livelihood as inherently ‘good’ because they are close to nature and compliant with colonial environmental management (Neumann 2000). Or, in the case of Malawi (Chapter 6), to represent ‘primitive’ indigenous practices as environmentally ‘destructive’ and justify the enforcement of specific land conservation initiatives. As previously noted (Chapter 3), positivist thought focuses on the dichotomies between reason and nature, universal and local, to assess what is rational, universal and thereby authentic. Conversely, what is natural, local, or indigenous is perceived as ultimately irrational, and rejected, denied or removed (Plumwood 1991). In Chapter 6, I will highlight some elements of the environmental belief system in Malawi that were selectively appropriated by Christian missionaries to reproduce their religious and political power and authority.

PCSTS has shown how the growth of European science historically coincided with successive phases of expansion of European political power and ideologies. A case in point is the development of Western sciences, and especially astronomy, cartography and economic botany, which have relied heavily on the success of European exploration and colonisation. Through the extraction of knowledges from indigenous groups, European colonial authorities reorganised local socio-economic, political and cultural structures and drew the colonies into globally dependent relationships and flows that lasted well after colonial independence thanks to post-World War II financial and development policies (Escobar 1995; Loomba 2005).

The ‘voyages of discovery’ greatly benefitted from the exploitation and appropriation of contextual knowledges about flora, fauna, topography, geology, medical plants and diseases of newly explored areas, without acknowledging the contribution of accumulated indigenous knowledge to European scientific progress (Jasanoff 2004; Loomba 2005; Harding 2008; Roosth and Silbey 2008).