Challenging knowledge hierarchies: working toward sustainable development in Sri Lanka's energy sector

• Main Author: Dean Nieusma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2007-02-01
• Series: Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy
• Subjects: sustainable development; energy resources; decision models; social behavior; indigenous knowledge; renewable energy resources; nongovernmental organization
• Online Access: http://ejournal.nbii.org/archives/vol3iss1/0602-007.nieusma.html

This paper analyzes sustainable development practices within Sri Lanka’s energy sector. It directs attention to how expertise functions in development decision making in ways that can unintentionally inhibit sustainable development. Understanding expertise as merely specialized knowledge clouds its role as a social activity. In practice, expertise is a combination of knowledge and authority, and expert knowledge exists within a hierarchically ordered authority structure of diverse knowledge domains—what is referred to here as “knowledge hierarchies.” Knowledge hierarchies exclude the participation of some relevant knowledge domains, and thereby preclude the possibility of local sustainable development. The Energy Forum of Sri Lanka, a small renewable energy advocacy organization, strives to enable sustainability by going beyond facile calls for greater inclusion to confront the mechanisms of exclusion. The paper documents three of the Energy Forum’s development interventions intended to level out the knowledge hierarchy that inhibits sustainable energy development in Sri Lanka. Drawing insights from the Energy Forum’s approach, the paper argues that experts who wish to contribute to sustainable development must attend to the knowledge hierarchies in which they operate to ensure that their own authority does not exclude other relevant knowledge domains.