Reproducing Inequality: Collaboration Habitus and its Epistemic Implications in African-European Research Projects on Forests

Abstract Despite shifts in science policy and funding modalities, international research collaborations continue to be shaped by inequalities that structure global science. These include a skewed division of tasks and unequal scientific authority in North-South partnerships. Existing scholarship highlights scholars’ experiences of such inequalities, but offers little explanation of how they are reproduced and affect joint knowledge production. We address this gap with an empirical study of six African-European research projects on forests. Drawing on Bourdieu’s sociology of science, we employ a praxeological methodology that includes participant observation in collaborative meetings, analysis of project-related documents and reflexive interviews with scholars involved. We show discrepancies between how collaborators’ relations were designed and practiced: Even when projects had been set up as equal partnerships aimed at joint knowledge making, the emerging collaboration orders tended to reflect differential roles and unequal authority in epistemic choices. While African scholars exerted authority over field work, European scholars directed the ‘how to’ of conducting forest governance research. We explain the continuity of this pattern with Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus: a practical sense of roles scholars have internalised, resulting from their positions in global science and the capitals (economic, scientific, social, symbolic) they are endowed with. The study illuminates how and why inequalities in research collaborations persist, regardless of formal project constellations and contrary to individual intentions. It highlights the potential of Bourdieusian theory for empirical science studies, with habitus as a concept explaining discrepancies between desired forms of collaboration and actual collaboration practice.