The Time Politics of Agroforestry Science

This article examines the time politics of agroforestry science through an ethnographic study with scientists at the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF) in China. IFF researchers seek to design complex agroforestry systems that emulate the regenerative cycles and evolutionary adaptations of natural forests, a goal which challenges the dominant temporalities of industrial agriculture and modernist development. Yet these aspirations are continually reshaped by the fast tempos and short horizons of scientific institutions and donor organizations. Drawing on environmental humanities scholarship, I argue that agroforestry science is animated by temporal empathy—an attentiveness to the temporalities of more-than-human worlds—but that this empathy is systematically constrained by institutional regimes of speed, measurement, and impact. Through case studies of agroforestry projects in China and Myanmar, I trace how scientists negotiate the dissonance between ecological time and developmental or donor time, and I show how their work both reproduces and contests neoliberal logics of value and progress. I propose temporal empathy not only as a feature of environmental science but also as a method for science and technology studies: as a mode of inquiry that can help us to apprehend, and potentially find common cause with, the aspirations and frustrations of scientists striving to imagine more livable futures.