Local knowledge as infrastructure for sustainability

Over the past thirty years, what Indigenous Peoples and local communities know about their environments has moved from the margins to the centre of global environmental assessment. Yet this knowledge is still treated, for the most part, as a store of information to be recorded, extracted and fitted into scientific and policy instruments. This perspective article argues that such a view misreads both what local knowledge is and how it sustains life. It focuses on the knowledge of local communities, which is distinct from, although often entangled with, Indigenous knowledge, and it discusses the latter only where its holders themselves govern the arrangement concerned. Drawing on infrastructure studies, I propose that local knowledge is better understood as an infrastructure for sustainability. It is relational and embedded in language, practice and institutions; it is continually renewed through exchange within and between communities; it goes largely unnoticed in ordinary times and becomes visible mainly when it fails. Four examples ground the argument: the oral tsunami tradition (Smong) of Simeulue Island, Indonesia; farmer-managed natural regeneration in the Sahel of Niger; the diverging plant knowledge of Hutsul communities split by the Romanian–Ukrainian border in the Carpathians; and, as a contrasting Indigenous-governed arrangement, Aboriginal fire management in the savannas of northern Australia. In each, knowledge does infrastructural work, namely early warning, land restoration, the supply of food and medicine, and fire management, and it is coupled to physical, social and ecological infrastructures; substitutes for this work are often costly, partial or absent. Its erosion follows recognisable paths, namely dispossession, language shift, the reshaping of daily life by schooling and markets, political fragmentation, and environmental change that outpaces learning. The same examples also show that these infrastructures can be repaired, re-rooted in the land, reassembled elsewhere and co-produced with science, as long as the authority of those who hold the knowledge is respected. The article also examines the objection that the infrastructural framing is itself extractive, and argues that, read through the lens of maintenance and governance, it points in the opposite direction. Sustainability policy should go beyond documenting local knowledge and sustain the social, territorial and linguistic conditions in which it lives. Four pillars are proposed for this shift: secure tenure and access, support for intergenerational transmission, governance of knowledge and data by those who hold it, and funding that rewards maintenance rather than extraction. People who live close to the land, the sea and the forest often know a great deal about their surroundings: which plants are safe to eat, how to let trees regrow in a field, how to burn grassland safely, or what to do when the ground shakes near the coast. Governments and scientists increasingly value this knowledge, but they tend to treat it like books in a library, to be written down and stored away. This article suggests another way of looking at it. Local knowledge works more like a road or a railway: it quietly supports everyday life, it needs constant care, and people notice it only when it stops working. Using four examples from Indonesia, Niger, the Carpathian Mountains and Australia, the article shows what this knowledge does, how it is lost and how it can be restored. It also explains why the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples should not simply be folded into ‘local knowledge’, and why calling knowledge an infrastructure must never become an excuse for taking it. Protecting local knowledge, it concludes, means protecting what keeps it alive: people’s rights to their land, the languages they speak, the chance for young people to learn from their elders, and fair control over how their knowledge is used.