Being Fieldworthy: Environmental Knowledge Practices and the Space of the Field in Forest Certification

Abstract

This paper considers how environmental knowledge practices and learning are coproduced through heterogeneous assemblages of inscriptions, devices, skills, ecologies, and people in the field. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies, I use the certification processes of the Forest Stewardship Council as an example, because its processes of verification through embodied and emplaced fieldwork explicitly seek to make abstract standards of environmental management ‘fieldworthy’ in different places and thus enable their implementation on the ground through specific environmental knowledge practices. Hence, it is only through the field as a shared space that certification processes can work (and travel) in the interests of better environmental management. The space of fieldwork thus enables knowledge workers to exploit the uncertainty, heterogeneity, and discretion in environmental science and management more readily than do other spaces, rendering these qualities more beneficial than problematic.