Sure, local knowledge matters more than academic knowledge. This is exactly the point of Ostrom’s Law.
I also recommend Anna Tsing’s Friction[1] that relates her work with the Dayak Meratus on the Borneo island of Indonesia. She makes the point of academic blindness (and beyond academics, occidental blindness to non-capitalistic approaches). Again: [what] works in practice can work in theory is a call to arms not to apply theory to practice, but rather to inform theory from practice. Practice may be able to do without theory, but the opposite is not true.
My conviction is that in our complex situations, good practice SHOULD inform theory, because then practitioners can reflect on their own path and bring more power to their action. Ignoring theory, or making it a byproduct of the Academy does not help. On the contrary, theory should always come from practice. This is something adamant about current “philosophers of technique” who don’t have a clue about using a computer or welding.
Ostrom’s books on the Governance of the Commons start from existing concrete situations from around the world. From her studies of these different (and unrelated) situations, she came up with the design principles that, she found, are common to all the successful institutional arrangements made by very different cultures about very different resources and situations (water management, fisheries, herding…). She also demonstrated that sub-optimal results or failures were correlated with not following these principles.
Note that I did not spend any time in academia: I am a dropout and proud autodidact. So it’s not like I’m not sympathetic to your view about academia. Still I’m confident there’s useful knowledge in places that I’m not politically or philosophically aligned with.
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Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004)
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691120652/friction ↩︎