Local Knowledge

Local Knowledge and Phenomenological Situatedness

Local knowledge is primarily a phenomenological concept, or one that enacts phenomenological ideas, although it has been developed and used in various disciplinary settings, with especially strong roots in cultural or symbolic anthropology and ethnographic methods. Local knowledge manifests its phenomenological underpinnings in its insistence on the context-specific character of knowledge—the knowledge that people develop among themselves in interaction with the programs, operations, or objects (physical artifacts) that are specific to their local context, such as a work practice in an organizational setting or a lived experience with electromagnetic frequency (EMF) emissions.

Local knowledge develops from experience with the situation in question. Much of it is tacitly known in the sense that Michael Polanyi used the term in referring to the sort of knowledge one develops over time, typically from repeated actions in the course of everyday living or the practice of a craft, trade, profession, art, or hobby, as distinct from book learning. Such knowing is highly context-specific, and it is the [Page 536]kind of knowledge that is rarely made explicit. In some cases, as Polanyi noted, it is not possible to make such knowledge explicit or to do so without great difficulty.

Applied to a public policy or public administration setting, “local” workers (such as in a governmental agency implementing public policies) or residents affected by such policies and programs are seen as far more knowledgeable about the situation at hand than those without such experience or point of view. This means that there is a conceptual shift in the meaning of “expertise”—those possessing local knowledge are understood to have a form of expertise, although that expertise is not based on, for example, university training. Local knowledge has its own characteristics. The expertise embedded in local knowledge resides in intimate familiarity with and understanding of the particulars of the local situation. This is “everyday knowledge,” as distinct from the more “scholarly” knowledge based in scientific training. This everyday knowledge derives from practical reasoning about context-specific events. For example, although scholarly knowledge is theory-based, abstract or general, scientific in construction, academy-based, and technical-professional, local knowledge is practice-based, context-specific, interactively derived, lived experience–based, and tacit and involves practical reasoning.

Although local knowledge is situational, that does not necessarily mean that it is lacking in specialized expertise. The character of the expertise is different: Local knowledge legitimates the experiential and the contextual as types of specialization equal in value (under certain circumstances) to the scholarly academic. Each has its place. Depending on the situation, local knowledge may well include technical or professional training because that is the source of knowing in that context. Perception and valuation of knowledge as local, rather than expert, seems to hinge, in some cases, less on its non-academic source than on its sociocultural character, the status of the perceiver(s) and of the person(s) “doing” the knowing, and structural features of the relationship between the two.

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