Local Experts – Expert Locals
A Comparative Perspective On Biodiversity And Environmental Knowledge Systems In Australia And Namibia

Research conducted within the framework of multidisciplinary programmes such as the German Research Council (DFG) programme on the 'human dimensions of global environmental change'1 is embedded in a tension between the aim to document the complexity of social and environmental processes that are instances of current global environmental problems and the aim to work out generalisable patterns which help understand present and future environmental issues in their diversity. These two conflicting aims sometimes appear to coincide with disciplinary boundaries such as that between model-building disciplines (above all cognitive psychology) and case-based disciplines (for instance ethnographic studies in anthropology). However, cooperation between projects has shown that this is not primarily a dualism of disciplines but a more general tension between research aims which can also produce new insights. In fact, it is not only projects in multidisciplinary programmes that have to deal with this tension; this is true for the social sciences more generally (Bowen and Petersen 1999: 1).