Differentiation of Expertise in Local Communities: Insights From Artisanal Fishing Villages in Brazil

Indigenous and local expertise have become widely emphasized in debates about environmental conservation and sustainable development. However, the engagement of this knowledge into conservation and sustainable development efforts should avoid assuming that a local community has uniform knowledge or some sort of cultural consensus, unless there is evidence supporting this conclusion. Investigating expertise in local communities offers a relevant way of understanding knowledge variation within them. This article aims to understand varieties of community expertise through case studies of two artisanal fishing villages in Northeast Brazil. We conducted surveys on fishing expertise, examining the distribution of this expertise within the communities. By conducting semi-structured interviews (N = 40) with traditional experts from the villages of Siribinha and Poças, we found that fishing expertise in the Itapicuru estuary is directly or indirectly influenced by various factors, including tourism, different fish abundance patterns at the river or between seasons, presence or absence of larger fishing boats, and gender division. We argue that these findings challenge unspecified talk about community expertise and instead demonstrate the complexity of different forms of expertise within local communities. Taking community expertise seriously for environmental conservation and transdisciplinary practice, therefore, requires attention to differentiation of expertise and identification of different community experts. We conclude that ethnobiology has an important role to play in current debates about expertise by providing empirical depth and nuance that appeals to epistemic diversity, and can also contribute to the understanding of knowledge variation within communities that is relevant to conservation efforts.