Baroque tools for climate action. What do we learn from a catalogue of local technologies?

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article presents some key aspects related to the development of the “local technologies catalog for climate action,” a platform aimed at making visible different artifacts, strategies, and practices developed and/or adapted to mitigate a specific socio-environmental problem by communities in different territories of Chile. Relying on a long scholarly tradition on the emancipatory and transformative role of grassroot technologies, we reflect on the process of creating a catalog of local technologies and the nature and role of these technologies as tools for climate action. Together with discussing the main methodological challenges involved in the process of cataloging, we develop three theoretical aspects that emerge from the technologies that were mapped: how local technologies involve communities taking a central role in defining what is problematic in specific environmental problems; the different forms in which these technologies are valued; and the logics of combination, adaptation, and variation that underlie these technologies. Based on this, we propose approaching local technologies as a form of baroque tools that result from the situated assemblage and mixture of different logics, values, knowledge, and materialities. We finish discussing whether local technologies and the catalogue constitute a productive space to deploy more radical forms of climate action.

Keywords

• Local technologies
• climate action
• grassroot innovation
• conviviality
• sustainable transitions
• Tecnologias locais