The Time Politics of Agroforestry Science

Based on ethnographic research at an agroforestry research institute in southwest China, I analyze the time politics surrounding scientists’ efforts to design, to research, and to promote agroforestry. In so doing, I bring science into conversation with STS and environmental humanities scholarship on temporality, I drawing on Michelle Bastian’s emphasis on time’s role of time in coordinating across unequal power relations, and her provocation to explore “the kinds of clocks that could be produced when we ‘coordinate’ ourselves with and through other relationalities within our world.” In certain respects, agroforestry science aspires to do precisely this, proposing practices that would coordinate with and through the complex temporalities of forest ecosystems. At the same time, however, agroforestry scientists find themselves compelled to coordinate their activities with the temporal sensibilities of the scientific and international development institutions that employ and fund them. Examining scientists’ efforts to coordinate their work with the competing temporalities of forests, evaluation frameworks and business models, I demonstrate how their (in)capacities for temporal empathy are shaped by institutional life. One outcome, I argue, is the reinforcing of dominant political and economic logics and hierarchies that science might otherwise challenge.