This paper explores the tropical dry forests of northwestern Costa Rica as sites of socio-ecological crisis and resilience as well as epistemic tension, where women engage in community organizing, grassroots innovation and citizen science to renegotiate forest knowledge and care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women facing droughts, tree loss, wildfires, and contamination, the paper explores the tensions and possibilities of co-producing environmental knowledge and interventions.
In response to environmental degradation, women living in and near the dry forests have engaged in wildfire prevention, drought response, reforestation, and water management. Additionally, citizen science and technologies have offered new ways of knowing the forest, aligning with Bensaude-Vincent’s (2018) understanding of citizen technoscience which describes how local actors repurpose technoscientific tools toward community-defined ends. Learning to design and use open-source geospatial technologies, low-cost sensors, and GIS-based fire risk maps has enabled the women to produce situated forest knowledge that is both technically adept and locally grounded. Together these activities form a hybrid infrastructure of formal scientific and local intergenerational knowledge, affective relations and ethics of care.
While allowing the women to care for the forest more effectively, these multiform ways of knowing and sustaining the forest can function as a method of inclusion and a site of epistemic negotiation. Their practices challenge dominant scientific knowledge production and technocratic climate governance logics. By foregrounding the material, technical, and relational dimensions of these practices and centering alternative modes of measuring, monitoring and caring for and with the forest, this paper contributes to feminist and decolonial STS debates on data justice, participatory science, and environmental governance. It argues that anthropology and STS can play a critical role in making visible the struggles and relations as well as the capacity of rural communities to create actionable and emancipatory knowledge systems and affective imaginaries of forest futures.