Communities of Practice in Crop Diversity Management: From Data to Collaborative Governance

Establishing linkage among data of diverse domains (e.g. biological, environmental, socio-economical, and geographical) is critical to address complex multidimensional issues such as food security or sustainable agriculture. The complexity of this challenge increases with the level of heterogeneity of the data but also with the social context of production of datasets, a dimension usually less considered. Building on the experience of a transdisciplinary project on the diversity of crop diversity management systems in West Africa (CoEx), this chapter reflects on the importance to better account for agency for more meaningful, responsible and efficient plant data linkage. The chapter addresses sequentially the cognitive and political challenges related to data work and the way they could be addressed simultaneously within the same social unit. To do this, we rely on the concept of community of practice (CoP) which gained enormous popularity in relation to data and knowledge management. More than simply a social mechanism for community knowledge management, we show in this contribution that CoP needs to be approached as a social experiment and a terrain of collective situated learning in order to address each challenge and their linkages with respect to data work.