ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how ethnographic methodology, when used alongside more conventional project monitoring and tracking systems, can reveal the complex and integral role that local knowledge's play in the everyday workings of interventions, even when they are rendered invisible. It shows important implications for scaling up interventions or attempts to replicate them across varied human geographies. With respect to the day-to-day decision making in the Kenyan maternal, newborn and child health project, it very much operated through an on-going process of negotiation through which shared understandings and priorities were contested, negotiated and mutually trans formed. The chapter argues that as people repeatedly participate in development or research projects over extended periods of time; universalistic knowledge interacts with local knowledge systems and unfolds in locales to become grounded epistemologies. It also argues for a plurality of intelligible contexts depending on the nature of the sources and the aims of the inquiry.
