The dominance of a positivistic science-based perspective within public and policy understandings of ‘knowledge’, which helps to suppress public debate about and participation in progress towards the ecologization of rural practices, could also be cited as a cause of underdevelopment in Irish progress towards sustainability in general. While positivistic and scientific attitudes certainly dominate public understandings of knowledge in Ireland, whether that constitutes the most significant obstacle to increasing rural sustainability is the subject of discussion here. A theme running through much recent literature on sustainable development is the quest for a ‘sustainable’ form of knowledge to guide development and/or conservation projects for rural areas and societies. It is fairly widely agreed that what Pellizzoni (2003) has described as ‘the traditional politics of expertise’ is no

longer effective in such projects. In his account, traditional politics starts from the assumption that all policy problems can be defined in essentially technological ways and can thus be settled by relying on specialized knowledge; specialized knowledge is a repertoire of models and approaches which confirm experts as speaking appropriately and pertinently to the problem, and disable lay citizens from doing so (2003: 330). Lay knowledge is understood, in this discursive world, as private, unverifiable, particular, and intertwined with interests that are non-cognitive; hence it is useless as a source of solutions and quite possibly a hindrance to rational problem-solving. Or as Kloppenburg has put it (1991: 524), ‘What we call modern science is itself a historical product of a continuous social struggle not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition.’