ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that sustainable development in rural Ireland is more likely to be found as an aspiration of grassroots rural networks than as a thought-out goal of policy actors. The emphasis on economic growth as the single most important criterion for success within political networks supports a uni-dimensional understanding of agriculture as the production of inputs for an expanding and globalizing food industry. A Cognitive Approach to Rural Sustainable Development (CORASON) set out to study the dynamics of knowledges found within rural projects for sustainable development. The chapter describes three case studies of projects for sustainable development in rural Ireland to explore some of the assumptions, claims and findings made in transdisciplinary research and debate, particularly those concerning local knowledge. Local knowledge' is a concept found across a variety of different literatures, but particularly in development anthropology and sociology on one side and the sociology of science on the other.
