The challenges of One Health. Accessing and networking with different forms of knowledge and epistemologies

Abstract

Despite its recent growth in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic, One Heath can be traced back to the colonial period when it was used to control the health of local communities and their animals while exploiting natural resources. At present, it is necessary to move away from this asymmetrical colonialist view and develop more inclusive perspectives. Local communities have their own knowledge with a holistic vision of health involving humans, animals and the environment. Their viewpoint is nevertheless rarely taken into consideration within the scientific approach to health. To fill this gap, the humanities and social sciences can be used to revive this local knowledge and to initiate a dialogue with scientific knowledge. More crucially, to effectively put One Health into practice, researchers must call into question their own practices, reflect on what constitutes science and rethink the way of producing knowledge, all the while acknowledging the different ways of understanding the world and diseases. This means opening up to other forms of knowledge and epistemologies and networking them.