Applied Mycology Can Contribute to Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Building upon China's Matsutake Management Initiatives.

Matsutake mushrooms are an important part of rural livelihoods and forest ecosystems across large parts of China, as well as elsewhere in East Asia, Northern Europe and North America. Mushroom harvesters have developed sophisticated understandings of matsutake ecology and production, and are applying this knowledge in various innovative management strategies. At the same time, Chinese government agencies and scientists are promoting matsutake-based livelihoods to support development and conservation goals. We collaborated with matsutake harvesters in one Yunnan community to carry out a systematic experiment on a popular shiro-level management technique: covering matsutake shiros with either plastic or leaf litter. Our experimental results suggest that although leaf litter coverings are superior to plastic coverings, shiros that are left uncovered may produce the highest yields. Complementing our experimental work is a multi-sited household survey of existing matsutake management practices across Yunnan, which shows that a high proportion of harvesters are already engaged in a broad range of potentially beneficial management strategies. Though both findings highlight limitations of previous initiatives led by government and research actors in China, this existing body of work is an important foundation and opportunity for developing applied mycology in the region. In and beyond China, working with communities to develop site-specific management strategies through rigorous and participatory scientific inquiry can provide salient benefits for both scientists and resource users.

Impact, theory of change, and the horizons of scientific practice.

Demands for research to generate impact, along with proliferating institutional regimes for evaluating impact, are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary scientific practice. Based on participant observation at an agro-environmental research institute in southwest China, this article explores three iterations of a tool for planning and evaluating impactful science called 'theory of change' (TOC). Despite their ostensible common grounding in TOC, I show how an impact scientist's framework, a donor's monitoring and evaluation regime, and a communication consultant's branding strategy each suggest very different normative structures for scientific practice. These structures entail: particular horizons towards which scientific research is to be practiced, precise points in time at which the future effects of research are to be anticipated, and specific assumptions about how scientists' agency should play out across time. Taking the peculiar sensibilities of TOC as a comparative framework, I illuminate IFF scientists' implicit imaginations of how contemporary science does and should generate effects in the world.