Environmental knowledge controversies: generative

events for science and politics?

Professor Sarah Whatmore,University of Oxford

Environmental knowledge controversies - definition

Those events in which the knowledge claims and technologies of environmental science, and the regulatory and policy practices of government agencies that they inform, become subject to public interrogation and dispute.

Such events take many forms but arise when the rationales and reassurances of environmental science-policy fail to convince those affected by what is at issue - whose direct experience and/or knowledge of it contradicts prevailing expertise, or to allay their concerns.

Why is flooding controversial?1. The speeding up and

‘democratisation ‘ of communication (on-line news, freedom of information)

2. Floodplain maps with substantial error

3. Use of flood technologies in day-to-day decision-making (e.g. insurance)

4. The local unfolding of national policy decisions; the ‘points’ scheme for flood defence investment

As Pickering floods on the 25th June, the BBC wants pictures

National floodplain maps: tests show c. 75 to 85% agreement with actual inundation

Is there something about the demands placed on environmental science in the service of ‘evidence-based’ public policy that is inclined to harden scientific knowledge claims, with all their provisional candour as conditional propositions, into technical statements, with all the reassuring certitude of known facts?

Can this be understood in terms of a tension between the ways in which knowledge claims become reliable through the experimental ethos of scientific claims-making and the managerial ethos of public policy claims-

making?

Conditional propositions/firm facts

Generative events for science and politics?

Our work suggests that knowledge controversies can act as force-fields in which expertise is redistributed through the emergence of:-

(i) new knowledge claims, resulting from different kinds and communities of knowledge being brought to bear on the production and distribution of flood risk expertise; and

Generative events for science and politics?

(ii) new knowledge polities, in which events like flooding gather publics around them with political attachments and capabilities that did not exist previously.

Participating Institutions

Funding Body

http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/