Mediano Derrame controlable a través de la activación del Plan de Contingencias Se asume entre 2,5 y 50 galones TIPO 1

In this chapter I have identified and examined particular story-lines used by climate risk technologists to order the boundaries within and across their research domains. These story-lines broaden Gieryn’s (1999:1-20) conception of boundary-work as credibility contests. Among climate risk technologists, boundary-work brings together various concerns about salience, credibility and legitimacy of claims, models, actors and institutions. In this regard, authority is negotiated in terms of matters of concern (Latour 2004) rather than simply

perspectives as to what are the most useful and useable forms of knowledge to make. The argumentative story-lines surrounding these questions are expressions of interests, identities and commitments. As such, they also point to tensions within this broad community and thus, the sites where integration of knowledges is managed. It is worth briefly reviewing these story-lines by which boundary-ordering is achieved in terms of how they variously relate to questions of salience, credibility and legitimacy of scientific climate knowledge.

Credibility, for climate risk technologists, might be primarily seen as the negotiations over methods and methodologies for representing and predicting climate. In this chapter, I have argued that, among climate risk technologists, credibility is most contested in the arena of climate prediction. It is achieved, largely, via skill-talk. The story-lines of ‘artificial skill’ and ‘the cottage industry’, for example, are markers of epistemic terrain and link reliable climate forecasts with individuals and institutions who have the necessary understanding of the climate system to avoid artificial skill. Deployed as being easy to create yet often hard to detect, artificial skill is more than a statistical marker of bad forecasts; it is also a rhetorical tool that gatekeepers use to mark off epistemic terrain. The language of skill, in general, gives the field of statistical climate prediction a patina of complexity and deters erstwhile dabblers, or at least makes them appear inept. In these terms, while skill concerns credibility, skill-talk appears to infer legitimacy. It serves to warn policy adviser and applications researchers, those in the certainty trough (MacKenzie 1990), about the complexity of properly understanding uncertainty in climate prediction; and by inference, who can and cannot be trusted to do proper climate prediction. In this sense, skill-talk would appear to be a boundary-ordering device in that it allows actors to ‚define their interests, build alliances, map out futures, and construct identities rapidly and across many domains‛ (Shackley and Wynne 1996:280). In all, this boundary- work can be seen as an endeavour to create and maintain a visage of a single unified Science.

Legitimacy was also raised more explicitly by climate risk technologists through variety of story-lines about how climate should be represented in public and

political domains. For example, confusion among publics was raised as a key concern. Among many climate risk technologists, and particularly climate scientists, negotiating consensus messages, or ‘singing from the one book’, was taken for granted as an obligatory means of avoiding public and political wariness. Yet among applications researchers and extensionists, quite different narratives of legitimacy were apparent. For example, some researcher envisaged the dissolution of boundaries between research and extension, holding a story- line that I would typified as: ‘making knowledge mutually makes mutually useful knowledge’. Here the legitimacy of actors, both scientists and publics was inferred as being contingent on their ability to get close to one another, to properly view each others situational practice and culture. This work serves to open up sciences to publics, and vice versa, such that they can better see each others parts and potential.

Salience was often spoken about in the above terms also. What is useful to end- users are things that cohere with the problems as they understand them. Thus applications researchers critiqued the climate scientists’ obsession with forecast skill, not because skill was seen as unimportant – everyone agrees that it is critical – rather, they suggested that skill was only part of the picture at least as important were the socio-cultural and practical issues of application.

Australian climate risk technologists work to produce much more than information to help agricultural publics manage for climate variability. Rather, information is just one output of the nexus among individuals, organisations and epistemic communities. Another is the form of the research network and its tendrils into broader public and political domains. These ways in which climate risk technologies mesh with its broader public and political contexts are (in)formed by the boundary-work described in this chapter. Such argumentative work among sciences, scientists and epistemic communities serves not only to separate disciplines and institutions; it also builds relationships, trust, commensurability, collaboration, and numerous other features of social and epistemic nexus. These are often propelled by boundary organisations (such as

degree to which provisional and contingent understandings (or models) of the climate and agro-ecological systems can be extended to non-scientists. This is the important work by which knowledge is made ready to travel and so to do work in the broader world. The work is done, not only through arguing about the salience, credibility and legitimacy of knowledge across boundaries, but also about its potential effects when set loose in the world. Thus, the story-lines identified in this chapter illustrate the negotiation of what knowledge and information can be made useful to decision-makers, as well as how these knowledges might be made dangerous. I will go on to examine this concept of delimiting the danger of scientific knowledge and emphasising its usefulness in Chapter 6 through identifying and describing different modes of extension of climate risk technologies.

Chapter 6 – Extending climate

In the previous chapter I established that, in producing information about climate variability and climate predictions, the climate risk technologists interviewed were not fixated solely with natural facts. More aptly, they were engaged with diverse overlapping matters of concern – they were concerned with the communicative, social, psychological, political, institutional, as well as biophysical aspects of climate variability and prediction. I highlighted story-lines by which participants negotiated who can represent the climate and the applicability of climate prediction to agricultural decision-makers. Analysis of these narrative-elements highlights how risks of improper production and application of climate information are understood and how they are dealt with via rhetorical devices and individual and institutional positioning. These analyses point to how scientists’ climate knowledges are made salient, credible and legitimate. The description of such boundary-work within climate risk technologies takes into account what is at stake for various groups of researchers and thus provides foundations for addressing the primary question of this thesis – how can knowledges be better integrated to manage climate variability in the semi-arid rangelands?

In this chapter I maintain a focus on the talk and texts of climate risk technologists, but pan towards how participants extend seasonal climate prediction to agricultural publics. Extension is taken broadly as an iterative socio- technical process of knowledge-making and social learning across epistemic cultures (as was discussed in Chapter 2). I focus on how participants constitute their engagement with various publics in order to make claims about climate variability and prediction applicable, or at least adaptable, to the decisions faced by agricultural publics. I am thus interested in how agricultural publics are constituted by climate risk technologists. I hold with the perspective that in order to thoroughly grasp public understandings of science, we also need to grasp how scientists understand publics (Irwin and Michael 2003).

In this chapter, in particular, I approach scientists’ understanding of publics by examining how climate risk technologists consider, and attempt to remedy, the misuse and misunderstanding of climate information by publics. Such dangers of improper use of climate information have been considered as relating to psychological issues and cognitive biases (Nicholls 1999; White 2000, and see Chapter 3, Section 4) or the misrepresentation or misinterpretation of climate information by the media (Nicholls and Kestin 1998; Kestin 2000; McRea et al. 2005) or publics (Childs et al. 1991; Keogh et al. 2004b; Park et al. 2004; Keogh et al. 2004a; Keogh et al. 2005). There are also instances when it is recognised that climate risk information is a tool that can be used by graziers to maximise short term profit at the longer term expense of natural resources (Stafford Smith and Foran 1988; Buxton and Stafford Smith 1996; McKeon et al. 2000). From my constructivist viewpoint, how such dangers are understood and dealt with in the public domain becomes a central focus of analysis. That is, my attention is on how knowledge and risks are translated.

Translation acknowledges that, across geographic and epistemic communities, there are divergent understandings of what is meant when particular things are said (see Chapter 3). Translation thus provides a useful metaphor for examining the process by which actors make boundary objects, such as the SOI, appear useful or even indispensable to other actors by stabilising particular interpretations of these objects across boundaries. The work of translation can transform interpretations or practices in relation to boundary objects and thus make forms of decision-making which fit variously well with the lifeworlds or existing practices of decision-makers (Wynne 1992a; Jasanoff 2004c). A classic example is the often repeated parable of a farmer or grazier gambling much more than the predicted odds would condone and losing. As one applications researcher framed the problem:

[For] the person who doesn't like abstracting – the very, very concrete person, which a lot of farmers are – the notion of not thinking about a number of future possibilities rather than just saying, "Look, you know, this one is going to happen sort of thing and I'll plan for that" – I can see for that group of people a very rocky road of using seasonal forecasts because if you convert the seasonal forecast into a categorical forecast to fit that style of

decision making – that very concrete style – I think you – well, it's got to end in tears (R30).

In this quote a seasonal forecast is converted into a categorical prediction as a result of a grazier’s ‚very concrete style‛ of decision-making. For instance, a 70 percent chance of above average rainfall might be taken as a prediction of a wet season. A decision to buy stock might ensue, yet a wet season may not. The stock might become unsaleable while they eat and trample the residual pasture. The forecaster might reflect that the rain did not follow the most likely outcome and that a low frequency event was experienced, as will sometimes happen. The grazier, on the other hand, having reconstituted the forecast in their own terms, might say the forecast was wrong. They might end up shooting the cattle that have become weak and worthless in a slow market, and vow never again to be swayed by the hubristic notion of seasonal climate prediction.

This naïve example points to an extreme case of what I refer to as ‘translation risks’ (cf. Duncan 2003). More than simply a misinterpretation or a misunderstanding of information, the concept of translation risk infers that epistemic terrain is not flat. Moreover, in examining translation risks rather than misunderstandings, there is a recognition that people take heed of information and knowledge partly on the basis of their interpretation of its legitimacy: socially, historically, institutionally and politically (Wynne 1991; 1992a, and see Chapter 3; 1996a). That is, translation risks encompass the way people relate to information and knowledge and its sources, rather than just how they might interpret it cognitively.

An important aspect of managing translation risks, sometimes tacitly, sometimes very consciously, is achieved in the framing of things, or more broadly via their performance (Hilgartner 2000). In the example above, the translation risks are associated with a particular boundary object – a seasonal climate forecast. Such boundary objects serve as anchoring points between and among diverse epistemic communities and cultures (Star and Griesemer 1989). They require careful framing in order that they are seen across boundaries with just enough

to be produced via participatory action (Cash et al. 2006), and while many of the boundary objects of climate risk technologies are largely generated by scientists, they have developed a participative value. In short, boundary objects are iteratively reframed in response to media and public translations.

In this chapter I first undertake the task of categorising the various forms of engagement among climate risk technologists and publics. Specifically, I identify three ‘modes of extension’ of seasonal climate prediction – discursive, conceptual, and contextual extension. These provide different means by which scientists articulate climatological and agro-ecological concerns at different scales, for different audiences. Each mode also serves to order identities and relations among farmers, scientists and techno-scientific boundary objects. These modes of extension can be initially typified briefly, as follows:

Discursive extension is the process by which Australian climate variability is constituted through broad societal, and media-driven narratives about weather and climate. In this form of extension, climate variability and climate change are closely tied to matters of economic and political interests and as such climate prediction is politically sensitive. The discursive construction of the climate variability and predictability (and the inter-linkages with increasingly public debates about the impacts of climate change) becomes an integral aspect of Australian environmental and agricultural narratives. In contributing to the discursive framing of climate, scientists recreate ENSO in a less technical, and sometimes colloquial, lexicon. Relatedly, I argue that at a discursive level, scientific climate knowledges can become an element in the production of social, cultural and individual identities.

Conceptual extension of seasonal climate risk occurs through relatively didactic engagement. Researchers and extensionists hold workshops with groups of agricultural publics and furnish them with basic knowledge of climate processes, associations and tools to make interpreting climate variability and forecasts easier. This conceptual knowledge demystifies weather and climate and the linkages between them. It provides a legitimate entry point to understanding the

mechanistic processes which underpin teleconnections and make the resultant associations real and able to be ‘witnessed’ in the instrumental record. Conceptual extension thus stabilises the meaning of boundary objects.

Contextual extension relies on more participative methods, and systems modelling or DSSs. Contextual application of climate science works at a close inter-personal level to address technical, place-specific questions about agricultural systems, sometimes by recreating the farm in a digital environment such that virtual experiments can be done. This mode of extension is data and technology intensive, expensive and time-consuming. It tends to end up engaging so-called ‘top-end’ farmers and graziers and, I argue, engagement tends to depend on the alignment of the ways of knowing among agricultural publics and scientist. These modes of extension provide a format for critically engaging with scientists’ attempts to mediate translation risks. I argue in this chapter that, in all three modes of extension, conveying the noise and signal of seasonal climate prediction relies on performative and relational aspects of communicative practice. Thus it is not enough to get ‘communication right’ in the sense of structuring language so that it effectively conveys credible information. The legitimacy of predictions and their salience relies on the performance of climate, identities and meanings. Through such performance ‘ownership’ is delegated, and relational networks established among scientists, technologies and agricultural publics, sometimes blurring their boundaries. An important aspect of the management of translation risks of seasonal climate predictions also involves making climate knowledge meaningful in the places where decision-makers operate. Whether through re-interpreting local history for publics in statistical terms as ‘climatology’, or by adopting bush colloquialisms in making climate predictions, the regional impacts of ENSO are constituted as an essential consideration in local decision-making. Yet, participants often seemed only tacitly aware of these performative and relational aspects of the construction of seasonal climate prediction. In this chapter I have attempted to make them explicit.