Medidas de Prevención y/o Mitigación de los efectos ambientales.

So the end to end system does have a few disconnects and there are too many boundaries to cross, both within and between our tribal agencies and disciplines. Climate is the classic example of where science without frontiers is needed (Barry White, after dinner speech, National Forum of the Managing Climate Variability Program).

In Barry White’s laconic reflection on the things he had ‚learnt and unlearnt‛ during 14 years as coordinator of the Managing Climate Variability Program, he implies that boundary-work is central to climate risk technologies. In this chapter, I analyse such boundary-work by focussing on how researchers talk and write about interdisciplinarity and the boundaries among disciplines and agencies, and to what effects. Such boundaries provide form to the terrain within which knowledge-makers work, and to the practices of knowledge-making themselves. As with biophysical boundaries, such as between climatic zones and vegetation types, the cultural boundaries of climate risk technologies are often diffuse, and are always moving. Thus they are difficult to map; and any map is no more than a representation of a moment that has already passed. Nonetheless, attempting to highlight some of the features of these boundaries can provide a depiction of an epistemic terrain of knowledge production. Such an account can, in turn, ground critical reflection about how knowledge-making could be reformed.

Immersion across disciplines is advocated by two leading lights in climate risk technologies. Graeme Hammer and Neville Nichols (1996:26) argue that "progress requires interdisciplinary action, not disciplinary interaction". Such interdisciplinarity was often commented upon by participants as exemplary within Australian climate risk technologies. The associations among actors and organisations are longstanding, and bridge-building is nothing new. Nevertheless, as I demonstrate in this chapter, the boundaries among and within disciplines and organisations were far from settled and stable.

The roles of different climate risk technologists were contested, and there were tensions about what can and should be done with the knowledges and technologies, who should do these things, and how they should go about it. While the focus of such debates usually centre explicitly on questions of science (or natural order), much of the negotiation within climate risk technologies implicitly happens (often privately, sometimes perhaps tacitly) around the relational and cultural boundaries across the scientific, public, and political domains, and their effects (or the social order). While the core business of scientists is to make credible representations of nature, it is also up to the scientists I interviewed to negotiate social orders both across and beyond their disciplinary boundaries and organisational roles. For instance, climate risk technologists, as well as playing a lead role in constituting the climate of Australia for publics and for politics, also put a great deal of effort into interpreting and representing how politicians and publics are responding and should respond to climate variability and change. In part this work is done by climate risk technologists drives important narratives of climatic history, variability and change as well as describing what forms of land management and policy will cohere with current understandings of Australian climates. It is also imperative that scientists articulate their scientific interests with those that occupy their political masters, the media, and publics. In this chapter, I provide some detailed examples of how the work of climate risk technologists is only in part about credible representation of the climate; it is also, importantly about negotiating boundaries between and among sciences, politics and publics. That is, climate risk technologies is a domain that is broadly concerned with contending matters of concern rather than simply producing matters of fact (Latour 2004).

The chapter has two substantive sections. First, I focus on the language surrounding ‘validation’ and ‘verification’ of statistical climate prediction models in Australia. These terms have been problematised elsewhere for philosophical and linguistic reasons including their effects on the boundaries between disciplines and between science and society (Oreskes et al. 1994; Edwards 1999).

The terms verification and validation are far less prevalent in climate risk technologies than reference to the statistical metric of ‘skill’ and ‘artificial skill’. Skill is used to quantify how much better a forecast is than assuming the current conditions will continue or be represented by the historical record for a given place and time. Skill is thus a key metric of the quality of forecast systems. The language of skill can thus be looked at in terms of the how it is discussed and deployed, and to what effects. While such effects are usually not explicitly discussed within scientific circles, they are often visible through the talk of scientists at interview and in more private settings, and often via humour (cf. Gilbert and Mulkay 1984). Such forms of talk appear to be deployed to order boundaries between groups and disciplines. Yet these effects are often unspoken and thus poorly thought through within scientific circles. Making their effects more explicit can, I would suggest, advance debate about the processes of knowledge-making in climate risk technologies. Thus, in the beginning of this chapter I point to ways in which narrative-elements associated with skill in seasonal climate prediction are deployed to order boundaries in climate risk technologies.

In the second part of the chapter, I examine some elements of how researchers talked about multiple, often-overlapping matters of concern. These matters of concern might be loosely considered as duties of care, to so-called end-users of knowledge, as well as to colleagues, organisations, politicians, the environment, and to science itself. They are story-lines that highlight what is at stake for different actors and agencies and demonstrate how this science is made salient, credible and legitimate within its continually changing contexts. From interviews it appears that cross-organisational and interdisciplinary relationships serve to improve understanding of scientific knowledge in a disciplinary sense. Importantly, such linkages also ground individuals in the commitments, politics, interests, institutional histories and constraints, and thus the matters of concern, that exist across epistemic cultures and organisations. Thus, engagement across boundaries engenders a clearer sense among climate risk technologists of who is doing what and why. At least at an interpersonal level, this engagement also

informs debate about what is important and why, not just in scientific terms, but also with regard to institutionalised matters of concern. Nevertheless, many issues within this network-polity are equivocated in scientific terms, even where there are often more socio-cultural issues at stake that might usefully be debated alongside, but in a different register to, the more technical concerns. In this chapter, the technical and social overlap in my account of how knowledge boundaries are negotiated.

5.1: Making seasonal climate predictions: an analysis