Understanding environmental knowledge controversies: the case of flood risk management

1
Understanding environmental knowledge
controversies the case of flood risk management

• Sarah J. Whatmore
• Oxford University Centre for the Environment
• Project runs March 2007 Feb. 2010.
• Project website (from 12/03/2007)http//knowledge
  -controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk.
• RELU People and the Rural Environment Forum.
  London March 2007

2
Environmental knowledge controversies

• The GM saga signalled a sea-change in attitudes
  towards the place of science in public
  policy-making. What do such knowledge
  controversies mean?
• Publicly funded research designed to settle
  environmental uncertainties can now anticipate
  becoming the subject of public dispute.
• Scientists and policy makers are actively
  reviewing their working practices and thinking
  again about how science does, and should, inform
  democratic decision-making.
• Unprecedented attention is being invested in how
  to deal with scientific uncertainty, identifying
  improved public engagement in science as a key
  means of rebuilding confidence in the knowledge
  claims and technologies on which policy relies.

3
The case of flood risk management

• The project addresses the public controversies
  generated by the risk management strategies and
  forecasting technologies associated with
  distributed environmental problems like flooding
  and pollution.
• Our focus is the science and politics of flood
  risk modelling and how to improve public
  involvement in determining the role of rural land
  management in the amelioration of flood risk.
• The research will be conducted in two case study
  localities- Ryedale in Yorkshire, centred on
  Malton and Pickering and the Arun catchment in
  West Sussex, centred on Arundel and Pulborough.

4
Objective 1 The production and circulation of
environmental scienceWork Package 1 (Oxford
Team lead by Sarah Whatmore

• To investigate how environmental knowledge claims
  and technologies (like hydrological models) are
  produced.
• To understand how they become hardwired into
  the procedures of government and commercial
  organisations (eg the flood risk maps produced by
  the Environment Agency and Association of British
  Insurers). And
• To account for how and why they become subject to
  scientific dispute and public controversy, and
  with what consequences for public engagement and
  trust?

5
Objective 2 an integrative methodology for
forecasting flood risk Work Package 2 (Durham
Team lead by Stuart Lane)

• To forecast the in-river and floodplain effects
  of land management practices
• Using Minimum Information Requirement (MIR)
  modelling techniques to
• (i) handle the potential catchment impacts of
  different decisions at a variety of scales and
  to
• (ii) visualise these impacts in ways that invite
  and enable public interrogation and engagement.

6
Objective 3 Developing and evaluating a new
approach to interdisciplinary public
scienceWork Package 3 -Newcastle Team lead by
Neil Ward

• To develop and assess competency groups as a
  methodology that brings together diverse kinds of
  scientific and local knowledge about flood risk
  in particular localities over a sustained period
  from the project outset. This approach combines-
• A radical mode of interdisciplinarity that
  requires participating social and natural
  scientists to engage constructively with the
  working assumptions and methods that under pin
  each others research practices and, in so doing,
  to re-evaluate their own.
• An upstream mode of public involvement that
  requires participating scientists to engage
  constructively with the different environmental
  knowledge claims and practices of concerned
  publics, building these perspectives into the
  research process.
• To draw lessons for other distributed
  environmental issues, particularly diffuse
  pollution, and disseminate them through
  transferable skills practitioner Workshops
  (Work Package 4)

7
Project Summary

• Developing and evaluating a new approach to
  interdisciplinary public science
• Through a study of diffuse land management
  practices that affect water environments.
• Focusing on the ways in which efforts to locate
  and manage flood risk become subject to
  scientific dispute and public controversy