Work Package 4

1. Work Package 4 Knowledge Exchange with academic and policy communities: long term project stewardship Dr Geoff Whitman and Professor Stuart Lane, University of Durham

2. Core Work Package 4 aims • To provide a long-term web-based ‘civic resource’ that draws upon the project’s wider findings • To broaden the empirical focus on flooding to other science areas

3. The web-based Civic Resource • Objectives: • Introduce and explore the nature of Environmental Knowledge Controversies in general, and with reference to the specific case of flooding. • Demonstrate the possibility of a radical repositioning of science in environmental and other forms of research, where the purpose of science is to redistribute expertise in ways that allow new forms of political intervention. • Document and differentiate the Environmental Competency Group methodology so as to provide a framework that others can experiment with. • Use innovative forms of communication for the purpose of (1), (2) and (3), whilst also providing a long-term archive of the project’s findings.

4. Exemplars • From ‘linear’ ordering as defined by the creator to interactive ordering centred on the user • Exemplars • Prezi: visualising and archiving project information • Living with flooding: transcending the personal accounts of ‘the self’ with the systematic accounts that emerge from across the many. • Debategraph: an experiment in on-line debate

5. Broadening the focus:1 • The position and role of ecological knowledge in public policy • 1980’s ‘revolution’ in medicine leading to the establishment of the Cochrane Collaboration (CC) (1993)- establishment of systematic reviews of the doctor-patient relationship. • Suggestion by some that ecology needs a similar ‘revolution’ to move it away from a base in which, • “…the majority of conservation actions are experience-based, in that they are based on the personal experience…rather than evidence-based, or based on scientific experimentation indicating that they are effective” [Pullin and Knight, 2001, p. 51] • A tension between: • those who advocate the restriction of admissible ecological knowledge to that grounded in formal scientific practices and those trained in those practices • Recognising the potential of ‘local ecological knowledges’ (e.g. BTO, RSPB, Springwatch, UK Phrenology Society) • Aims: How do tensions emerge in decision-making (e.g. the planning process)? How might our approach contribute to a re-think of whose knowledges are relevant to conservation?

6. Broadening the focus: 2 • Broadening engagement with climate change models through a focus on: validation and verification • Climate models are considered to be the ‘core tools’ in the study of climatic processes and have have become “…synonymous in the public mind” (Watson, 2008, p. 37) with attempts to predict how climate will change in the future. • However, there is a tension that exists between people’s localised experiences of climate changes (i.e. weather) and the ‘objective’ modelling of these changes at a global scale • In anthropology it has been noted that, • “...in talking about weather we seek to understand lived worlds, symbolic forms and human well-being...how climate change is apparent in local weather patterns, how rain and wind feel on one’s face, how snow feels differently underfoot than it did in one’s childhood” (Crate and Nuttall, 2009, p. 394) • Climate “…has always carried a deeper, precarious and more ambiguous meaning” (Hulme, 2009, p. 12) for humans than that developed through models and statistics.

7. Broadening the focus:2 • There is recognition from within the climate modelling community of a need to engage with and communicate uncertainties as a prerequisite for scientific credibility. As Stainforth et al note, • “Effective communication of the underlying assumptions and sources of forecast uncertainty is critical in the interaction between climate science, the impacts on communities and society in general... (these)may prove critical for maintaining credibility in the future as model-based information improves” (2007, p. 2146) • However, there is less engagement with the idea that other knowledges may be important in both the validating and credibility of such models. Following Shackley and Wynne (1995) we want to engage with the idea that • “…in order to enhance broader based policy learning and engagement with the issues, it is conceivable that …model validation is needed, in which for example, those who are usually bracketed off as the ‘objects’ of research, such as farmers, local communities and industrialists, are involved in testing model assumptions and interface negotiations” (Shackley and Wynne, 1995, p. 126)

8. Participating Institutions Funding Body http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/