The predictive state: Science, territory and the future of the Indian climate

Abstract

Acts of scientific calculation have long been considered central to the formation of the modern nation-state, yet the transnational spaces of knowledge generation and political action associated with climate change seem to challenge territorial modes of political order. This paper explores the changing geographies of climate prediction through a study of the ways in which climate change is rendered knowable at the national scale in India. The recent controversy surrounding an erroneous prediction of melting Himalayan glaciers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a window onto the complex and at times antagonistic relationship between the Panel and Indian political and scientific communities. The Indian reaction to the error, made public in 2009, drew upon a national history of contestation around climate change science, and corresponded with the establishment of a scientific assessment network (INCCA) which has given the state a new platform on which to bring together knowledge about the future climate. I argue that INCCA is indicative of the growing use of regional climate models within longer traditions of national territorial knowledge-making, allowing a re-scaling of climate change according to local norms and practices of linking scientific knowledge to political action. I illustrate the complex co-production of the epistemic and the normative in climate politics, but also seek to show how co-productionist understandings of science and politics can function as strategic resources in the ongoing negotiation of social order. In this case, scientific rationalities and modes of environmental governance contribute to the contested epistemic construction of territory and the evolving spatiality of the modern nation-state under a changing climate.

Reframing adaptation: The political nature of climate change adaptation

“…At the same time, the science of climate change itself influences how we recognise and understand these changes (Hulme, 2011;Mahony, 2014;Swyngedouw, 2010). As a result, climate change requires people to adjust ('adapt') not only to new hazards and changing resources, but also to new regimes of knowledge, as well as to changes in access to and control over resources.…”

“…Authority captures how the operation of power manifests in the competition for influence and the ability to exert agendas by one individual or institution over another within environmental governance and adaptation processes (Fairhead et al, 2012;Nightingale and Ojha, 2013;Sikor and Lund, 2009). Struggles for authority are manifest at all scales, and intertwined in the processes by which different knowledges are used in adaptation (Beck et al, 2014;Bulkeley, 2012;Hulme, 2011;Jasanoff, 2013;Mahony, 2014), and how environmental subjectivities emerge in relation to broader discourses of change and transformation (Nightingale, 2015). 'Knowledges' in its plural form signals how understandings of climate change and adaptation are based in more than just scientific knowledge (Hulme, 2010;Jasanoff, 2013;Mahony, 2014).…”

“…Struggles for authority are manifest at all scales, and intertwined in the processes by which different knowledges are used in adaptation (Beck et al, 2014;Bulkeley, 2012;Hulme, 2011;Jasanoff, 2013;Mahony, 2014), and how environmental subjectivities emerge in relation to broader discourses of change and transformation (Nightingale, 2015). 'Knowledges' in its plural form signals how understandings of climate change and adaptation are based in more than just scientific knowledge (Hulme, 2010;Jasanoff, 2013;Mahony, 2014). By exploring the ability of actors' to assert one understanding over another (authority), and evaluating how knowledges combine and influence each other, we are able to show "on-the-ground" effects of knowledges and discourses (Goldman, 2011;Taylor, 2013).…”

Tecnopolíticas das mudanças climáticas: modelos climáticos, geopolítica e governamentalidade

“…According to Mahony (2014), the authority of climate change modeling has been legitimated at a time when the technical ability to discover what will happen to a territory in the future is of growing importance. Like other maps, climate maps represent power and are valued because they offer projections useful in planning and ordering a territory (Carey, 2012).…”

“…While more researchers from developing nations have been incorporated into the institutional framework of the IPCC during the course of drafting these reports, this has not been accompanied by any substantial inclusion of scientific output from these countries (Vasileiadou, Heimeriks, Petersen, 2011). In IPCC reports, the overwhelming reliance on science produced in developed nations raises two questions: how do the governments of developing countries view, and value, their participation on the panel (Kandlikar, Sagar, 1997;Mahony, 2014) and what implications might this have on the correlation of forces among States within the political framework of climate change? These questions suggest that the geopolitics of climate change must be understood both within organized spaces for negotiating political accords and within spaces where global climate science is assessed and formulated (O'Lear, Dalby, 2015).…”