Participatory forms of policy-making have often been criticized for insufficiently theorizing the coproduction of publics and matters of concern. This paper seeks to investigate this relationship further by analyzing how the concept of civic epistemologies (CEs) can provide insights for understanding how political contexts shape both publics and contestable debates. Presenting fieldwork on cyclone governance in Odisha, India, based on the analysis of interviews with vulnerable fishing communities and state actors, the article shows how CEs influence the interdependent formation of vulnerable fisher and state subjectivities on one hand with representations of risk located in external biophysical atmospheric gases on the other, thereby sustaining reductive roles and futures. At the same time, the paper develops the concept of CEs by examining them as performative acts carried out by marginalized communities and state actors at the subnational level of a nonindustrialized country, thereby indicating sites at which epistemic agency can be increased and governed. Participatory knowledge production needs to understand how it is affected by CEs if it is to generate effective expertise for transformative futures in the face of increasing climatic risks.
Despite repeated calls for grassroots participation in climate policy making, the epistemic agency of marginalized voices remains little understood. While local knowledge is increasingly regarded as an antidote to top-down climate expertise, it is often not heard, or ends up reinforcing dominant framings of risk. The concept of civic epistemologies (CEs), often understood as the sociocultural norms by which societies authorize knowledge claims, can provide insights into the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in climate governance, but has rarely been applied to such concerns. At the same time, such questions affect how scholars conceptualize CEs, which have seldom been examined where civics are fragmented or marginalized. In this article, I argue that understanding CEs as “expectations of democracy” can indicate how they authorize climate expertise in such settings. I illustrate this argument by examining hurricane governance in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where vulnerable fishers constitute a sociopolitically and economically excluded part of a fragmented civic that shapes the production of risk expertise. Here, fisher expectations that the government will behave corruptly, and government expectations that fishers prefer to remain socioeconomically separate from the state reify biophysical approaches to risk. This analysis contributes to understanding why many attempts to include marginalized voices in climate policy fail to achieve their anticipated outcomes, expanding understanding of how CEs mediate epistemic agency in contested political contexts. Furthermore, examining CEs as expectations of democracy can inform upon conditions under which political-epistemic orders change, revealing opportunities for intervention in climate risk governance.
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