Fixing Subjects, Fixing Outcomes: Civic Epistemologies and Epistemic Agency in Participatory Governance of Climate Risk

Abstract

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.

Coprodução na prevenção a riscos climáticos: um olhar integrativo na escala local

“…A gestão participativa demanda organização, mobilização e confiança da sociedade para abordar questões comuns e construir saídas, que resultam de uma negociação coletiva (BAZTAN et al, 2020;MCLENNAN, 2020). Bridel (2021) argumentou que é essencial levar em conta as demandas que sinalizam a conexão entre coprodução e aspectos políticos. Ressalta-se a urgência de incorporar insights de governanças locais que fujam da mentalidade ocidental, integrando as teorias de coprodução às teorias de voluntariado, valorizando as relações sem fins lucrativos (WANG et al, 2020) e os benefícios potenciais que os serviços de prevenção de riscos climáticos podem gerar (GAZLEY; CHENG, 2020).…”

Democracy in a deluge: Epistemic agency of marginalized voices in Oaxaca's storm governance

“…Epistemic agency and civic epistemologies. The concept of civic epistemologies (CEs) is useful here because it connects the agency of local knowledge producers to the constitutional political-epistemic relations in which they are embedded (Bridel, 2021). CEs have been used to refer to the "social and institutional practices by which political communities construct, review, validate and deliberate politically relevant knowledge" (Miller, 2008(Miller, : 1896Jasanoff, 2005Jasanoff, , 2011aMorvillo, 2020).…”

Posthumanist participation: Beyond extractivism in the Dutch Wadden Sea Area

“…The limitations of each of the coastal entanglements in responding to environmental calamities marks the importance of making political what kind of dynamics are foregrounded, taken for granted, or rendered invisible in shifting coastal management regimes. All these aspects together shift who can act, who is at risk, and who is allowed to be porous and leaky (Beck, 1992;Bridel, 2021;Choi, 2015;Kramarz, 2022).…”