“Infrastructural geopolitics” of climate knowledge: the Brazilian Earth System Model and the North-South knowledge divide

Abstract

This article examines how geopolitics are embedded into the efforts of Southern nations that try to build new climate knowledge infrastructures. It achieves this through an analysis of the composition of the international climate modelling basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), viewed from the perspective of the Brazilian Earth System Model (BESM) - the scientific project which placed a Latin American country for the first time inside the global modelling bases of the IPCC. The paper argues that beyond the idea of “infrastructural globalism”, a historical process of global scientific cooperation led by developed countries, we also need to understand the “infrastructural geopolitics” of climate models. This concept seeks to describe the actions of developing countries towards minimizing the imbalance of global climate scientific production, and how these countries participate in global climate governance and politics. The analysis of the construction of BESM suggests that national investments in global climate modelling were aimed at attaining scientific sovereignty, which is closely related to a notion of political sovereignty of the nation-state within the international regime of climate change.

Morals and climate decision-making: insights from social and behavioural sciences

“…Environmental governance research has shown how interventions that aim to be neutral, apolitical, or merely technical, are implicitly moral (Li, 2007;Blythe et al, 2018;Nightingale et al, 2020) and has emphasized the power that these implicit moral framings have in climate governance (Morrison et al, 2017). Scholars have identified a narrow set of epistemological perspectives dominant in global climate change discourse (Castree et al, 2014), the risks that arise from apolitical framings of environmental change 'problems' and 'solutions' (Blythe et al, 2018), and growing mistrust of prevailing climate change framings among communities in the Global South (Mahony, 2014;Miguel, Mahony and Monteiro, 2019). There are, in effect, contested meanings in climate change policy discourse and decision-making, whereby seemingly apolitical global climate knowledge is in fact 'shaped by histories of exploration and colonialism, [… and] messy processes of linking scientific knowledge to decision-making within different polities' (Mahony and Hulme, 2018, p. 395).…”

Infrastructuring “data-driven” environmental governance in Louisiana’s coastal restoration plan

“…More conceptually, infrastructuring focuses our attention toward how actors navigate the kinds of abstraction central to translation, since infrastructures are standards arising alongside immediate needs. Infrastructure is when "local" data siloed in one single model or separate repositories is integrated with others, or when standard models are adapted for local purposes as well (Miguel et al, 2019)-in either case to be "used in a natural, ready-to-hand fashion" (Star and Ruhleder, 1996: 114). Crucially, this infrastructure can break down when it becomes (re)siloed, out of date, programmed with bugs, or does not match the expectations of stakeholders.…”

“…O'Lear, 2016;Swyngedouw, 2010), while data justice scholars have suggested digital tools and datification might allow for some reconfiguration of hegemonic social relations (e.g. Dencik et al, 2019;Miguel et al, 2019).…”

Southern skies: Australian atmospheric research and global climate change

“…Indeed, the "globalism" of climate science is under growing scrutiny (e.g. Miguel et al, 2019). Ethnographic approaches to the study of climate research communities in Brazil (Lahsen, 2004) and India (Mahony, 2014) have offered crucial insights into the ways in which researchers in the Global South have more recently experienced and interpreted the processes of global climate scientific production.…”

“…Excavating the ways in which countries such as Australia engaged in global climate scientific production and governance contributes to the wider project of bringing to light the "infrastructural geopolitics" that belie the "infrastructural globalism" of international Australian atmospheric research scientific cooperation (Miguel et al, 2019;Edwards, 2010). This approach recognises the geopolitical asymmetries inherent in global climate science and attends to the deeper historical contexts that configure and mediate the ways in which globalist knowledge is interpreted and applied locally (Mahony, 2014).…”