Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Study Task: In Pickering, the original, twice-presented flood wall proposal
was made on the basis of contributory expertise from EA-solicited scien-
tists with higher degrees. Local stakeholders were consulted, but about the
practical policy options rather than the analysis of flooding as such. The
RFRG, however, worked differently. It was a heterodox and temporary epis-
temic community composed of flood modellers, credentialised experts with
little knowledge of flooding, and local (sometimes highly educated) people
with experience of flooding but no experience in flood analysis or miti-
gation. See if you can apply Collins and Evans's categories to group the
13 members of the RFGR. Speculate about how the expertises may have
interacted.
In the Pickering case, it seems to me that a complex dance of exper-
tises took place to produce a technically effective solution to flood threats
that also received widespread local support. First, two of the five RFRG
academics possessed contributory expertise and recognised credentials; how-
ever, importantly, they were not the same contributory experts earlier
retained by the EA. They came into the Group with open minds and a
willingness to use their technical skills after sustained dialogue with others.
Second, the other three academics possessed some combination of inter-
actional and referred expertise in flood analysis and prevention. Third,
while the lay members of the Group largely lacked contributory expertise,
their experiences of flooding and knowledge of Pickering's geography were
nonetheless formative for the experts (and vice versa). In particular, the inter-
actional and referred expertise of three Group members allowed them to
translate between lay members and the modellers. In short, the produc-
tion of hydrological knowledge and policy recommendation was, in this
case, collective. By playing different roles, Group members created some-
thing new (the bund model) that had not previously been on the table
in the expert-led approach of the EA. To use Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry
Ravetz's term, the bund model was not so much a more 'truthful' represen-
tation of water flows and their management as a more socially 'robust' one
(Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993). Alternatively, if it was more 'truthful', then
it's in the pragmatist sense discussed at the end of Chapter 4.
We can turn this around and ask what happens when 'lay epistemology' is
excluded in situations where, with hindsight, we can see that it was required.
In a now classic study, Brian Wynne (1992) - like Collins and Evans, an
analyst of science-led policy - examined a case where non-credentialised
'contributory experts' were not recognised by credentialised ones employed
by the UK Government. As in the Pickering case, it was a 'tornado politics'
situation. After the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power sta-
tion in the former USSR, wind-deposited radioactive material was detected
 
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