Trust Through Participation? Problems of Knowledge in Climate Decision Making

Abstract

Our discussion was lively and ranged widely when I in the late 1990s interviewed an influential US global change science administrator in a federal agency in Washington DC. At his initiative, we embarked on the issue of distrust in science and the related issue of participation in international forums under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). He said:The science administrator articulates a dominant discourse of science according to which participation in the production or adjudication of scientific facts ensures that the latter will be viewed or described as such by scientists and decision makers. Scientists and science administrators are especially likely to reinforce this discourse which reflects assumptions at odds with constructivist understandings of science. As argued in other chapters in this volume as well, scientific facts, and hence also, of course, discourses about them, do not transcend particularities of perspective. If scientific interpretations are inextricably interwoven with politics and particularities of perspective, the fact of receiving an education abroad does more than merely enhance technical capacity of individuals: it also shapes subjectivities and political agendas. Integrating this insight, constructivist literature on the effectiveness ofinternational cooperation around the environment identifies capacity building as a process that transforms values, beliefs, expectations and policy preferences (VanDeever 2005; Lahsen 2004; Mol 2002; Conca and Dabelko 2002; Cortell and Davis 2000).