Understanding the transformation of climate futures. A conceptual framework illustrated with urban adaptation policy

Abstract

Projects in which science-based futures are produced indicating the relevant impacts of climatic changes are proliferating, in tandem with the increasing attention for climate change adaptation. Constructionist science studies have put forward the concept of ‘co-production’ to understand how knowledge claims become stable, authoritative, get institutionalised and reorder science and society. Moreover, knowledge and structures of power are co-evolutionary. Exercises in constructing futures are interesting practices where what is and what ought are enmeshed, and where knowledge claims may in turn be performative for societal reordering. This article presents a conceptual framework to understand the transformation of knowledge claims about the future in more analytical detail. Five concepts are suggested to aid the analysis of transformations: reduction, extension, rhetorical packaging, modification and redefinition. This conceptual framework is used to present a qualitative, in-depth study about the transformation of the volatile issue of urban warming in the face of climate change in the Netherlands, and the related knowledge claims on the future of this issue. As this case makes clear, the constant erosion of legitimacy for urban warming as a matter of collective concern is important to understand the transformation of knowledge claims. Also, the context and organisational embedding in which the projects originated had direct consequences for the construction of relevant knowledge on future urban warming. Moreover, the pre-existing methodologies science brings to the production of knowledge functioned as important templates which transformed the issue of urban warming.