Understanding environmental knowledge controversies: the case of flood risk management

1. Understanding environmental knowledge controversies: the case of flood risk management Sarah J. Whatmore Oxford University Centre for the Environment Project runs March 2007 – Feb. 2010. Project website (from 12/03/2007)http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk. RELU People and the Rural Environment Forum. London March 2007

2. Environmental knowledge controversies • The GM saga signalled a sea-change in attitudes towards the place of science in public policy-making. What do such knowledge controversiesmean? • Publicly funded research designed to ‘settle’ environmental uncertainties can now anticipate becoming the subject of public dispute. • Scientists and policy makers are actively reviewing their working practices and thinking again about how science does, and should, inform democratic decision-making. • Unprecedented attention is being invested in how to deal with scientific uncertainty, identifying improved public engagement in science as a key means of rebuilding confidence in the knowledge claims and technologies on which policy relies.

3. The case of flood risk management • The project addresses the public controversies generated by the risk management strategies and forecasting technologies associated with distributed environmental problems like flooding and pollution. • Our focus is the science and politics of flood risk modelling and how to improve public involvement in determining the role of rural land management in the amelioration of flood risk. • The research will be conducted in two case study localities:- Ryedale in Yorkshire, centred on Malton and Pickering; and the Arun catchment in West Sussex, centred on Arundel and Pulborough.

4. Objective 1: The production and circulation of environmental scienceWork Package 1 (Oxford Team lead by Sarah Whatmore • To investigate how environmental knowledge claims and technologies (like hydrological models) are produced. • To understand how they become ‘hardwired’ into the procedures of government and commercial organisations (eg the flood risk maps produced by the Environment Agency and Association of British Insurers). And • To account for how and why they become subject to scientific dispute and public controversy, and with what consequences for public engagement and trust?

5. Objective 2: an integrative methodology for forecasting flood riskWork Package 2 (Durham Team lead by Stuart Lane) • To forecast the in-river and floodplain effects of land management practices • Using Minimum Information Requirement (MIR) modelling techniques to • (i) handle the potential catchment impacts of different decisions at a variety of scales and to • (ii) visualise these impacts in ways that invite and enable public interrogationand engagement.

6. Objective 3: Developing and evaluating a new approach to interdisciplinary public scienceWork Package 3 -Newcastle Team lead by Neil Ward • To develop and assess competency groups as a methodology that brings together diverse kinds of scientific and local knowledge about flood risk in particular localities over a sustained period from the project outset. This approach combines:- • A ‘radical’ mode of interdisciplinarity that requires participating social and natural scientists to engage constructively with the working assumptions and methods that under pin each others’ research practices and, in so doing, to re-evaluate their own. • An ‘upstream’ mode of public involvement that requires participating scientists to engage constructively with the different environmental knowledge claims and practices of concerned publics, building these perspectives into the research process. • To draw lessons for other distributed environmental issues, particularly diffuse pollution, and disseminate them through ‘transferable skills’ practitioner Workshops (Work Package 4)

7. Project Summary • Developing and evaluating a new approach to interdisciplinary public science • Through a study of diffuse land management practices that affect water environments. • Focusing on the ways in which efforts to locate and manage flood risk become subject to scientific dispute and public controversy