Understanding Environmental Knowledge Controversies: the Case for Flood Risk Management, 2007-2010

UK Data Archive

Study Number 6620

USER GUIDE

Oxford University

Centre for the Environment

RELU Project Office

South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, United Kingdom

Interview Consent Form

I agree to be interviewed for the purpose of the ‘Understanding Environmental Knowledge Controversies’ project and to the interview being electronically recorded.

I understand :

that my name will not appear on any tapes or transcripts resulting from the interview.

that my name and identity will remain confidential in any publications or presentations referring to this interview.

that I will receive a copy of the transcribed interview and of any publications referring to this interview.

that I will have the opportunity to comment on and add further information in relation to the transcript of this interview.

Signature of interviewee: ………………………….

Printed name of interviewee : ………………………………….

Date : ………………………………..

------

I have explained the project and the implications of being interviewed to the interviewee and I believe that the consent is informed and that he/she understand the implications of participation.

Name of interviewer :

Printed name of interviewer :

Date :

If you require further information about the research please contact the project office.

FINDING THE ACTORS (A NOTE ON METHOD)

ACTIONS

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) encourages researchers to ‘follow the actors’. Although this exhortation lacks somewhat in specificity many STS researchers have taken it to mean that they should conduct ethnographies of research groups and/or laboratories. This approach has generated many interesting studies illuminating previously overlooked aspects of the actual doing of science. However, it still tends to leave out many relevant aspects. In contrast to the ethnographic close focus on one research community this study of flood modelling in the UK aims to generate material that enable us to understand the circulation of knowledges, practices, people and technology among organisations and across locations. Hence, we need to focus on the network as generative of an environment in which research is conducted, policies conceived and controversies arising.

To trace a network of heterogeneous actors is an undertaking that has been made much easier by the existence of the world wide web (www). The web is a virtual space in which physical actors make traces. These traces can be easily located and followed back from the virtual to the physical. Our cartography of the UK flood risk modelling environment starts with mapping actors through their virtual relationships. We started with the Defra (the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs1) benchmarking of 1- dimensional hydraulic river modelling software packages commencing in 2002.

According to the project report published in 2004 the endeavour was undertaken as a necessary update of a previous benchmarking effort initiated in 1993 by the National Rivers Authority (NRA)2. With time several of the eleven packages benchmarked then had been taken off the market and the remaining had been significantly upgraded, and the Environment Agency had rationalised its software support. Hence, a new benchmarking study serving to ensure ‘that best practice in hydraulic modelling is consistently achieved’ (R&D Technical Summary W5-105/TS) worked with three software packages: ISIS, MIKE 11 and HEC-RAS.

An immediate realisation was that the www does not support chronological exploration. Differently from archives of written texts the web does not keep track of time, web pages are added to, changed or removed at will. Many government departments, such as Defra, have chosen to use the web as an archive which, in relation to our purpose, means that the details of the benchmarking project in the form of the final report is accessible. This archival impulse does not extend to the software providers who, as players on the IT- market update both their products and their websites regularly. Hence, doing a study today means that the software packages that were benchmarked by Defra a few years ago have been updated and further developed.

1 http://www.defra.gov.uk/ 2 The NRA was a government agency responsible for managing water resources between 1989 and 1996. According to tiscali.referenc (http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0027296.html, accessed 23/8/2007) it took over the responsibility of ten regional water authorities in England and Wales. It was replaced by the Environment agency. 2

Following up on the three software packages in 2007 we find that ISIS is, according to its webpage presentation ‘a flexible and comprehensive range of tools for designing cost- effective engineering schemes and developing catchment strategies’3.The software package is created and owned by Wallingford Software, a UK based business that creates computer software for the management of water resources4.

MIKE 11 is, again according to the web presentation, ‘the most popular river modelling system among professionals dealing with surface water problems in the world’ being ‘a versatile one-dimensional hydrodynamic software package including a full solution of the St. Venant equations’5. It is manufactured by DHI (the Danish Hydrological Institute) a company working internationally, with an office in Church Stretton in the UK6.

HEC-RAS, developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers7, is on the web described to be ‘designed to perform one-dimensional hydraulic calculations for a full network of natural and constructed channels’8. In contrast to the other two software packages HEC- RAS is a free download, accessible to everybody. The non-proprietary nature of this programme is a result of US law establishing that any technology developed with federal public funding should be made available to the public free of cost. However, there is no user support available to users outside of the US military.

Focusing on the effort to stabilise 1-D hydrodynamic models use in the UK through a web tracing of links leads to a number of consultant businesses. Even before leaving the Defra website we run into Bullen Consultants and Halcrow Group, which both figure on the first page of the project overview, as research contractor and contractor’s project manager, respectively.

Bullen Consultants9, a UK based firm with over 500 employees in offices throughout the UK, merged with Faber Maunsell10 within the wider framework of US firm AECOM Technology11 on the 1st of April 2005. Halcrow12 is a UK based international engineering consultant with 6,000 employees in offices worldwide, has 25 offices in the UK. Halcrow Group is part owner of the ISIS model which makes the benchmarking project appear vulnerable to accusations of bias.

3 ‘ISIS Flow/Hydrology’, http://www.wallingfordsoftware.com/products/isis, accessed 27/03/2007. 4 Wallingford Software (presented at http://www.wallingfordsoftware.com/info/profile) located in Oxfordshire is part of the HR Wallingford Group (http://www.hrwallingford-group.co.uk) that provides consultant services worldwide. 5 ‘Water Resources’, http://www.dhigroup.com/Software/WaterResources.aspx, accessed 26/3/2007. 6 The software package, the local offices and information about DHI were descrbed on the website http://www.dhigroup.com/. 7 The USACE Hydrology Engineering Center maintains a website at http://www.hec.usace.army.mil/. 8 ‘Features’, http://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/hecras-features.html, accessed 28/3/2007. 9 In the DEFRA report located at the website http://www.bullen.com. 10 http://www.fabermaunsell.com/index.jsp 11 http://www.aecom.com/ 12 http://www.halcrow.com/html/default.htm 3

By looking closer at the websites of the three software packages there are further links to follow. ISIS mentions a number of consultants in relation to projects presented on the website. In 2007 most projects presented engage with the InfoWorks software, but there are some archived older news stories about ISIS. One of them mentions Peter Brett Associates13 a UK based consultant. On their website there is a link to the Association for Consultants in Engineering14 on whose website one can get a list of consultants working with water in the UK. However, trying to use this list to locate further 1-D model users proved impossible because it was not possible to limit the search criteria in a way that generated less than several hundred hits which could not be linked to specific models. This discovery confirms the efficacy of an ANT approach, tracing actors via links that are made explicit in one form or another, rather than trying to construct some type of exhaustive account of a population of actors that could then b sampled in a quantitative social science fashion. After discovering this we moved on to trace more actors via the MIKE 11 website.

On its extensive and detailed website DHI presents its entire range of software packages. Although they claim widespread use of MIKE11 all over the world only a few examples of consultants using it are provided. Looking for projects and consultants in the UK we found references to Atkins15 which claims to be the largest engineering consultant and the largest employer of technical staff in the UK. Another consultant mentioned is Hyder Consulting16 just celebrating 150 years in business, now a worldwide operator with 18 offices in the UK and registered on the London Stock Exchange since 2002. A third consultant identified on the MIKE11 website is Mott MacDonald17 a US owned firm with 11,000 staff in 140 countries, listing ‘Water’ as one of their sectors of expertise18. In addition to giving references to users MIKE11 is also explicitly connected to the FEH (Flood Estimation Handbook), another hub in the actor network of flood models in the UK that we will return to below.

HEC-RAS, the free for use software, has a very different presentation of use, all within the framework of showing the US Army as a constructive force, aiding the rebuilding of infrastructure in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, it lists vendors that can provide potential users with more support on a commercial basis. For the UK these are Bullen Consultants (which means that the only software apparently left without an advocate in the Defra benchmarking was MIKE 11) and JBA Consulting19. JBA is, according to their website, a young (founded in 1995), comparatively small (175 technical staff) extremely active company that seems to connect with everything concerning water in the UK.

Having worked through the three 1-D models benchmarked by Defra, and mapped the actors they connect with visibly, on websites, it is time to return to the FEH20. Published

13 http://www.pba.co.uk/Default.aspx 14 http://www.acenet.co.uk/ 15 http://www.atkinsglobal.com/ 16 http://www.hyderconsulting.com/ 17 http://www.mottmac.com/ 18 http://www.water.mottmac.com/ 19 http://www.jbaconsulting.co.uk/about.html 20 Flood Estimation Handbook, http://www.nwl.ac.uk/ih/feh/. 4 by CEH21 the FEH give guidance on rainfall and river flood frequency estimation in the UK. It consists of printed volumes and software packages that are to be used together, these can be purchased from WHS (Wallingford HydroSolutions Ltd) or as parts of a package of user training provided by JBA. The FEH website does not tell about appreciative users but they list actors who have contributed to its development, Halcrow and Binnie Black & Veatch22 were advisors as well as testers together with Kirk McClure & Morton acquired by RPS in 200423, Atkins, Sir Alexander Gibbs and Partners a very reputable UK engineering firm acquired by Jacobs in 200124; Babtie Group (also acquired by Jacobs in 2004). Jacobs Babtie Group has worked with US firm Kellog Brown and Root25 with headquarters in Houston, Texas, in UK flood management projects as well as with Montgomery Watson (called MWH (Montgomery Watson Harza) on the website http://www.mwhglobal.com/default.asp) and Bullen.

Mapping the connections that are mentioned in text or as links on websites proved to be an effective way to locate commercial consultants in the UK who engage with flood mapping. We used it to produce a preliminary list of actors to contact for interviews. It was complemented with information from flood scientists in the project, information from Defra, NERC and EA websites and by asking interviewees for further contacts.

We started with sending out emails requesting an interview to twelve consultants, this resulted in six interviews with nine people. At this stage we did not look for particular individuals but were happy to talk with anybody working with modelling in the firms. The consultants we manage to get interviewees from were Peter Brett Associates, Mott MacDonald, JBA Consulting, Hyder Consulting, Halcrow Group, and Capita Symonds. The interviews were conducted at a time and location of the interviewee’s choice. They were digitally recorded, a consent form was signed and the duration was one to one and a half hour.

THOUGHTS

The intention of undertaking interviews has been to build up an understanding of the ways in which models are used by engineering consultants and how actors relate to each other in the ecology of UK flood risk management. This aim is a part of the broader objective of WP 1’s analysis flood modelling, hence, the interviews are also used to guide further investigation into the commercial side of this field. The knowledge gained from the interviews will inform the design of case studies in which modelling practices are investigated in more detail through more interviews, work shadowing and analysis of documentation.

As the point of these interviews was qualitative i.e. gathering as much information as possible, not comparative (analysing differences and similarities between actors) they

21 Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, http://www.ceh.ac.uk/science/restructure/index.html. 22 http://www.bv.com/markets/water/ 23 http://www.rpsgroup.com 24 http://www.jacobs.com/ 25 http://www.kbr.com/ 5 were organised in a manner intended to make sure that each interview generated as much new information as possible. Hence, we worked out a list of topics that were addressed with each interviewee (biographical information, models, context of use, company, relationships with other actors). In order to facilitate the maximum growth of information each interview expanded on topics in a way that followed the perspective of each interviewee. This was achieved by letting the probing of each topic be informed by our initial knowledge about the company and its work as well as insights gained in previous interviews. For example, having learnt about the general outline of CFMPs (Catchment Flood Management Plans) would lead to more specific questions to interviewees in companies working more extensively with them. In relation to each interview the respondents were also asked to provide us with some names of other people they would recommend us to contact for additional interviews.

Six interviews may seem like a very small sample with more than 100 consulting firms active in the management of water in the UK. However, our objective was not to produce an exhaustive map of engineering consultants, nor were we looking for some ‘representative sample’ of spokespersons. Our aim with the first round of interviews has been to generate a snapshot image of how consultants view their work and the field at this particular time. This image will be used in relation to information from other sources. Interviewing consultants is only one of several routes we use to form a picture of the sociotechnical network of flood risk management in the UK. We have no interest in comprehensive knowledge about a particular type of actor, what we want is to learn about possible relationships with models and modelling in a commercial context. The interviews have shown us some ways in which this is done, whether all actors in the same position would talk about models and modelling in the same way is not important to our objectives.

Our approach also encourages reflexivity therefore we want to draw attention to the fact that our interviewees are actors, not indifferent objects. Their choice to take time out of busy schedules to spend time with us demonstrates a ‘sensitivity’ to our project. (We are very grateful for their interest, without it this part of the project would have been in trouble.) From reading the one page project summary attached to our initial email our interviewees decided to assist our research. In doing this they also expressed a wish to impact on our work by contributing narratives about flood modelling as experienced in engineering firms. This is important to make a note of because it links to the competency group methodology where we actively searched for people ‘sensible’ to the issue.

ABOUT THE TRANSCRIPTS

The transcription of the interviews has used the following conventions26:

CL; signifies speaker

… indicates a pause

26 Following Duranti, Alessandro (1997) Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press 6

= equals latching i.e. two different utterances without a pause

[ overlap by another speaker

(word?) uncertainty regarding what is said

Interviewees have been anonymized as X (when more than one: X, Y, and Z)

Employers of interviewees have been anonymized as Company A (when identifiable through partnerships their closest collaborators are called Company B, Company C)

[Note: some of the above transcription conventions may have been removed during pre-archiving data processing] Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Research Report ((RES227 25 0018)

Background

Devastating environmental events like flooding can move those affected by them to interrogate and, sometimes, to contest the expert knowledge claims associated with the science and management of environmental risk. “Why do they keep saying it’s a one in a hundred year event when we’ve been flooded three times in five years?” “Wouldn’t proper maintenance of the river channels be more effective than building flood walls?” “We’re the ones with experience of flooding, why aren’t the ‘experts’ interested in what we know?” Legitimate questions that are not easy to answer and which expose the scientific and policy practices meshed together in the ‘expertise’ of flood risk management to demanding public scrutiny. Questions and demands that are framed in specific local contexts, within which conditions themselves vary, and which can only be adequately addressed at the same scale. Such knowledge controversies have typically been seen in environmental science and policy communities as troublesome problems to be avoided. This project follows work in science studies and the philosophy of science, particularly that of Isabelle Stengers, in investigating whether knowledge controversies might not play a more constructive or generative role in developing the capacity of democratic societies to handle environmental uncertainty and, if so, how?1

Objectives

There are four, interrelated, dimensions to how we have set about doing this:-

(i) An analysis of how scientific knowledge claims about flood risk are produced and come to inform the evidence-base of flood risk management in the UK. This focuses on the working practices of mathematical and computer modelling that are the mainstay of flood science, and on its products – predictive hydraulic and hydrological models - that are the primary device by which this knowledge is applied in management practice (Work Package 1).

(ii) An analysis of how and why flood risk expertise becomes a matter of public controversy in two flood affected localities - Ryedale (North Yorkshire) and Uckfield (West Sussex). This centres on the trial and evaluation of an experimental research methodology that we call Competency Groups (CGs) and involves social and natural scientists in the project team working collaboratively with local volunteers to interrogate ‘expert’ framings of local flood risk and try out alternative propositions of our own (Work Package 3).

(iii) The development of new ways of modelling flood risk (knowledge-theoretic approaches) that better forecast the in-river and floodplain effects of rural land management in specific local contexts and which are informed by, and responsive to, the knowledge of local members of our CGs in two flood affected localities (Work Package 2).

(iv) The identification and transfer of key lessons from our analysis of the flood science/policy case to other fields of environmental risk management reliant upon modelling science (eco-systems and climate change), and the production of an interactive web resource for scientists, policy-makers and concerned citizens to identify and interrogate environmental knowledge controversies for themselves (Work Package 4).

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Methods

Different methods were used in each of the three main Work Packages, in addition to the experimental Competency Group methodology devised and evaluated as part of the research which was the primary means for developing our interdisciplinary working practices (see also Interdisciplinarity below).

Work Package 1 generated three main bodies of empirical material: - (a) recorded interviews with key flood risk scientists, consultants and policy-makers in the UK; (b) ethnographic participant observation with two sets of modelling practitioners - the modelling team in a leading engineering consultancy and the project team’s own modellers (WP2); and (c) archival research on key moments in the development of flood science through the 19th and 20th centuries, eg the mathematical formulation of ‘roughness’ as a key dimension of hydraulic process and its changing technical standardisation in handbooks and software2.

Work Package 2 developed a new ‘knowledge-theoretic’ approach to flood modelling3 through the engagement of publics affected by flooding in co-producing flood models in the experimental CGs. This way of modelling produces different, bespoke, model assumptions and goals in terms of possible flood risk management solutions. Three sources of knowledge were used in the formulation of each model: (a) experiential, as held by both ‘university’ and ‘local’ members of the CGs; (b) theoretical and encoded in the ways in which we tend to see the world as Newtonian (e.g. flood water has to go somewhere; it must conserve mass); and (c) data-based, in terms of the records of rainfall and water level that we had obtained and which were used to develop and to test assumptions.

Work Package 3 developed an experimental research methodology – Competency Groups - involving the natural and social scientists in the project team (‘university’ members) collaborating with volunteer residents (‘local’ members) in localities in which flood risk management is already a matter of public controversy. We ran two such groups one in Pickering and one in Uckfield. In each case, CG membership comprised some 5-6 project team members and 5-8 local members, plus a dedicated camcorder operator. Group activities centred on bi-monthly meetings in which hands-on modelling became the key practice through which ‘expert’ and Group members’ knowledge-claims about the local flood problem can be tried out.

Work Package 4 designed a web-resource using an interactive digital visualisation system - Prezi - to enable others to try out our approach to environmental knowledge controversies and our Competency Group methodology for themselves, and trialled with scientists and practitioners in the fields of ecosystem and climate change management.

Interdisciplinarity

The project sought to establish an interdisciplinary way of working with ‘radical’ collaborative ambitions both between natural/social scientists and between these scientists and those affected by the environmental problem at issues – in our case flooding. This ambition has been tested principally, but not exclusively, through the design, conduct and evaluation of an experimental

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society collaborative research methodology - Competency Groups (CGs). The project has produced several papers on the experience of this exercise in ‘radical’ interdisciplinarity from ‘natural’4 and ‘social’5 scientific perspectives. In addition, a work-stream evaluating the team’s experiences of interdisciplinary working and examining how the evolution of the project affected the attitudes, understandings and practices of the project team, has been led by Andrew Donaldson (an affiliated researcher on the project, based at Newcastle). This evaluative work demonstrates that the conventions of interdisciplinarity should be considered as ideal types, which do not reflect the actual mess of interdisciplinary research in practice. Moreover, interdisciplinary research exists in its objects, although many of these have little to do with interdisciplinarity 6.

Results

Using flood risk management as a vehicle for interrogating the nature and consequences of environmental knowledge controversies, Work Package 1 has been centrally concerned to understand three related aspects of the relationship between flood science and policy as it impacts the experiences and concerns of people directly affected by flood events. These are:- (a) how the knowledge claims of flood science (predictive estimations of flood risk) are produced, analysing the working practices of flood modelling/modellers; (b) how these modelling practices become standardised through particular technologies (like software packages) data sets and contractual arrangements with key policy agencies and hard-wired into the procedures of flood risk management; and (c) how and why this complex mesh of flood science/policy ‘expertise’ sometimes becomes the subject of public controversy, and with what consequences. Our answers to these questions inform the conceptual underpinnings of the whole project’s approach to understanding environmental knowledge controversies and the translation of this understanding into the methodological ethos and practice of our ‘Competency Group’ methodology.

Our analysis centres on the reliance of the technical arrangements and institutional procedures of flood risk management on the scientific practice of mathematical / computer modelling (as opposed to laboratory experiment or field observation). Working with flood modelling practitioners in academic, consultancy and public agency settings our work demonstrates that (a) what ‘modelling’ involves varies significantly in different institutional contexts, notably between commercial and academic modelling cultures7; and (b) the contractual terms set by the prevailing regime of flood risk management are a major influence on the standardisation of modelling practice8 .

As modellers would be the first to acknowledge, the knowledge claims advanced through modelling are both uncertain and provisional. Uncertain in that modelling is an exercise in predicting future (unknown) events from projections of observed (known) events and, in the case of flooding, in estimating the return period of a flood event of a specified magnitude. Provisional because the predictive capability of models is only as good as the data sets available to make them run, which are always imperfect and subject to the cost and reliability of data generation. However, our work shows why and how such careful provisos in the conduct of flood science tend to become dulled in translation into flood management policy and practice. This occurs through the standardisation of modelling software and contractual terms characterising the relationships between engineering consultancies and government agencies reliant upon them for their estimations of flood risk. The public face of this complex mesh of ‘flood management’ expertise is the Environment Agency (EA), and those moved in the event of flooding to interrogate it are likely to encounter ‘scientific and technical knowledge presented in its final form’ /.../ in which ‘its certitude has been achieved’, bearing little trace of all

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society the uncertainties associated with its production 9. This is the context in which flood risk management ‘expertise’ is liable to become controversial.

What our analysis suggests, then, is that where uncertainty is a normal, indeed necessary, feature of scientific knowledge production processes, the entry of these same uncertainties into the public arena finds politicians, media commentators (and sometimes scientists) handling them like hot coals. This raises the question of whether there something about the demands placed on environmental science in the service of ‘evidence-based’ public policy that is inclined to harden scientific knowledge claims, with all the provisional candour of a proposition, into technical statements, with all the reassuring solidity of a ‘known fact’. This can be understood in terms of a tension between the ways in which knowledge claims become reliable through the experimental ethos of scientific claims- making and the managerial ethos of public policy claims-making. This returns us to the central role that the idea of knowledge controversies has played in the work of the project team, including the design of our Competency Group experiment - the question of whether they have a more constructive or generative role to play in developing the capacity of democratic societies to handle environmental uncertainty than has conventionally been acknowledged and, if so, how?

It is clear from our work that this is not a simple question concerned with managing the consequences of a pre-existing public disagreeing with established experts about how to ameliorate an already defined problem. Our project has interrogated the taken-for-granted status of each of these three terms by tracing the disruptive power of events like flooding to arouse in those affected by them a heightened concern with the nature of the problem and the reliability of expert knowledge claims, concerns which can swell into new forms of political association and demand that force expert reasoning to ‘slow down’ under the weight of scrutiny. In this, our work takes forward and the suggestion of Stengers, Latour, Callon and others in science studies that knowledge controversies can act as force-fields in which expertise is redistributed through the emergence of:- (i) new knowledge claims, resulting from different kinds and communities of knowledge being to bear on the production and distribution of flood risk expertise; and (ii) new knowledge polities, in which events like flooding gather publics around them with political attachments and capabilities that did not exist previously 10.

If this all sounds rather challenging for flood risk management practitioners – this is undoubtedly the case, but these challenges can also be taken as opportunities to develop new kinds of working practice that handle both environmental uncertainty and public engagement differently. Our Competency Group methodology is an attempt to do just this, putting the principles of Stengers’ ‘experimental ethos’ to the test11 . The possibilities of this way of working are evidenced in our legacy in Pickering, in which our collaborative proposition of the ‘bund-model’ has attracted the scientific and political backing to now be built. This methodology was the focus of the project’s Work Package 3.

The experimental Competency Group methodology is a conscious attempt to translate the ‘generative capacity’ of environmental knowledge controversies into a research methodology, involving the natural and social scientists in the project team (‘university members) collaborating with volunteer residents (‘local’ members) in localities in which flood risk management was already a matter of public controversy. Inspired by Isabelle Stengers’ philosophical project of ‘experimental constructivism’, the Competency Group is an apparatus for ‘slowing down reasoning’. It achieves this by working closely with artefacts that embody, or objectify, expert knowledge claims and producing new ones

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society to assist the Group in trying out alternatives and demonstrating them to others12. In our case, the principal artefacts were flood models.

The CG methodology had three goals: -

(iv) to interrogate the expert knowledge claims and practices that inform existing flood management policies;

(v) to enable those affected by flooding to try out alternative ways of framing and ameliorating local flooding problems; and

(vi) to produce a collective envoy that objectifies the Group’s knowledge claims and enables its work to travel and so make a difference to the terms of public debate and policy- making.

While CGs share some commonalities with other public engagement research practices, we would identify six distinctive theoretical commitments associated with this way of working:

• First, a focus on knowledge practices. Knowledge and reasoning clearly involve linguistic skills and competences (discursive cognition or ‘book-learning’). However, they also rely on bodily skills and thinking with objects (practical cognition or ‘learning by doing’). The importance of these practical aspects of knowledge and reasoning is well appreciated in the fields of education and psychology, but less so in the repertoire of public engagement methodologies.

• Second, an apprenticeship to what is at issue. Public engagement techniques often claim to empower ‘local’ people or excluded social groups, with researchers apprenticing themselves to the goals and understandings of those with/for whom they are working. Our approach apprentices all those involved to the nature of the problem at issue, empowering it to force new thinking through the negotiations of different kinds of knowledge and reasoning in the Group.

• Third, a staging of associative events. The experimental ethos of this approach means that neither the ‘university’ nor the ‘local’ members of the Group know ahead of time what the outcome of working together will be. In this, CGs involve a form of improvisation in which the people and artefacts brought into association through the Group’s work produce new knowledge claims and propositions which could not have been anticipated in advance.

• Fourth, the generation of collective competences. The Group’s collaborative ways of thinking and producing knowledge generate new collective competences. These competences draw on members’ different kinds of reasoning, information and skill, the combination of which amounts to more than the sum of its parts. In this way, all Group members become active participants in the knowledge claims and propositions the collaboration achieves.

• Fifth, the redistribution of expertise. Expertise is redistributed in the re-combinations of knowledge achieved through the work of the Group. This involves treating all kinds of

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

knowledge and skill, whether drawn from everyday experience or scientific experiment consistently. Consistency here means attending closely to how knowledge of all kinds is produced, what evidence is called in support, and what makes it reliable on its own terms.

• Sixth, the exercise of new publics. The ethos of CGs aligns their practice to the politics of minorities - the right of citizens to disagree with government / policy and their capacity to give public expression to their concerns. By bringing people affected by a problem together with scientists working on it, CGs are less likely to reproduce the existing terms of, and players in, a controversy and more capable of reframing the it in ways that exercise new public formations.

Our Competency Groups each comprised 5-6 ‘university’ members and 5-8 ‘local’ members. Activities centred on bi-monthly meetings in which hands-on modelling became the key practice through which knowledge-claims about local flood problems could be tried out. Meetings were supplemented by a variety of other activities which emerged in the course of the Groups’ work (eg field visits and video recording). Each Group was supported by a password-restricted website hosting a resource depository for materials collected by group members (e.g. maps, transcripts, photos/videos, newspaper cuttings, policy documents etc) and a group blog. Audio and video recordings were made of Group meetings for use by all members.

Our first Group was convened in Ryedale in North Yorkshire (running from September 2007 to June 2008) and the second, in Uck catchment in East Sussex (running from September 2008 to May 2009). In Ryedale, the work centred on the town of Pickering, that suffers from repeated flooding from Pickering Beck, but also upstream in the Derwent catchment and the flood risk problems in villages and rural areas from the River Seven. In Sussex the work centred on the flood risks affecting the town of Uckfield. It was evident from local press coverage in Ryedale that flood risk management was a hotly contested issue, intensified by the July 2007 flood event effecting Pickering and Sinnington, among other places, that occurred shortly after we advertised for local members to join the Group. In Uckfield, the local controversy was less intense, with the experiences of the 2003 winter floods receding by the time we began our local work there, but reignited by the news that the town had been declared ineligible for funds to provide adequate management schemes. Both controversies centred on the knowledge-base underpinning alternative flood risk management options, and in particular the efficacy of flood defence

The collective ethos of this way of working demands a sustained commitment from all participants to negotiating each others’ different ways of framing a problem and appreciating the different kinds of expertise each others’ attachments brought to the collaborative production of knowledge. In turn, this requires the redesign of research ethics protocols to reflect CG members equal claims on materials produced together. We would identify four key principles for the conduct of Competency Groups to guide others wanting to try them for themselves:

(i) Group members participate as individuals in a personal capacity rather than as representatives of any constituency;

(ii) Group members endeavour to speak from their own experience rather than relying on received wisdom;

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

(iii) Group members are open to, and respectful of, different points of view. Disagreements are generative to this way of working.

(iv) Group members learn together both about the problem at hand and collaborative ways of working, making some lessons transferable.

The Competency Group experiments in Pickering and Uckfield were key sites for the development of an innovative approach to collaborative flood modelling associated with the project’s core natural science component taken forward by Work Package 2.

The rate of progress in quantitative modelling since the 1950s has been such that application of sophisticated computer models to a wide range of geoscientific problems is now routine. It is generally held that by making such models more physically (physics) based, their explanatory power and predictive reliability are enhanced. This formulation, a model-theoretic approach, assumes accurate knowledge of the properties, states and relationships between all of the objects that are known to matter within the system of interest but, simultaneously, an incomplete understanding of the totality that this knowledge creates. In hydrological modelling, this translates into a severe dependence upon the data models that are needed to make a hydrological model work. The opposite extreme is a model-data approach in which measurements become the basis of generic relationships. Even in the most heavily data derived cases (e.g. neural network forecasting of river flows) these data models can be shown implicitly to have a theoretical content. Thus, both model-theoretic and model-data approaches sit within a general class of modelling, best labelled as ‘data-theoretic’.

In our work, we have been developing an alternative approach that we label ‘knowledge-theoretic’ rather than data-theoretic, to capture the much richer sources of knowledge available to the modeller13. The models that we developed in both Ryedale and Uckfield were co-produced through the collective ways of working of our Environmental Competency Groups. The focus here was upon the development of innovative minimum information requirement models for estimating the effects of rural land management measures upon downstream flood risk. However, unlike many projects of this kind, the models here were co-produced through the collective ways of working of our Competency Groups. Whilst we started intending to use an established distributed hydrological model (CRUM)14, the CG activities steered the modelling activities into two very different directions, leading to one model for each case location. Both models were based upon a coupled but simplified treatment of catchment hydrology and catchment hydraulics. The models differed because they were formulated through the CGs, leading to different model assumptions and model goals in relation to possible flood risk management solutions. Three sources of knowledge were used to formulate each model: (1) experiential, as held by both academics and local members of the CGs; (2) theoretical and encoded to the ways in which we tend to see the world as Newtonian (e.g. flood water has to go somewhere; it must conserve mass); and (3) data-based, in terms of the records of rainfall and water level that we had obtained and which were used to develop and to test assumptions. The knowledge linked to all three was discussed and negotiated in CG meetings. The coding of the models was then undertaken by the WP2 PDRA (Odoni) in the periods between CG meetings. Regardless as to whether or not the coding had been completed between CG meetings, the model was used in each CG by all Group members working in break-out groups and this was fed back into model development.

Case 1: Bunding15

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

The model developed for Pickering, ‘bunding’, assumed that in the most extreme flood events the catchment is largely close to saturation (supported by both local members field observations of the catchment and double mass balance analysis of extant data), and that losses to evaporation and soil storage are negligible: all rainfall would be translated into runoff. The primary focus of the model was then being to route this rainfall across hillslopes and through the river channel network whilst allowing the user to place small bunds within floodplains that can hold water back as long as the storage areas that they define are not full. Thus, the model: (1) determines flow directions across the landscape using digital topographic data under the principle of the line of steepest decent; and (2) applies an observed rainfall rate to those flow directions, routing the associated rainfall through the catchment. The step in (2) produces (3) a flow discharge rate at every point in the catchment; and through a simple interactive tool allows (4), the user to place bunds and to enter their characteristics to assess their storage effects. These bunds are intended to be sited so as to cross the channels and any adjacent flood plain, and are designed to allow a maximum efflux rate, so that some flow through them can occur at any time via an outlet, the latter always to the main river channel, and sustained by a primary concern that these bunds could only create small areas of storage and so would fill quickly (experiential knowledge). The outlet works such that the rate of filling of a bund (i.e. loss of storage) is lower than if there were no outlet present: the aim is to permit as much water as possible to flow through the outlet during low and medium flow conditions, so that no water is stored, but to hold water behind the bund during high flow conditions, such as those that would threaten the town with flooding. The difference between the modelled flow and the outlet flow is used to fill the bunded storage zone, and the flow protection for the town is assumed to be that top slice of the inflow held back by the bund. This protection persists for as long as the bunded storage area is not full. When it is full, the storage by that bunded zone is assumed to become zero, and the full inflow rate is passed to further storage zones downstream, which may then start to take effect. The combined effect of each bunding configuration is then summarised in the form of a time series, showing the level of flow protection afforded to a point and the period over which it can be sustained, in comparison with the modelled flows it would experience in an 'unprotected' flood. The model was successfully validated in collaboration with the follow-on demonstration project led by Defra, which used a two-dimensional hydraulic model to test the effects of the optimum bund locations identified in the downstream reaches of the catchment using ‘bunding’.

Case 2: Overflow16 In Uckfield, the CG immediately raised the issue of using upstream storage areas to reduce flood risk, something that had been dismissed by previous consultants’ work. Thus, ‘bunding’ was applied to the Uck. It confirmed the consultants’ findings that bunds could not deliver sufficient flood storage during events typical of that experienced in September 2000 (c. 1: 100 year return period). However, the Uckfield CG quickly raised the possibility of using a suite of other measures including in-river debris dams, riparian woodland, hedgerow planting, re-meandering etc. In turn, this necessitated a much more complex model formulation and led to the development of ‘Overflow’, a model that allows the testing of the effects of a large number of quite small catchment riparian intervention measures (CRIMs). This presented two primary challenges: (1) computational efficiency because of the potentially large number of simulations (locations, types of intervention) that needed to be tested; (2) inferring distributed data (e.g. on river channel geometry). Overflow addresses these through a combination of static and dynamic analyses. A given steady state rainfall rate is corrected for losses to slower flow routes (e.g. subsurface flow) and then routed and accumulated through the catchment. Flow paths are allowed to vary as a function of rainfall depth, and for situations where some of the flow is out of bank and routed across floodplains. The specific discharge for each cell is applied to the Manning equation to estimate an effective flow depth and flow velocity and hence a

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society cell transit time. By accumulating these along flow paths, starting at the outlet, a ‘flow time map’ is generated for the rain rate in question. The time maps can then be divided into time interval bands, and flow volumes calculated for each time interval of interest in a flood event by summing the area of the catchment within that time interval band and multiplying this by the rainfall falling in that time. Thus, a series of summations for different times and areas produces a volume series at the outlet, which is then converted to an estimated discharge simply by dividing by the length of the model time step. This calculation is undertaken for a range of different steady state rainfalls as well as a range of parameter values, sampled in a Monte Carlo framework (e.g. channel Manning’s n, floodplain Manning’s n). The measured rainfall rate is then used to sample from the ensemble of steady state rainfall simulations so as to model a particular event. This approach is important because: (1) it is possible to undertake a complete uncertainty analysis quickly as parameter uncertainty and rainfall uncertainty are implicitly built into the set of steady state simulations; (2) the model can be calibrated by optimising sampling of rainfall rate and parameter sets on measured flows; and (3) interventions can be tested in ways that retain uncertainty by recalculation of the steady state rainfall simulations, something that is more rapid than a fully dynamic simulation.

Overflow can be used to test the effects of: (1) changes in channel flow resistance or blockage (e.g. due to installation of a debris dam); (2) changes in overbank flow resistance (e.g. floodplain roughening); (3) changes in stream sinuosity; and (4) introduction of measures like hedgerow planting. As with ‘bunding’ it can be used interactively to place measures in particular places, and this was the focus of work in the CG. However, we have also developed a means of optimising interventions, which we have applied to both Uckfield and subsequently Pickering. Early testing of individual interventions showed how the same measure could have positive or negative flood reducing effects depending on where the intervention was located. For instance, some locations could cause the synchronisation of flood peaks leading to less rather than more downstream flow attenuation. Subsequent testing also showed that the effects of any one intervention could change according to the location of other interventions. Thus, we have developed two optimising versions of Overflow: (a) forward only; (b) Monte Carlo. Both are based upon testing all possible intervention types and locations individually, classifying them into positive, neutral and negative interventions given the uncertainty associated with model predictions. The forward only then introduces each intervention one at a time in order of the magnitude of individual impact, calculates their effect, and retains them if still positive. There is scope here for the user to screen each intervention for other factors (e.g. plausibility in relation to land ownership) and to set the number of interventions that might feasibly be reduced. The Monte Carlo approach samples randomly from the set of interventions defined as ‘positive’ to identify an optimising set. This is much less computationally efficient than the forward only approach but it does lead to identification of synergistic interactions between interventions that individual testing does not reveal.

The project had as its fourth objective the production of a user-friendly means of enabling others to put its approach to understanding environmental knowledge controversies as generative events, and its experimental Competency Group methodology, into practice for themselves. To this end Work Package 4 has delivered a long-term web-based archive of the materials generated through the project and, critically, a ‘civic resource’ that enables others to adopt our approach to environmental knowledge controversies and Competency Group methodology to fields of environmental management other than flooding. The web-based resource has the following objectives:

(iv) To introduce and to explore the nature of Environmental Knowledge Controversies in general, and with reference to the specific case of flooding.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

(v) To demonstrate the possibility of a radical repositioning of science in environmental and other forms of research, where the purpose of science is to redistribute expertise in ways that allow new forms of political intervention. (vi) To document and to differentiate the Environmental Competency Group methodology so as to provide a framework with which others can experiment. (vii) To use innovative forms of communication for the purpose of (1), (2) and (3), whilst also providing a long-term archive of the project’s findings.

Table 1 summarises the materials that will shortly be available through this web-resource.

Table 1. Resources available through the web-resource

Element of Format Purpose Resource Knowledge Prezi based upon Designed to introduce the notion that Controversies material generated by knowledge controversies provide new the Project PI opportunities for rethinking the nature of (Whatmore) democratic politics, including the practice of science. Draws heavily upon WP1 material. Doing Science 1. Prezi based upon Designed to convey the experience of a Differently material generated by a practicing natural scientist of being involved project Co-I (Lane) in both the wider scientific and then 2. Policy and practice supported by a more detailed Policy and note (jointly produced Practice note for use by practitioners with the RELU interested in how modelling might be done programme) differently. Environmental 1. Prezi based upon Contains an introduction to the nature of an Competency material generated by Environmental Competency Group (Prezi) Groups the project which is supported by a more detailed and 2. Principles document formal statement of the principles associated 3. ‘Frequently Asked with an ECG and a more general document Questions’ document that provides answers to some of the questions that we are commonly asked about ECGs (see also Policy and Practice note). Flood Interactive web Contains both video and audio transcripts Research: an resource that from both ECG meetings and interviews with experiment in documents key academic and local members of the team that doing it elements of our aims to illustrate other elements of the web differently experiment site. The web resource is loosely structured around themes. Further reading Peer reviewed Web-links to all peer-reviewed publications publications associated arising from the project, structured by Work with the project Package. Project archive The project web-site Contains the end of project version of the project web-site.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

To trial this web-resource, we have undertaken a series of interviews with scientists and practitioners, four from each of the fields of: (1) climate change science, focusing upon popular understandings of climate change; and (2) ecosystems science, focusing on the debate over systematic knowledge collection versus local or lay observations. These interviews were designed to compare and contrast the case of flood risk management with other areas of potentially controversial science. Both cases shared the characteristic with flood risk management that the knowledge associated with them can be informal and experiential as much as formal and associated with conventional scientific enquiry. They differed because the nature of the controversy is less acute and geographically-focused as compared with the controversies associated with flood risk management. We flag two key outcomes from these engagements.

The nature and role of Knowledge Controversies In order to explore knowledge controversies with the scientists we worked through how we had outlined controversies using the Prezi materials noted in Table 1. The approach was interactive, with scientists using Prezi to navigate and so to critically engage and to comment on each of the interrelated components of Knowledge Controversies element of the Prezi. They were asked to work through our outline and for each component to use their own experiences and expertises to test whether our assumptions could be applied to the fields of Ecology and Climate science, recording their thoughts (below, in italic) as they did so.

Overall all of these scientists believed that what we had produced was an innovative, useful and interesting outline for re-thinking how to work through environmental knowledge controversies. Our outline was seen to provide a novel way to “capture differences in individual framings of the problem” and further that it offered a way of treating differences as a “creative opportunity for increasing understandings between parties”. This together was taken to suggest that our approach might “start to challenge positions and build better agreement in moving forwards” in controversies. It was also suggested that the medium of presentation- that is Prezi- was a way of “capturing knowledges from a variety of sources and in a range of different media” which would allow multiple partners to represent their views and knowledges. They also raised some useful questions, for example in terms of the mismatch between our use of the notion of the ‘event’ of knowledge controversies creating opportunities to slow down reasoning challenging, when many environmental management challenges demanded ‘instant’ or ‘quick’ solutions. One outcome of this was a re-evaluation of their own notion of the ‘event’, as something that provides opportunities for problem reframing. Examples given here were the recent CRU e-mail scandal over climate change data and the effects this is having on the IPCC.

The question of ‘Problem Framing’. This provoked a number of responses from scientists. Ecologists who had experience of working on developing countries questioned our view that “Within public policy processes expertise is often already distributed in particular ways”. For them, the situation was more complex and they were able to draw on experiences of locals and communities being involved in the framing of problems. As one ecologist remarked in his experience in developing countries problem framing “also favours those with ‘grounded knowledge’”. In another case a statutory agency ecologist highlighted that in her view the current focus on “public participation” leads to wider framings. A final critique of our view on framing related to our claim that framings should reflect all those concerned. One climate scientist remarked that “with ‘meta-issues’ like climate change this becomes truly impractical”. In another case an ecologist made the point that our claim that “a problem is owned by all those adversely affected by it” could be problematic as people are not always aware of being affected by a particular problem. Referring to climate change he stated that “Problems may not be visible to those affected for example if they have not been educated to think at carbon

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society spatial scales”. We suggest that Environmental Knowledge Controversies ‘serve to focus our attention on ‘what’ it is we are concerned about’.

Capacity building and training

In addition to two week-long introductory training programme for all members of the project team, covering the core methods, approaches and concerns of Work Packages 1-3, various members of the project team also a variety of other courses, including:- professional modelling courses (Whatmore, Landstrom, Munk (Oxford based RELU funded DPhil student); media training courses (Whatmore, Landstrom, Odoni and Bradley); video shooting and editing courses (Willis).

The interdisciplinary working methods of the project have instilled the disciplines and demands of research collaboration between social and natural scientists, and with publics affected by the issue at hand, in all project team members. In addition, our sustained collaborations with two sets of citizens affected by flooding have demonstrated the potential of extending these research skills beyond the academy – now being taken forward through the project’s interactive web-resource (and Policy and Practice notes) to enable others to try these skills for themselves.

Outputs and data

Papers To date, the project has 9 papers published or in press, 7 under review and 9 papers in the final stages of preparation for submission to review. Our publication strategy has targeted top quality journals / agenda setting edited collections across a range of disciplines including – science studies; hydrological science; human and physical geography; environmental policy; social theory; history and philosophy of science; and natural sciences17.

Presentations In addition the project results have been presented at a large number of national and international peer reviewed conferences (involving some combination of all project team members); more than a dozen invited keynote and/or public lectures and practitioner presentations (principally Whatmore and Lane).

Data archiving Appropriate data sets (scientist and practitioner interview transcripts and the model script) from the project have been submitted to ESRC’s data archive, and formally accepted into the collection.

Knowledge transfer, User engagement and impacts

In addition to the ‘knowledge transfer’ work of WP4 detailed under results above, the citizens affected by flooding directly engaged in our 2 Competency Group research collaborations and the Fellowship attachment of Dr Kathryn Monk from EA Wales to the project, the project has engaged with some 30 local and national, public and private sector practitioners. The project also hosted a successful final conference in December 2009 attended by some 50 academic and policy dissemination of our work.

In terms of impact, the project has produced an unusually significant legacy. In Pickering, the project’s collaborative modelling work and proposals for ‘bunds’ (or mini-dams) to mitigate flooding

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society were first presented at a Public exhibition in the town attended by some 200 people (the Ryedale Flood Research Group’s report ‘Making Space for People’). Our bund-model proposition has been tested subsequently as part of a Defra funded ‘demonstration project’ (£500,000) ‘Slowing the Flow at Pickering’ (see http://www.forestry.gov.uk/website/forestresearch.nsf/ByUnique/INFD-7YML5R). As of August 2010, it is now due to be built with funding from Ryedale District Council (£800,000).

In Uckfield, the Group’s modelling work has been presented to the local Flood Forum, suggesting that bunds alone would not protect the town from flooding. A new model, Overflow, has subsequently been developed further by the project team’s modellers in collaboration with the regional Environment Agency, calibrating it for Uckfield and using it to test new flood management measures. In addition, an MSc (research) student project (Byers) has taken the CG work forward, interesting the statutory bodies in the initial results of the modelling work enough to furnish the data necessary to complete the work. His activities have been recorded through a blog (http://uckfieldfloodmodelling.blogspot.com/) that will be incorporated in his finished thesis (expected October 2010), a version of which will be made available to the original CG members and the statutory bodies. This thesis has specific and tested recommendations for small scale interventions for flood risk reduction.

The project has been selected as a case study in public engagement by the HEFCE/RCUK Beacons for Public Engagement initiative. (http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/what-publicengagement/neil-ward); and the project's PI has been identified as one of the case study academics by the Research Councils United Kingdom in their publication (2010) ‘Demonstrating the benefits of public engagement for researchers’. www.rcuk.ac.uk/per . In addition, the project is currently being written up as a case study in the Academy of Social Sciences publication 'Making the case for the social sciences' (2010 in press).

Future research priorities

1. To develop our conceptual approach to understanding knowledge controversies as opportunities to open the process of expert knowledge production to public interrogation, such that the uncertainties admitted in robust scientific practice become admissible also in the public realm.

2. To further develop the knowledge-theoretic approach to modelling through applications to other fields of environmental science, thereby improving the specificity and accessibility of model construction.

3. To enable others to experiment with the Competency Group methodology and, thereby, extend its usefulness to civic and scientific communities involved in other knowledge controversies.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

FLOOD-APPRENTICES: AN EXERCISE IN MAKING THINGS PUBLIC

Sarah J. Whatmore and Catharina Landström

School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1

3QY

Bibliographic notes:

Sarah Whatmore studied Geography, and Planning at University College London and worked for a spell in policy research at the Greater London Council. She is currently Professor of

Environment and Public Policy at the University of Oxford. Her research addresses the interface between cultural geography, political theory and science and technology studies. She is the author of Hybrid Geographies (Sage, 2002) and joint editor of Political matter: technoscience, democracy and public life (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Using Social Theory: thinking through research (Sage, 2003 and Sage Research Methods Online, 2010). Her current research is on environmental knowledge controversies and the science and politics of flood risk.

Catharina Landström studied Theory of Science at University of Göteborg. She did post- doctoral research in Australia on the biological control of exotic pests, which she has written about in science studies journals e.g. ‘Justifiable Bunnycide: Narrating the Recent Success of

Australian Biological Control of Rabbits’ (Science as Culture, 2001, 2). She returned to Sweden and did research on gender and technology that also generated journal publications (e.g. ’A

Gendered Economy of Pleasure. Representations of Cars and Humans in Motoring Magazines’,

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

(Science Studies, 2006, 2)). Her current research is also on environmental knowledge controversies and the science and politics of flood risk.

Abstract

Taking our lead from Stengers’ experimental constructivism, this paper reports on the invention of a research apparatus - the ‘competency group’ (CG) - that aims to put things capable of forcing thought and attachment to work in the exercise of new knowledge polities. It draws on the work of one such Group based in Pickering, a town in the catchment of Ryedale with long experience of flooding. This Group involved social and natural scientists working collaboratively over a twleve month period with people affected by flooding to interrogate the science that informs local flood management and intervene in the public controversy to which it had given rise. The paper focuses on the ways in which various artefacts that mediated our collective flood- apprenticeship in Ryedale were recharged as publicity devices through which the working practices and knowledge claims of what became the Ryedale Flood Research Group gathered political force in the wake of the Group’s work.

Keywords: competency groups; environmental knowledge controversies; flood risk management; hybrid forums; hydraulic modelling; knowledge polities

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

INTRODUCTION

Pickering is an historic market town located in Ryedale, to the north of York. The town’s website ‘Pickering online’ makes much of its being an ‘ideal holiday location’ as a gateway to the castles, stately homes, museums and galleries of the picturesque North York Moors and home of England's longest surviving steam railway (www.pickering.uk.net). The site gives equal prominence to Pickering’s repeated experience of flooding – four times in the last ten years, including the devastating summer floods of 2007. It is to this most recent flood event that the site attributes the success of a demonstration project for flood defences for the town in a nationwide competition for government funding in 2009. The Minister for the Environment is quoted to explain that such projects are designed to experiment with new ways of protecting communities from the heightened risk of flooding in the face of climate change. The aim of the Pickering project, the site continues, is to slow down the progress of water from the upper catchment by means of upstream storage and involves the collaboration of a host of (quasi-)governmental bodies with various environmental responsibilities, including: the Forestry Commission; the

Environment Agency (EA); North York Moors National Park; Natural England; the Regional

Flood Defence Committee and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

However, what the ‘Pickering online’ account glosses over is the heated controversy surrounding flood risk management in the town, colourfully played out in the pages of the local press, and the role of an experimental research intervention in a realignment of scientific and political energies that played a key role in the success of the bid for demonstration project monies. In this paper we outline the flood controversy in Pickering and examine the activities of the ‘Ryedale Flood

Research Group’ and their consequences in generating a new knowledge polity around flooding in the town.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

The association between knowledge controversies and the emergence of new publics has been elaborated in the work of scholars in Science and Technology Studies. Michel Callon’s ‘hot situations’ (1998), Bruno Latour’s ‘matters of concern’ (2004a) and Isabelle Stengers’ ‘things that force thought’ (2005a), for example, all provide vocabularies for addressing those moments of ontological disturbance in which the things on which we rely as unexamined parts of the material fabric of our everyday lives become molten. Such situations, matters or forces render expert knowledge claims, and the technologies through which these become hardwired into the working practices of commerce and government, the subject of intense public interrogation. In this, controversies act as force-fields in which expertise becomes enmeshed with, and redistributed through, ‘an ever-growing, ever-more-varied cast of characters’ (Callon, 1998: 260) sufficiently affected by what is at issue to want to participate in collectively mapping it into knowledge and, thereby, in its social ordering. For Callon, Latour and Stengers such knowledge controversies are generative events in their potential to foster the dis-ordering conditions in which expert reasoning is forced to ‘slow down’, creating opportunities to arouse ‘a different awareness of the problems and situations that mobilise us’ (Stengers, 2005a: 994).

Their account of the political potency of knowledge controversies relies on two departures from the conventions of democratic political theory. The first is to avoid equating democratic politics with the institutions of representative government and the machinery of policy making, and to be more attentive to the multiple and emergent constitution of publics and their political capabilities. Here, one can point to a variety of efforts to articulate an associative politics concerned with the capacity of citizens to band together and act in concert but in the manner of a ‘swarm’, rather than in consequence of some pre-figured category of political interest (e.g. stakeholders) or class18. For Stengers, these new kinds of publics are allied to

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘minoritarian’ politics in which they can produce ‘not as their aim but in the very process of their emergence, the power to object and to intervene in matters which they discover concern them’ (2005b: 161). The second departure is to redress the endemic humanism of political theory by recognising that such emergent publics are not exclusively human achievements. Jane Bennett, for example, draws an instructive contrast between the demos (polity) of contemporary political theorists like Ranciere and that of Latour to argue that democratic political theory has to grasp that politics exercise more than the disruptive power of people to disagree indifferent to what is at stake in the disagreement (2005). Thus, for Stengers emergent publics are induced by generative events like knowledge controversies in which the phenomena or problems that ‘slow down reasoning’ make a difference or, as Latour might put it, matter to the assemblage of political attachments and capabilities (2005).

The term ‘hybrid forums’ coined by Callon and his collaborators (2009) has become widely adopted to describe the spaces opened up in the event of controversies that are capable, in

Noortje Marres’ evocative phrase, of ‘sparking a public into being’ (2005). On the face of it, the flooding controversy in Pickering would seem to be a case in point of these various amplifications of the ways in which situations or objects that come to matter gather publics around them and trigger new political occasions and associations (Latour, 2005). However, there can be an elliptical tendency in these accounts when it comes to the question of how knowledge controversies generate new forms of public and practices of public-formation (public-ity). The energetic business of ‘arousing’, ‘triggering’, ‘sparking’ connections between knowledge controversies and emergent publics is sometimes glossed over by their being treated as always already implicated. Here we set out to examine their connection in the making through our involvement in the science and politics of flooding in Pickering, so as to interrogate more closely

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society the realignments of scientific and political energies made possible in the event of a particular knowledge controversy.

We take our lead from Stengers’ experimental constructivism which ‘indicates above all a positive interest in that which makes a construction in all its dimensions take hold, in the manner in which a construction affects and is affected by its environment.’

(http://www.ulb.ac.be/rech/inventaire/unites/ULB640.html (author translation)). The experimental19, or inventive, ethos that characterizes this recasting of constructivism extends beyond her early focus on philosophy of science and the specificity of diverse scientific knowledge practices to a more recent stress on political philosophy and the conditions and possibilities of subjecting scientific propositions and artefacts to public trial (see Whatmore,

2010 forthcoming). We are drawn to the reflexive quality that marks this project out as one in which the obligation to ‘treat all kinds of knowledge and skill that we study consistently, in terms of the effects that they produce’ (ibid) includes her own knowledge practices into the bargain. This is important in the context of flooding in which controversies often centre on discrepancies between the firsthand experience of flood events and the vernacular knowledge accumulated in affected localities, and the flood science that informs ‘evidence-based’ flood risk management. The practical consequence of this reflexive quality for her experimental ethos is to encourage the invention of research apparatuses in which ‘the citizens of whom scientific experts speak can be effectively present [and] participate in the invention’ (Stengers, 2000: 160), the forms and results of which cannot be known in advance. Stengers’ approach calls for experiments in which the knowledge claims and practices of those researching knowledge controversies are somehow put at risk/stake in the controversy alongside those of people affected by it with whom they collaborate.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

A second feature of Stengers’ experimental constructivism to which we are drawn, is her emphasis on articulating those ‘things which force thought’ in/as minoritarian political practices.

Where the dominant logic of ‘public participation’ methodologies is the claimed empowerment of local people (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Hayden, 2007), the logic here is what Annemarie Mol would call ‘ontological’ (1999). That is, to empower ‘the situation’ (Stengers, 2010) to ‘force thought’ in those affected by it and ‘slow down’ the reasoning of established experts necessary to any redistribution of expertise. In other words, the modus operandi of this experimental ethic is that of an apprenticeship to ‘what’ is at stake in a knowledge controversy, and through which a new knowledge polity might assemble. The primary knowledge practice on which the technical arrangements and institutional procedures of flood risk management rely is mathematical modelling, a computer mediated exercise in predicting future (unknown) events from projections of observed (known) events and estimating the return period of a flood event of a specified magnitude. As modellers would be the first to acknowledge, the knowledge claims advanced through predictive modelling are necessarily provisional and uncertain. However, such scientific circumspection becomes dulled through the standardisation of model equations, data sets and modelling software used by engineering consultants to produce the ‘evidence-base’ on which the government agencies responsible for flood risk management rely (Landström et al., 2010 forthcoming). In the event of flooding, the public face of this complex network of expert knowledge production to those affected by it on the ground is the Environment Agency (EA). It is in the EA’s policy documents, consultancy protocols and investment decisions that all the uncertainties and provisos properly attached in the practice of flood science become obscured, such that ‘scientific and technical knowledge is presented in its final form /.../ in which its certitude has been achieved’ (www.demoscience.org/mappingControversies2008.pdf).

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

In this context, the experimental research apparatus we draw upon here – the

‘competency group’20 – is a conscious exercise in translating these two features of Stengers’ experimental constructivism into research practice. Competency Groups are forums for collective thinking designed to interrogate the ‘intermediate stages’ of expert knowledge production which ‘best highlight the connections between scientific work and other types of activities’ (ibid) and, at the same time, to generate new collective competences in handling the uncertainties of flood risk knowledge and to redistribute expertise. This experimental apparatus was trialled as part of a research project interrogating the knowledge controversies associated with flood risk science and management in the UK funded by the Rural Economy and Land Use

Programme (www.relu.ac.uk).21 It involved the natural and social scientists in the RELU project team collaborating with residents affected by flooding in two localities in which flood risk management was already a matter of concern and public contestation. In the Pickering case,

Group membership comprised two hydraulic modellers and three social scientists (‘university’ members) and eight volunteer residents (‘local’ members) from the town and upstream catchment, supported by a dedicated facilitator and a camcorder operator from the project team.

Our collaborative activities centred on bi-monthly meetings, supplemented by a variety of other activities that emerged in the course of the Group’s work including field visits, archival research and video recording. These activities were further supported by a password restricted website hosting a resource depository for materials generated by Group members (eg maps, transcripts, photos, newspaper cuttings, policy documents etc) and a Group blog. The working practice of Competency Groups centres on ‘slowing down’ reasoning. In the case of the CG in

Pickering, this ‘slowing down’ applied to each others’ reasoning amongst members of the Group as well as to that of the local EA in order to collectively interrogate explanations for, and

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society solutions to, flooding in the locality that were circulating in the controversy and/or brought to the table. One of the primary means of achieving this ‘slowing down’ of reasoning was to work with various materials and artefacts that served to mediate or objectify the knowledge claims and practices of different members of the Group and those informing local flood management – from photos and video footage to computer models and policy documents brought and/or produced by

Group members. This emphasis on the ‘objectification’ of knowledge claims and practices served two other purposes also. Firstly, as a means of ‘putting at risk’, in Stengers’s terms

(2000), the knowledge practices of university as well as local members of the Group, perhaps most obviously those of the hydrological modellers in the project team/Group. Secondly, as a means of enabling the collective knowledge claims and practices of the CG to travel beyond the time and place of Group activity, notably in visualisation devices such as maps and computer models of local flooding.

We focus in this paper on the ways in which some artefacts or mediators involved in our collective thinking were recharged as public-ity devices through which the working practices and knowledge claims of what became the ‘Ryedale Flood Research Group’ (RFRG) gathered political force in the wake of the Group’s work. These twin moments in the (re)constitution of publics involve different forms of flood-apprenticeship – ‘thinking with things’ as a key feature of the working practices of the Competency Group and ‘making something together’ as an envoy through which the RFRG’s work might be made public. The first of these is the focus of another paper (Lane et al., 2010 forthcoming). Our emphasis here is the translation of the first into the second, particularly through the mediations of a computer model. The paper is organised in three parts. The first outlines the emergence of a public controversy in Pickering after the floods. The second traces the intervention of our Competency Group and, in particular, the collaborative

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society thinking device of the ‘bund model’ that emerged from our work and began gathering a public to it through a RFRG event in the Civic Centre. The final part follows the capacity of this device to force thought and attachment and to exercise new knowledge polities through scientific and political realignments locally that are still swelling in its wake, two years after the Group ceased to meet.

AFTER THE FLOODS: A CONTROVERSY IN THE MAKING

Flood risk reduction and management is a major concern in the UK with an estimated four to five million people, two million homes and businesses, and assets valued at £250 billion currently at risk in England and Wales (Defra, 2007). While the EA has operational responsibility for flood management, it is Defra that sets national policy and allocates government monies for the alleviation of flood risk through the activities of the EA and other bodies involved in flood defence.22 This institutional arrangement for managing flood risk is mostly functional but when controversy arises it can become part of the problem because, as

Brian Wynne has suggested, ‘institutional science in many [policy] domains /.../ [suffers] from association in public experience with problematic and sometimes downright provocative institutional conditions, practices, assumptions, purposes and inconsistencies’ (Wynne, 2006:

212). In the case of Pickering, and the upstream catchment of Ryedale, controversy was provoked by the EA’s decision to shelve a proposed scheme for protecting the town from flooding. It was a decision that was to attract significant media coverage. In the archives of the

BBC online news, for example, an item from 2004 reports the EA’s decision to shelve the flood protection scheme because at an estimated cost of almost £7 million it protected only 50 homes.23

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

The proposal had been the outcome of a major review triggered by devastating floods in the autumn of 2000, the second flood event in two years. An archived article from the local

Evening Press describes the previous year’s floods in biblical terms:

The highest flooding of the river since 1931 their peak at this point on Wednesday. started with a low pressure weather system Bryan Nelson, co-ordinating the in the North Sea, causing unusually high Environment Agency's flood team, said: rainfall on the North York Moors. Melting "This is the biggest flood since 1931. In snow on high ground compounded the Malton and Norton the roads are blocked problem. Pickering was first to be hit on and under three feet of water. People are Saturday, with levels now abating. But living upstairs. A red warning is in place and Malton and Norton soon followed, with 100 that's the highest code of alert. In Stamford properties flooded. River levels are not Bridge, the peak is still two days away. expected to reach their peak in Malton and There's really nothing we can do but wait Old Malton until tomorrow morning, but until the waters subside. It's an act of Stamford Bridge is bracing itself for ever- God."24 increasing water levels with levels reaching

Following the floods in 2000, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott allocated special funding to a scheme for protecting North Yorkshire towns. The scheme proposed eight projects of which seven went ahead. One of these, close to Pickering, was Malton in which flood defences were installed and properties seen to be protected from flooding during subsequent events that may otherwise have led to inundation. Another news article reports that this £7.5 million scheme was nearing completion in 2003.25 Only Pickering did not get the defences proposed and continued to flood.

A closer look at the rejection of the flood defence scheme for Pickering makes it clear that things were more complex than the failure to achieve a favourable cost benefit assessment - the explanation advanced by the EA in 2004. The mandatory public consultation process had seen the other towns endorse the proposed flood defence projects but not Pickering, prompting the EA to commission a further in-depth ‘feasibility study’. While this was being carried out, the money set aside for the scheme was withdrawn by Defra. When we first began work in the area

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society in 2007 it was commonly assumed that had the project gone ahead according to the initial proposal, Pickering would have had flood defences by then but that the town had lost out because of the delay. Our interviewees consistently blamed the delay on the opposition of the

Civic Society26 to the proposed flood defences. Talking to EA officers, local councillors and citizens prominent in the heated exchanges published in the ‘letters’ pages of local newspapers we learned that the consultant’s report (Babtie Group Ltd, 2003) commissioned by the EA had recommended a flood wall through the town, and that local disagreements heightened when this was put out for public consultation. The Civic Society was widely held to have objected to the aesthetic impact of the flood wall on the picturesque town centre, although our interviewees differed in their accounts as to whether or not such objections had been misconceived. In the years since the public consultation these disagreements had hardened into increasingly entrenched positions, united only in their antipathy to the EA, and more or less well organised campaigns conducted acrimoniously in the local press and council.

Staging the Competency Group experiment in the context of this extant controversy, our aim was not to recruit representatives of the different factions or ‘stakeholders’. Rather, it was to

‘slow down’ reasoning by creating a space in which the expert knowledge claims that informed the flood wall proposal could be more closely interrogated, and residents moved by the event of flooding to engage with the issues could try out alternative ways of framing and addressing the problem of flood risk management informed by their experiences and observations. The process of recruiting local members of the Competency Group27 from Pickering and its upstream catchment prompted a closer look at these expert knowledge claims.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

The science behind the flood wall

The Pickering Flood Alleviation Scheme Options Report produced for the EA by the engineering consultants Babtie, Brown and Root (Babtie Group Ltd, 2003) can be accessed in

Pickering public library. The ‘Babtie report’, as it is commonly referred to locally (see figure 1), begins by reconstructing the process by which it had been commissioned. The EA had submitted an application for planning permission to Ryedale District Council in August 2001 to construct a series of permanent flood defences along Pickering Beck as it passes through the town.

Objections clustered around concerns that some properties would suffer worse flooding with the proposed defences; other options had not been fully appraised; consultation had been too limited; and the visual impact of the proposed defences would be detrimental. Consequently, the EA had withdrawn the application and instructed the Babtie Group to conduct a further appraisal of possible options and the costs and benefits of different levels of protection.

Figure 1: The ‘Babtie report’, front page

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

The ‘Babtie report’ makes clear that the Civic Society had not been alone in objecting to the flood wall proposal (so too did Ryedale District Council and English Heritage), nor had their objections been exclusively aesthetic. In this, the report corroborates what members of the Civic

Society told us. As one interviewee explained, they had suspected that the proposed flood wall was likely to make flooding worse in an area of the town which had been relatively unaffected previously. Having alerted the landowner to this suspicion, a surveyor’s report confirming it had been submitted in response to the consultation and it was this which had led the EA to withdraw the proposal. In other words, the Civic Society had argued that the flood wall would not protect

Pickering from flooding effectively, thereby challenging the expert knowledge claims that underpinned the initial EA proposal. Although we could not gain access to the report of the consultants originally commissioned by the EA, the Babtie report refers to their having used a

‘mathematical, computer based, hydraulic model’ constructed with the latest hydrological data from Pickering Beck as it passes through the town (op cit: 3). The Babtie report itself reviews eight different flood management options: (i) do nothing; (ii) do a minimum; (iii) improve maintenance and flood warning; (iv) improve upstream storage; (v) widen the existing channel;

(vi) re-grade the channel; (vii) build local flood defences; and (viii) provide a flood diversion tunnel. Only one of these is deemed to be both practicable and cost effective - option (vii) ‘local flood defences’ which are specified in the report as ‘stone or brick walls with either concrete or sheet pile cores’ (Babtie Group Ltd, 2003: Table 4.1).

In effect, and having taken into consideration local objections and reviewed other possibilities, the Babtie Report came to the same conclusion as the EA’s preliminary assessment

- namely that the only viable flood protection option for Pickering was a flood wall.28 This coincidence in the expert knowledge underpinning the assessments of two independent

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society consultants’ reports directed our attention, as it had that of many of the local members recruited to the Competency Group, to the question of how expert knowledge claims are produced and become hardwired into flood management practices. This is a question which puts the spotlight on the ‘mathematical, computer based, hydraulic model’ mentioned in passing in the Babtie report. Like other fields of environmental engineering, flood risk assessment is a knowledge practice that relies heavily on standardised tools and claims-making procedures. Its significance as the engine of flood risk management is enmeshed with the commercial imperatives of consultancy work and the contractual terms on which firms like the Babtie Group are engaged by the EA (see Landström et al., 2010 forthcoming). We do not learn anything more about this model from the Babtie report but, as local members of the Competency Group made us aware, there is some information about the modelling tools and practices of engineering consultants in the field of flood risk assessment in the public domain.

Given that the EA stipulates which models can be used when commissioning consultants it is probable that both assessments of flood risk mitigation for Pickering were made using one of three one-dimensional (1D) software packages: ISIS, HEC-RAS and MIKE11.29 These three packages are very similar, using the same basic hydraulic equations to calculate river flows and levels. The designation 1D means that the model can represent water moving in one direction through a channel. Working with any one of these packages, the user interacts with the numerical

‘engine’ of the model via a Graphic User Interface that enables them to try out a number of interventions. The modeller uses topographic, hydrological and hydraulic data to build a representation of the river system. This representation is calibrated against data from observed flood events to optimise its accuracy. The calibrated model is then used to generate a series of simulations, setting the boundary conditions of rainfall and time in ways that are assumed to

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society cause flooding, to assess the effects of different kinds of intervention to reduce flood risk under different conditions. Such 1D hydraulic models are a tried and tested technology that produce reliable outcomes, the strengths and weaknesses of which are well known in professional modelling circles. Local media reports and our interview materials from Pickering indicated that the expert knowledge claims generated by such modelling work had been taken as read by all sides in the controversy about the proposed flood wall in Pickering, with the notable exception of the Civic Society. However, the grounds for their scepticism had gained little traction as the terms of dispute were overtaken by Defra’s withdrawal of funding. As the chorus of local residents, businesses and councillors campaigning for the reinstatement of monies for a flood wall in the town swelled, so the question of ‘what’ was in dispute became sidetracked from an interrogation of expert knowledge and the reasoning behind the EA’s flood wall proposal to recriminations about the loss of funding.

If modelling is the engine of flood risk assessment and mitigation, it stalled in the case of

Pickering. Despite the best efforts of the Civic Society, the hydraulic model that authorised the proposal of a flood wall as ‘the’ solution circulated as expert knowledge in its ‘final form /.../ in which its certitude has been achieved’ (op. cit). In this, modelling failed too as a device for forcing thought even as the wall it underpinned continued to magnetise the terms of the controversy and political efforts to recover the funding. Nothing changed regarding flood protection in Pickering in the period between the rejection of the flood wall in 2004 and the intervention triggered by the Competency Group experiment in 2008. Where, as we noted in the introduction, the notion of ‘hybrid forums’ (Callon et al., 2009) tends to synchronise the event of controversies and the emergence of new publics, neither the associated multiplication of political actors nor the amplification of the matter of politics were in evidence at this point in Pickering.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

The controversy seemed stuck in a holding pattern, stymied by the exhausted prospect of funding for a flood wall. How to recover the power of the flood events in this town to ‘force thought’ and the potential of the controversy they ignited to ‘slow down’ expert reasoning and so create opportunities to generate new knowledge claims and gather new publics around the nature and amelioration of flood risk?

THE RYEDALE FLOOD RESEARCH GROUP: AN EXPERIMENT IN REDISTRIBUTING EXPERTISE

By chance, our advertisement for recruits to join an ‘experimental research forum’ on flooding in Ryedale appeared in the local press just four days before the unseasonal summer floods of 2007 hit. Among the people who responded, we encountered a rich vein of frustrated interest in the scientific and policy practices meshed together in the ‘expertise’ of flood risk management. Where scientific and policy practitioners involved in the institutional management of flood risk commonly assumed a general (and problematic) public mistrust of science, this was wide of the mark in Pickering. Rather, the missing public trust in evidence seemed to have more affinity with Brian Wynne’s account of the ‘quite specifically focussed and selective forms of public alienation from science which do exist’ and which he attributes to a ‘lack of open institutional self-reflection, the condition of inadvertent but evident institutional denial which it engenders, and the associated exaggeration of the powers of scientific knowledge’ (Wynne

2006:212). Indeed, our recruitment of local members to the Competency Group in Ryedale was contingent upon the purchase of his claim that ‘there is no general, indiscriminate public mistrust or rejection of ‘science’; [rather].... there is lots of enthusiasm for it – but this is discriminating enthusiasm’ (ibid). As one local member expressed it in the first CG meeting some two months later – “... Every time we get the floods, we get the meeting with the EA and they come along and somebody sits at the front and “oh we are not going to do any dredging, we are not going to

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society get rid of any sediment, we won’t do that because this that and the other” and you sit there as a layman and, you probably noticed I tend to ask a lot of questions, I never have the answers. I keep asking questions. And I think to myself why doesn’t dredging and clearing silt affect it?

Because just thinking about it from a simple plumbing point of view.... //... it doesn’t tie in with what these people say. And yet as a non-scientist, as a layman, I just sit there and think this is an expert, how do you argue with that....” (MP, 11/09/2007: transcript 17/1-12).

Local members’ visceral experiences of the recent flood event and frustrated dealings with flood risk ‘experts’ charged our collective ‘flood-apprenticeship’ with a keen sense of urgency. As two of the five ‘university’ members of the Group we experienced firsthand working with various objectifications of knowledge about flooding, artefacts which mediated the collaborative interrogation of expert knowledge and experimentation with alternatives, that became critical to the emergent practices and identity of the CG. Most striking from the off was its effect on reconfiguring flooding expertise amongst Group members. Working with brought objects (such as maps, photos, satellite images and even a remnant piece of mouldy carpet) served to situate each member’s attachments to the event of flooding. This activity also helped to dissociate the ‘university’ members from the normal networks constitutive of their authority and highlighted the ways in which all knowledge claims rely on the witness of objects. At the second meeting we worked with printouts of the EA’s indicative flood maps of the 2007 event as a means of translating individual experiences into composite knowledge of the pace and pattern of flooding. Local members shared their recollections of flooding in the town back to the 1940s and set about modifying the official map of the most recent floods from their experiences and observations on the ground. These amended mappings informed our collective efforts to interrogate the expert models that held sway, and the proposed flood wall which they had

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society authorised, and engage in modelling for ourselves as a means of trying out different forms of intervention suggested by individual Group members.

‘Making something together’ had been a formative objective of the CG experiment, without knowing what, how, or if this would prove possible as the research collaboration evolved. However, by the second meeting in Pickering it was already clear that local members of the Group were participating not only as an opportunity to engage with, and inform, flood science but in order to ‘make a difference’ to the impasse on flood defences. As one member put it - ‘I wondered if..//.. any thought had been given to publicity after the research so it is not gathering dust on somebody’s shelf and.. // .. then we all forget about it. I would hate to think that that happened. Because if you are going to change public policy at some stage you have got to be very vocal, radio, television, newspapers, publicity.’ (SW, 11/11/2007: transcript 16/9-13).

The ensuing discussion gelled into a decision to give our research collaboration a ‘public face’ - the Ryedale Flood Research Group (RFRG) which, from this point on, began to overtake the methodological principles that had guided its initiation. To produce something that would have an impact on the controversy in Pickering, the RFRG discussed the need for some means of making the collective knowledge claims of the Group travel; an envoy which the EA (and other institutional actors) would have to take seriously or, at least, ‘could not dismiss easily’. Our efforts became concentrated over subsequent months on producing a bespoke model of flooding in Pickering Beck which would enable others to follow our working practice of ‘trying out’ different flood mitigation ideas and seeing what difference they made to the movement of water over the catchment landscape. Our own modelling work led us to identify and propose a form of ameliorative intervention not considered by the EA and dismissed in the Babtie report as

‘unviable’, namely upstream storage by means of a series of small obstructive structures or

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society bunds. So it was that our envoy / proposition also acquired a shorthand name in the Group - the

‘bund-model’ (see Figure 2).

All members of the RFRG contributed to constructing and testing the bund-model in different ways. As well as the knowledge local residents had of the catchment and objectified through the mapping exercise outlined above; our modelling work began by conceptualising together what a flood model needed to be able do, which processes it should simulate and which questions it ought to address. Between meetings, the mathematical modellers in the Group wrote the appropriate model equations and computer code to create a virtual representation of the catchment hydrology and hydraulics on a computer screen. Radically different from the 1D models underpinning EA flood management30, the RFRG’s bund-model is based on a distributed, routing algorithm that works with digital topographic and rainfall data. It routes overland surface flow under conditions of soil saturation. The Graphic User Interface made it possible for us all to experiment running the model, trying out different sizes, numbers and locations of bunds to simulate upstream storage in the catchment and their effects on water levels and flood risk in

Pickering (see Lane, et al., 2010 for details).

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Figure 2: Exhibition poster explaining the bund-model

The notion of models as mediators in the production of scientific knowledge is hardly new in science studies (see Morrison and Morgan, 1999) and the way in which the RFRG’s collective identity became bound up with the bund-model bears comparison with a process observed among meteorologists (Sundberg, 2006). However, as an objectification of the Group’s working practices the bund-model, unlike the weather simulation models of professional meteorologists, also redistributed flood modelling expertise in ways that challenged the hardwired arrangements of the EA and its consultants. If the bund-model was to become an effective envoy of the RFRG’s knowledge claims, its work of mediation would have to carry into the local flood controversy. In this, Michel Callon’s observation that ‘once a local collective

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society exists and has begun its work of reconfiguration, it must have the means of constructing the circulation space of statements and other intermediaries that it produces’ (Callon, 1994: 417) had to be addressed by the Group as a practical matter.

The ‘bund-model’ goes public

In pursuit of the RFRG’s early determination to intervene in the local flood controversy, the idea of organising a public exhibition in Pickering Civic Centre emerged and gelled into a commitment sometime around the fourth Group meeting. The event was advertised in the local press and held on a Tuesday in October, a few months after the Group had ceased to meet regularly and ‘university’ members had become involved with the project’s second Competency

Group experiment in Sussex. Occupying a large ground floor space overlooking a flood-prone stretch of the river in question, the exhibition was open from the early afternoon into the evening

(Figure 3) and attracted some 200 visitors, including EA staff, local politicians and journalists. It was organised around a series of posters arranged to ‘walk’ visitors through the RFRG’s knowledge claims about the nature of flooding in Pickering, and culminating in our proposition of upstream storage by means of a series of small bunds. This was supplemented by a range of visual materials and visualisation devices worked with and/or constructed by the RFRG to enable visitors to get some sense of the working practices that had produced the knowledge claims and propositions being presented. These included a slide show of photographic images taken in the catchment; a screening of a video documentary of bank erosion; and edited clips from video recordings of Group meetings set to run in a loop on a laptop, with Group members on hand to talk visitors through what they saw. Additionally, the bund-model was running on another

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Figure 3: invitation to an exhibition computer enabling visitors to try it out for themselves (with the assistance of Group members) alongside a hands-on ‘water physics’ exhibit for children. The event saw all RFRG members circulating around the exhibition space and talking with visitors, punctuated by more formal presentations of a copy of the Group’s written report (RFRG, 2008) to a local official and of a

CD with a selection of our working materials to the local library.

The event garnered extensive local press and radio coverage. The strap-line in the Malton

& Pickering Mercury (2008) read ‘A team of top university boffins and local residents have come up with new solutions to the flooding in Pickering. They've suggested a series of bunds – mini dams – be built on the moors north of the town to hold back water at times of flood’. Its rival, the Gazette & Herald, ran with ‘Scientists and local people hope that nine months [sic] of working together on an innovative project may provide the solution to the persistent flooding in the Pickering area’ (Coles, 2008). Both local newspapers presented the proposition of ‘multiple

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society small bunds upstream’ as a welcome innovation that brought new hope to those at risk, with the

Mercury noting that it was the product of computer modelling by the RFRG. Their coverage also latched onto the Group’s ‘experimental’ redistribution of expertise. That university ‘scientists’ and ‘local people’ could work together over a sustained period and come up with new ways of approaching a controversial problem was clearly newsworthy. For example, where a quarter of the Gazette & Herald article addressed the upstream storage proposal the rest drew on interviews with Group members to describe the collaborative working practices of the RFRG. One of the

Group’s university members, ‘flood scientist Professor Stuart Lane’, is quoted saying: “The people who live with flooding know as much, if not more, as scientists like me”’ (Coles, 2008).

Various local members are also quoted attributing their involvement to the experience of flooding. For example, SP is reported saying: “I remember leaving work at 6pm and when I got home [in Sinnington], my house was flooded. It was absolutely dreadful, really depressing. This project is a really good idea. We all just feel that if we can get something started, it’ll get people’s hopes up, and that in itself will be enough to push the authorities to do something to prevent future flood damage”’ (ibid). This narrative focus on the collaborative character of the

RFRG is accompanied by an image of ‘university’ and ‘local’ members together at the exhibition

(Figure 4).

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Figure 4: Publicising RFRG collaboration

The reflections of another local RFRG member on his experience of the research process are quoted at length - ‘MP, of Undercliffe, Pickering ..//.. said it had been a “true collaboration” between local people with local knowledge and academics who were experts in the field of flooding issues’, and his confidence in the Group’s knowledge claims: ‘“We've got a scheme that's realistic and based on sound, scientific arguments. Hopefully it has got enough credibility to force the hands of the powers-that-be and get something done”’ ((Malton & Pickering

Mercury, 2008). Like the newspapers, the local radio coverage was as interested in the ‘novelty’ of ‘scientists and local people’ working together as in the proposition that improving upstream storage would be a cheaper and more effective intervention than the unfunded flood wall .

Notwithstanding some anxieties about journalistic turns of phrase and inaccuracies, the publicity generated by the Civic Centre event extended the reach and impact of the RFRG’s flood- apprenticeship. Recharged as a device for making public the Group’s knowledge claims, the

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society bund-model articulated the local flood controversy in new terms by slowing down reasoning and opening up questions about the production of knowledge claims, the constitution of expertise and what makes a proposition reliable. If the political affects of the exhibition vindicated our collaborative research experiment, the capacity of this envoy to go on forcing thought and exercising new political possibilities and associations since has exceeded even our most earnest intentions.

AN EMERGENT HYBRID FORUM: THE BUND-MODEL CONTINUES TO TRAVEL

Before the RFRG made its intervention the flood controversy in Pickering had become transfixed by the funding vacuum for a proposed flood wall. In the wake of the public exhibition, the bund-model continued to travel and began to gather a public to it, multiplying the ‘actors’ and amplifying the ‘matter’ at stake in the event of flooding in a manner characteristic of an emergent hybrid forum. At the same time, ‘going public’ had been the last collaborative act of the RFRG collective in situ, so our role in this emergent forum shifted and the Group’s grip on how the bund-model travelled, and who / what it assembled, loosened. As the sense of

‘something happening’ took hold and interest in the bund-model gained pace, a local member of the Group who had always been one of its most active bloggers took on the role of contact person, reporting to and soliciting input from the rest of the collective via email. With the assent of other members, this role grew into that of an RFRG spokesperson as enquiries multiplied. He has come a long way from the self-styled ‘layman and non-scientist’ we heard from earlier in an extract from the transcript of the Group’s first meeting, identified by the anonym ‘MP’, and as a named ‘local’ member quoted in the press coverage of the Civic Centre event.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

MP’s first Group email shortly after the public exhibition (8/11/2008) related that the town clerk had requested the RFRG website address in order to establish a link from the

Council’s website, and that he (MP) had written a piece for a ‘local community magazine’ - the

Beacon - inviting readers to unite behind the RFRG’s bund-model proposal. His most surprising news was that he had been invited by a prominent local politician, and leading advocate of the

EA’s flood wall proposal, to talk about the Group’s report (RFRG, 2008) at an upcoming meeting of the Land Drainage Liaison Group (LDLG).31 Judging from the email correspondence that ensued, Group members were encouraged but wary of these early signs of interest and momentum in the wake of the RFRG’s work ‘going public’. His next email (29/01/2009) brought

‘university’ members (now engaged in the work of the second Competency Group experiment in

Sussex) up to date about a meeting held by ‘local’ members of the RFRG to discuss the latest developments in Pickering, at which they had agreed to continue to meet if it served ‘to keep the pressure on’ the flood management authorities. Attached to this second email were notes of a meeting that MP had attended at the invitation of a local EA official. Such note-taking is a standard civil service practice denoting the ‘on the record’ status of this meeting, but in the context of the EA’s frosty public relations in Pickering, it assumed a greater significance.

The notes record their discussion of a range of ‘stakeholders’ with an interest in the

Group’s upstream storage proposition who might be involved in a Working Group to take it forward. MP is insistent that any such Working Group must be transparent, with minutes being taken and made publicly available so that the ‘local media and community’ were kept informed.

Momentously, the official reports that the EA, in collaboration with other agencies, had submitted a bid to Defra for £0.5 million to fund a ‘physical experiment with upstream land management measures to reduce flood risk’. This is the Group’s first intimation of a bid for the

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

‘demonstration project’ later reported to have been successful on Pickering’s town website, to which we referred in the introduction. These meeting notes also make explicit reference to

‘taking the bund-model forward’ in terms of the data requirements involved; securing independent confirmation of the ‘exploratory findings of the RFRG’ using an extant [ie EA approved] model; and undertaking a field visit to the catchment with interested parties.

The following month, MP circulated the minutes of the meeting of the Ryedale Land

Drainage Liaison Group (dated 24/02/2009) at which he had been invited to speak. ‘Item 4’ provides a short account of his presentation on the work of the RFRG and of the ensuing discussion, which turns first to the merits of dredging [already ruled out on ‘scientific’ grounds by the EA] before returning to the potential of ‘upstream bunds’. The idea of the bunds is misattributed to the CPRE32, but the RFRG’s flood modelling is credited with having demonstrated its viability. The minute closes with a discussion of the ‘role of local knowledge’ in the RFRG’s ‘results’ and the problem of getting organisations like the EA to engage with it in an open-minded way. These minutes furnish glimpses of how other actors drawn into the hybrid forum handled the intervention of the RFRG. A notable example was the attempt to revive the idea of dredging, to which the Land Drainage authorities remained committed, by associating it with the RFRG report even though it had little to say on the subject. The attribution of the idea of

‘upstream bunds’ to the CPRE is also suggestive in terms of the incredibility of such a knowledge claim before the RFRG produced its bund-model, because it could not have been adequately objectified by standard 1D modelling techniques. From this we gained some impression of the kinds of adjustments that extant political actors were having to make as the

RFRG’s bund-model began to replace the EA’s flood wall as the currency of the emergent knowledge polity.

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Realignment and Redistribution

In March, just five months after the RFRG launched its bund-model at the Civic Centre event, MP emailed the Group to report Defra’s official announcement that the Pickering bid for a

‘demonstration project’ was one of three nationally which had been awarded funding. Although the announcement made no reference to the RFRG’s work, Group members were excited by this news. An April update on the progress of the project detailed the growing number of actors now involved in a ‘project delivery group’, including some fifteen representatives from local

‘stakeholder’ organisations; JBA (Jeremy Benn Associates), an engineering consultancy responsible for evaluating the bund-model; and two ‘scientific experts from Durham University’.

MP had accompanied several of them already on a joint field visit to the catchment. The momentum of ‘project delivery’ complicated the RFRG’s involvement in the emergent hybrid forum. The two hydrological modellers in the RFRG (and RELU project team) were now acting in the ‘project delivery group’ in their capacity as ‘scientific experts from Durham University’ while MP assumed the mantle of RFRG representative. His updates continued to enable all

Group members to follow the shifts in scientific and political attachment occasioned by the bund-model as it mediated a new episode in the public trials of ‘upstream storage’.

Attached to MP’s Group email in June was a news article from the Yorkshire Post in which the local (Conservative) MP Anne McIntosh is reported voicing her support for the

‘demonstration project’, bunds have become the driving force for larger set of land management measures and the project’s significance is extrapolated beyond the local case.

‘The Pickering project aims to create buffer falling on the upper catchment to flood strips along water courses, working to waters arriving in the watercourse flowing provide small dams along the railway and through Pickering. The MP said if block moorland drains. One of the first of its successful it could provide a model for flood kind in this country, it also involves planting defence schemes throughout the country.’ trees to increase the time it takes from rain (Branagan, 2010)

Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Even now, the RFRG’s redistribution of expertise objectified in the bund-model exercised the public authorities. At first, EA announcements about the ‘demonstration project’ made no mention of the work of the RFRG. A ‘Fact sheet’ produced in March

2009, for example, described an experimental scheme to test the possibility of alleviating flooding in Pickering by, amongst other measures, building small dams.

Reference is made to: ‘A recent report by Durham University which proposed building bunds upstream of Pickering to temporarily store excess flood water’ (EA,

2009a), a misattribution in which the work of the RFRG was either lost in translation and/or trumped by an habitual attraction to academic credentials.

However, a news item appearing on the national EA website in July 2009 (see

Figure 5), suggested some capacity for institutional learning. The tenor of this publicity about the ‘demonstration project’, some months into the work of the ‘project delivery group’, is much more attuned to the redistribution of expertise at work in the hybrid forum. The item reports on the start of a ‘pilot project costing some £700,000 to try out upstream storage by a series of small bunds in Pickering’, and acknowledges that it: ‘follows a study - entitled Making Space for People in Flood

Risk Management - by the Ryedale Flood Research Group, following a close collaboration between academic researchers and local people.’ (EA, 2009b). This acknowledgement is associated with an assurance that the project will be ‘science-led with input from Durham University and Forest Research, the research arm of the

Forestry Commission’xxxiii , and reinforced by a quotation from ‘Professor Stuart Lane of Durham University, one of the academic researchers [in the RFRG]’ (ibid). Not only is this account more accurate but it shows the EA embracing the idea of redistributing expertise, going so far as to assert that: ‘Working with local people is one of the main aims of the new project partnership which will be involving

70 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Figure 5: Environment Agency news item, marked section quoted

key organisations such as Pickering's town council, civic society and flood defence

group’ (ibid).

These EA notices also illuminate the arousal of ‘a different awareness of the

problems and situations that mobilise us’ in the wake of the RFRG intervention.

Unlike the unfunded flood wall, and the invisible hydraulic model on which the expert

reasoning for it had relied, the bund-model freighting the knowledge claims and

working practices of the CG created opportunities for its ethos of public

experimentation to be replicated. Prominent in these notices is the project’s aim to:

‘show that land management can help to reduce the risk of flooding and bring other benefits for water quality, biodiversity and soil protection’ (EA, 2009a). The local EA official (who had attended the RFRG exhibition and initiated the meeting with MP) is quoted embracing its experimental ambitions: ‘We are looking at alternative measures

71 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

to reduce flood risk and this whole catchment approach is quite new’ (EA, 2009b).

This new ‘whole catchment approach’ is characterised by its attentiveness to the

‘natural processes’ at work in the catchment and how these might be used ‘to reduce

the frequency and severity of flooding in Pickering’ (EA, 2009a). The ‘fact sheet’ explains that, in addition to testing the bunds, the project will look at the effects of blocking old drainage channels (grips), planting additional trees and creating woody debris in the upper catchment, and buffer strips on field margins to store excess water

(EA 2009b). In this, the demonstration project can be characterised as an experimental apparatus which, like that of the CG/RFRG, involved an apprenticeship to what is at stake in the flood controversy in Pickering. With the investment of Defra monies and the attention of the EA nationally, it is also an experiment with the potential to force

thought and exercise new publics further afield.

CONCLUSIONS

The now familiar question of ‘how to make public science more public’

(Wilsdon and Lewis, 2004) demands that any rethinking of the relationship between

science and democracy attends as closely to the practices involved in constituting

publics as to those of producing knowledge. The co-incidence of controversies and

new publics implicit in Callon’s widely adopted notion of hybrid forums can distract

attention from the laborious business of how their connectedness is achieved and,

thereby, from understanding such connections as situated achievements that are

neither automatic nor guaranteed. We have argued that for controversies to be

generative of new polities particular kinds of experimental practice capable of

achieving a redistribution of expertise are required. In the case of the Pickering flood

controversy, before the Competency Group experiment in ‘flood-apprenticeship’ and

72 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society the mediations of the bund-model that became its envoy, neither the multiplication of political actors nor the attention to the matter at stake characteristic of a hybrid forum were in evidence. The potential for the controversy to ‘spark a new public into life’ was stymied because it had become stuck on reversing the withdrawal of funding for a flood wall, rather than interrogating the expert knowledge claims that underpinned the wall’s status as the only or most reasonable option . It was the CG experiment which engendered a shift in the terms of the controversy, first through the knowledge practices of the Group itself and, subsequently, through the public mediations of the bund-model in which its knowledge claims and practices became objectified. The process of ‘going public’ which saw the Competency Group metamorphose into the

Ryedale Flood Research Group and exhibit its work in the Civic Centre was a critical component in this rearticulation of the problem at issue, amplified by the local media.

Only as a knowledge controversy did flooding become a generative event in which expert reasoning was forced to ‘slow down’ and a space for reasoning differently opened up, involving those affected in new political opportunities and associations.

Not until this point could something resembling a hybrid forum be said to emerge in

Pickering, with the qualities of an ‘open space[ ] where groups can come together to discuss technical options involving the collective, hybrid because the groups involved and the spokespersons claiming to represent them are heterogeneous’ (Callon et al,

2009: 18).

Bruno Latour has argued that the challenge for research is not the distance

‘between observer and observed ... //....but between the contents of the world before and after the inquiry’ (Latour, 2004b: 219). ‘The question we have to ask ourselves’, he goes on, is ‘... whether there is now a distance between the new repertoire of actions and the repertoire with which we started’ (ibid). Asking this question of our

73 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

‘flood-apprenticeship’ in Pickering we can make a number of claims, but only in terms which suggest that the distance between the ‘repertoire of actions before and after the inquiry’ and that between ‘observer and observed’ are more intimately related than Latour’s neat argument allows.

The first such claim is ‘methodological’. For the most part research into knowledge controversies in science studies is based on observations of the activities of others (those affected by the matter in dispute), and the knowledge practices and claims of the researchers are not at stake in the controversy they are studying. By contrast, the Competency Group is an apparatus for studying knowledge controversies that stages research collaborations between scientists and those affected by what is in dispute - the ‘university’ and ‘local’ members in the Pickering case. This complicates the ‘distance’ between researcher and researched and the question of whose knowledge is at stake. Such complications involved demanding negotiations of difference within the working practices of the Group, including the design of a

‘collective’ research ethics protocol, and sharing responsibility for the Group’s knowledge claims and propositions when these were subjected to public trial. As an attempt to put the reflexive demands of Stengers’ experimental constructivism into research practice, the Competency Group itself could be said to add to the repertoire of research practices on which other researchers, and potentially other actors involved in knowledge controversies, can draw. To this end, the project is constructing a web- resource to assist those interested in this way of working to experiment CGs for themselves xxxxx).

However, if all the Competency Group participants had walked away after the first meeting, new knowledge about public engagement would have resulted and the project’s objectives as a ‘methodological’ experiment would still have been satisfied.

74 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

In this, the experimental character of our flood-apprenticeship is very different from

that associated with scientific interventions undertaken to test hypotheses under

controlled conditions. Staging the Competency Group amounted to setting up an

experimental apparatus to see if it could produce new political and scientific

possibilities in a complex, ‘live’ situation. That it resulted in movement in the

Pickering flood controversy is not a measure of the success of the Competency Group

methodology but of its public repercussions which could not possibly have been

anticipated, let alone ‘designed’ , in advance. It is these repercussions, through which

any inventiveness attributed to the CG is superseded by that of the RFRG and its

public envoy - the bund-model, that have added most in terms of ‘a new repertoire of

actions’ in the wake of our research collaboration. The bund-model has continued to

travel long after the CG had ceased to meet, exercising new knowledge polities to the

RFRG’s proposition of ‘upstream storage’. Through the Pickering ‘demonstration project’ it is travelling still, now as an envoy of a new approach to flood risk management – ‘whole catchment management’ attracting national publicity.

Last, but by no means least, what can we claim for our experimental flood apprenticeship in terms of ‘the contents of the world’ before and after the enquiry’ that makes a difference to the alleviation of flooding in Pickering? As we were

completing the revisions to this paper, RFRG members learned from another of MP’s

emails (28/07/10) that Ryedale District Council had just approved funding of

£800,000 for an ‘upstream storage scheme’ to alleviate flooding in Pickering.

Newspaper coverage the following week reported the statement of the Council’s

Corporate Director that the scheme ‘involves the creation of strategically-placed bunds, or earthworks, to create upstream water storage’ (Gazette Herald, 04/08/2010:

13). Anne McIntosh, the local MP and newly elected Chairman of the House of

75 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, is also quoted welcoming the decision and declaring ‘I believe this scheme will be successful in protecting Pickering and that we can learn from it for other parts of the country’

(ibid). MP greets the news as ‘a major step in the right direction, so may be worth a

small celebration’, adding wryly ‘just remember, none of this would be happening without your valuable contributions (although you'll get b….. all praise from anyone other than me. Inevitably, various bit players are already patting themselves on the back)’.

In the light of our experiences in Pickering, it seems clear to us that the question posed by Demos of ‘how to make public science more public’ cannot be adequately answered by how well science serves governmental or commercial agendas. Rather, as Callon suggested some time ago, it requires an expanded appreciation of the extraordinary capacity of science for invention ‘as a source of variety, according to the strategic configurations into which it enters’ (1994: 416).

This places the onus on diversifying the publics with whom scientists collaborate, and the terms on which they do so. In the case of environmental knowledge controversies, and others in which ‘expert reasoning’ is heavily reliant on modelling, it is already

widely accepted that: ‘to build robust and legitimate models, public bodies will need

to devise methods of consultation and participation not only when the model is

running, but also in setting out the objectives and parameters of the model in its

earliest stages’ (Yearley, 1999: 863). We do not disagree, but our argument in this paper has been that sometimes ‘public bodies’ can become part of the problem, as in the Pickering case, and that the repertoire of techniques of ‘public engagement’ needs also to facilitate the emergence of new kinds of public; publics capable of producing

‘not as their aim but in the very process of their emergence, the power to object and to

76 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society intervene in matters which they discover concern them (Stengers, 2005b: 161). This requires the invention of research apparatuses capable of ‘slowing down’ expert reasoning and redistributing expertise; an inventiveness which brings the skills of social scientists to the fore in the design and conduct of research practices that stage more and different opportunities for new knowledge polities to emerge.

77 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

REFERENCES

Babtie Group Ltd. (2003) Pickering flood alleviation scheme. Options report for the

Environment Agency. Pearl House, 32 Queen Street, Wakefield, U.K.

Bennett, J. (2005) In parliament with things. In Tønder, L. and L. Thomassen (eds).

Radical democracy: politics between abundance and lack. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 133–48.

Branagan, M. (2010) ‘MP to meet landowners amid concerns over flood defences’,

Yorkshire Post, Thursday June 24

Callon, M. (1994) ‘Is science a public good? Fifth Mullins Lecture, Virginia

Polytechnic Institute, 23 March 1993’, Science, Technology and Human

Values, 19 (4): 395-424.

Callon, M. (1998) An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities

revisited by sociology. In M. Callon, The laws of markets: 244-269. Oxford,

Blackwell

Callon, M., P. Lascoumes and Y. Barthe (2009) Acting in an uncertain world. An

essay on technical democracy (translated by Graham Burchell). Cambridge

MA, MIT Press

Coles, J. (2008) ‘Together we’ll make it work’, Gazette & Herald, Thursday October

Cooke, B. and U. Kothari (eds) (2001) Participation: the new tyranny? London, Zed

Books

Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pdf (2007) Flood and coastal

erosion management downloaded from

www.defra.gov.uk/environ/fcd/default.htm, 1/4/2009

Dewey, J. (1927) The public and its problems. Athens OH, Ohio University Press

78 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Environment Agency (2004) Benchmarking of hydraulic river modelling software

packages. Project Overview. R&D Technical Report: W5-105/TR0.

Environment Agency (2009a) Fact Sheet, pdf March, downloaded from

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk

Environment Agency (2009b) New measures to cut Pickering flood risk, July,

accessed via http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk

Environment Agency pdf (no date) Delivering for the environment. A 21st Century

approach to regulation, Downloaded from www.environment-

agency.gov.uk/static/documents/Business/delivering_1906007.pdf, 2/4/2009

Hayden, C. (2007) Taking as giving: bioscience, exchange and the politics of benefit-

sharing. Social Studies of Science, 37/5: 729-758

Jeremy Benn Associates (2006) Internal Drainage Board Review, Final Report.

Downloaded from Defra website, www.defra.gov.uk 15/3/2009

Landström, C., S. Whatmore and S.N. Lane (under review) ‘Virtual engineering:

computer simulation modelling for UK flood risk management’ Science

Studies

Lane, S.N, N. Odoni, S.J. Whatmore, C. Landström, N. Ward and S. Bradley (2010 in

press) ‘Doing flood risk science differently: an experiment in radical scientific

method’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Latour, B. (2004a) Politics of nature. How to bring the sciences into democracy.

Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press

Latour, B. (2004b) How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science

studies. Body Society, 10/2-3: 205-229

79 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Latour, B. (2005) ‘From realpolitik to dingpolitik or how to make things public’, in

Latour B. and P. Weibel (eds) Making things public: 14-43. Cambridge MA,

MIT Press

Malton & Pickering Mercury (2008) ‘Dam plan to halt flooding’, October 29th

Marres, N. (2005) ‘Issues spark a public into being. A key but often forgotten point of

the Lippmann-Dewy debate’, in Latour B. and P. Weibel (eds). Making things

public: 208-217. Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Marres, N. and R. Rogers (2005) ‘Recipe for tracing the fate of issues and their

publics on the web’, in Latour B. and P. Weibel (eds). Making things public:

922-933. Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Mol, A. (1999) ‘Ontological politics: a word and some questions’, in Law, J. and J.

Hassard (eds) Actor network theory and after: 74-89. Oxford, Blackwell

Morrison, M. and M. Morgan (1999) ‘Models as mediating instruments’, in Morgan,

M. S. and Morrison, M. (eds) Models as mediators. Perspectives on natural

and social science: 10-37. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Odoni N. and S.N. Lane (2010) Knowledge-theoretic models in hydrology. Progress

in Physical Geography, 34/2: 151-171

Ryedale Flood Research Group (2008) Making space for people in flood risk

management. Downloadable at http://knowledge-controvesies/ouce.ox.ac.uk/

Stengers, I. (2000) The invention of modern science. Minneapolis, University of

Minnesota Press

Stengers, I. (2005a) ‘The cosmopolitical proposal’, in Latour B. and P. Weibel (eds).

Making things public: 994-1003. Cambridge MA, MIT Press

Stengers, I. (2005b) ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s last enigmatic message’, Angelaki, 10/2:

151-168

80 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Stengers, I. (2008) ‘A constructivist reading of Process and Reality’, Theory, Culture

and Society, 25/4: 91-110

Stengers, I. (2010) ‘Including nonhumans in political theory: opening Pandora’s

box?’, in Braun, B. and S. Whatmore (eds). Political matter: technoscience,

democracy and public life: 3-34. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press

Sundberg, M. (2006) ‘Credulous modellers and suspicious experimentalists?

Comparing model output and data in meteorological simulation modelling’,

Science Studies, 19/1: 52-68

Whatmore, S. (2009) ‘Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy and the

redistribution of expertise’, Progress in Human Geography, 35/4: 587-599

Whatmore, S. (2010 forthcoming) ‘Stengers’ experimental constructivism: steps

towards a minoritarian research practice’, Society and Space

Wilsdon, J. and J. Lewis (2004) See-through science: why public engagement needs

to move upstream. London, Demos

Wynne, B. (2006) ‘Public engagement as a means of restoring public trust in science -

hitting the notes, but missing the music?’ Community Genetics, 9: 211–220

Yearley, S. (1999) ‘Computer models and the public’s understanding of science: a

case-study analysis’, Social Studies of Science, 29/6: 845-866

81 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

1 See particularly Whatmore, S. 2009 Mapping knowledge controversies: environmental science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise. Progress in Human Geography, 33/5: 587‐599; and Whatmore S., 2011(under review) Stengers’ experimental constructivism: steps towards a minoritarian research practice. Society and Space.

2 Whatmore, S. and C. Landstr m, 2010 (in press) Manning’s n: putting roughness to work. In Morgan M. and P. Howlett (eds), How well do facts travel? Chapter 4. CUP, Cambridge.

3 Odoni, N. and S. Lane, 2010 ‘Knowledge theoretic modelling. Progress in Physical Geography.34: 151-171

4 See Lane S., N. Odoni, C. Landstr m, S. Whatmore, N. Ward and S. Bradley (2010 in press) ‘Doing flood risk science differently: an experiment in radical scientific method’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35/4; and Landstr m C., S. Whatmore, S.Lane, N.Odoni, N. Ward and S. Bradley (resubmitted Sept. 2010) ‘Co-producing flood risk knowledge: ‘participatory modelling’ as a means of redistributing expertise’. Environment and Planning A

5 Whatmore S. and C. Landstrom (2011 in press) Flood apprentices: an exercise in making things public. Economy and Society

6 See Donaldson A., N. Ward and S. Bradley (2010) Mess among disciplines: interdisciplinarity in environmental research. Environment and Planning A, 42: 1521-1536. See also Lane S., S. Whatmore and C. Landstr m (under review) ‘Imagining flooding futures’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

7 Landstrom C., S. Whatmore and S. Lane (in prep) Modes of modelling: academic and consultancy flood modelling practices. Social Studies of Science

8 See Landstr m C., S. Whatmore and S. Lane (under review) Virtual engineering: computer simulation modelling for UK flood risk management. Science Studies

9 Landstrom C., S. Whatmore, S.Lane, N.Odoni, N. Ward and S. Bradley) (under review) Co-producing flood risk knowledge: ‘participatory modelling’ as a means of redistributing expertise. Environment and Planning A

10 Whatmore S. and C. Landstrom (2011 in press) Flood apprentices: an exercise in making things public. Economy and Society;

11 See Whatmore S. (under review) Stengers experimental constructivism: steps towards a minoritarian research practice. Society and Space

82 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

12 See Whatmore S. and C. Landstrom (2011 in press) Flood apprentices: an exercise in making things public. Economy and Society

13 See Odoni, N. and S. Lane, 2010 ‘Knowledge theoretic modelling. Progress in Physical Geography.34: 151- 171

14 See Lane S., N. Odoni, C. Landstr m, S. Whatmore, N. Ward and S. Bradley (2010 in press) ‘Doing flood risk science differently: an experiment in radical scientific method’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35/4

15 The bunding model has been published in two manuscripts one focusing on the hydrological modelling elements of the work (Odoni and Lane, 2010) and a second situating the work more broadly (Lane et al., 2011).

16 The preliminary Overflow results have been presented to practitioners (Joint Defra-Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Risk Management Conference, 2010) and a series of papers are in preparation that detail the results.

17 The illness of the WP2 PDRA has pushed the schedule of these back. He has now returned from authorised sick leave and the University has funded a contract extension to the 31st December 2010. Papers in preparation include - Lane, S.N., Byers, E., Odoni, N. and Hardy, R.J., ‘Strategies for optimising catchment riparian intervention measures for flood risk reduction’. Water Resources Research; Odoni, N and Lane, S.N., Development of the OVERLOW distributed model for testing catchment-wide land management interventions to reduce flood risk: (1) model conception and testing. Hydrological Processes; Odoni, N., Lane, S.N. and Nisbet, T., Development of the OVERLOW distributed model for testing catchment-wide land management interventions to reduce flood risk: (2) testing interventions in the Pickering Beck catchment. Hydrological Processes; and Porter, I., Lane, S.N., Odoni, N. and Hardy, R.J., Evaluation of catchment riparian intervention measures for flood risk reduction. Hydrology and Earth Systems Science.

18 A common reference point here is Dewey’s (1927) notion of the public as ‘a set of actors jointly affected by a problem /.../ who organize into a public to ensure that the problem is addressed’. See, for example, Marres and Rogers, 2005.

19 In French there is no clear distinction between the terms ‘experiment’ and experience’ and Stengers’ use of the term ‘experi-ment’ (without a preposition) is designed to signal an open, active practice, attentive to the experience as we experience it. (2008: 109 footnote 1). 20 To our knowledge, the term ‘competency group’ was coined in a small office in the centre of Brussels in 2001 by Pierre Stassart and Sarah Whatmore in the process of trying to derive a research practice for a collaborative project on ‘novel foods’ from the notion of ‘competent publics’ in a web- essay by Stengers on ‘sustainable development’ (see Whatmore, 2009). In this, it differs from the usage we later came across in medical and legal circles in which competency groups refer to gatherings of professional practitioners of specialist branches of medicine or law.

21 Details of the ‘Understanding knowledge controversies’ project can be found at http://knowledge- controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/ . Other members of the project team include Anders Munk and Gillian Willis at the University of Oxford, Stuart Lane, Nick Odoni and Geoff Whitman at Durham University,

83 Paper accepted for publication by Economy and Society

Neil Ward at the University of East Anglia, and Sue Bradley and Andrew Donaldson at Newcastle University.

22 The roles and responsibilities of different bodies are described on Defra’s website, accessed 1/4/2009 (www.defra.gov.uk/environ/fcd/rolesandresponsibilities.htm).

23 ‘Flood defence plans scuppered’, BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/- /1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/3395139.stm, 2004/01/14, accessed 10/6/2009

24 ‘Flooded out, The Evening Press’, 8th Mar 1999. Archived on http://www.thisisyork.co.uk, accessed 10/6/2009

25 ‘Minister inspects flood defence project’, BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/- /1/hi/england/2901759.stm, 2003/03/31, accessed 10/6/2009

26 Pickering & District Civic Society (http://www.pickeringcivicsociety.btik.com/) was formed in 1984 and, like its counterparts across Britain, is a voluntary body with charitable status concerned with the protection of local heritage and a regular commentator on local planning applications. 27 Following the ‘minoritarian’ principles of Stengers’ experimental constructivism, CG members were recruited on the basis of their particular experiences of flooding and willingness to engage in the Group in a personal capacity, rather than their representativeness of some larger social category or group (in either the statistical or electoral sense) which would presuppose that a recruit could be substituted by any other individual representative of that category and make no difference to the collaborative thinking of the Group. See the RFRG’s report (2008) for details of the recruitment process.

28 In August 2003, the Babtie report estimates the cost of the flood wall option at £1.36 million, excluding ‘site investigations, design costs, compensation and general items’ (Babtie Group Ltd, 2003: Table 4.1). Yet, according to the BBC article the Yorkshire Regional Flood Defence Committee rejected an application for £6.7 million in January 2004. Given that ‘real’ costs are unlikely to have quadrupled in the intervening five months, this implies that the consultants’ estimate was incorrect but we lack the information necessary to confirm, or understand this.

29 Defra and the EA published a project report benchmarking hydraulic computer models that were approved for use by engineering consultants commissioned to undertake flood modelling. The project compared the performance of three 1 dimensional (1D) software packages: ISIS, HEC-RAS and MIKE11 (EA, 2004).

30 For details of the technical differences between this ‘knowledge-theoretic’ practice of flood modelling and the conventional practice of ‘data-theoretic’ modelling see Odoni N. and S.N. Lane (2010).

31 In parts of England drainage is managed by Internal Drainage Boards, who have permissive powers to undertake work on drainage and water level management and are involved in the maintenance of rivers, drainage channels and pumping stations in their areas. For an overview see Jeremy Benn Associates (2006).

32 CPRE is the acronym for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, known formerly as the Council for the Protection of Rural England. xxxiii The project research associate (based at Durham University) and RFRG member most closely involved in the technical elaboration of the bund-model was seconded to Forestry Research for the duration of the ‘demonstration project’ to assist with its further development.

84 The Project - Understanding environmental knowledge controversies - Research Project - Oxford University Centre for the Environment Page 1 of 2

School of Geography and the Environment Understanding Environmental Knowledge Controversies

The Project

This project was conceived in order to address the public controversies generated by the risk management strategies and forecasting technologies associated with diffuse environmental problems such as flooding and pollution.

Environmental issues play an ever-increasing role in all of our daily lives. However, controversies surrounding many of these issues, and confusion surrounding the way in which they are reported, mean that sectors of the public risk becoming increasingly disengaged. To try to reverse this trend, and to regain public trust and engagement, we are aiming to establish a new way of doing science.

We are undertaking a three-year research project, funded by RELU (the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme), to look at the relationship between science and policy, and in particular how to engage the public with scientific research findings. We aim to develop a new approach to interdisciplinary environmental science, involving non-scientists throughout the process. We have chosen to focus on a major diffuse environmental management issue associated with rural land management - namely flooding.

The key to our approach is interdisciplinarity, which involves natural and social scientists working closely together and, throughout the life of the project, re-evaluating our respective practices and assumptions.

We have chosen two areas prone to flooding for our fieldwork - in Ryedale in Yorkshire, centred on Malton and Pickering, and the Ouse system in Sussex, centred on Uckfield. In each of these areas we will be recruiting non-scientists to join us in forming Competency Groups, which will be an experiment in democratising science. The Competency Groups will be composed of researchers and laypeople for whom flooding is a matter of particular concern. The groups will work together to share different perspectives - on why flooding is a problem, on the role of science in addressing the problem, and on new ways of doing science together.

We are aiming to achieve four substantive contributions to knowledge.

1. To analyse how the knowledge claims and modelling technologies of hydrological science are developed and put into practice by policy makers and commercial organisations (such as insurance companies) in flood risk management.

2. To develop an integrated model for forecasting the in-river and floodplain effects of rural land management practices.

http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/project/ 1/18/2011 The Project - Understanding environmental knowledge controversies - Research Project - Oxford University Centre for the Environment Page 2 of 2

3. To experiment with a new approach to public engagement in the production of interdisciplinary environmental science, involving the use of Competency Groups.

4. To evaluate this new approach to doing public science differently and to identify lessons learnt that can be exported beyond this particular project to other fields of knowledge controversy.

Professor Sarah Whatmore, School of Geography, Oxford University Centre for the Environment Professor Stuart Lane, Department of Geography,Durham University Professor Neil Ward, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of East Anglia Copyright © 2007-2011, UEKC Research Project, SoGE, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 (0)1865 285523. About this website | Privacy | Accessibility | Last modified: Tuesday, 03-Nov-2009 16:04:08 UTC Valid XHTML & CSS | Contact Webmaster

http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/project/ 1/18/2011 Work Packages - Understanding environmental knowledge controversies - Research Project - Oxford University Centre for the Environm... Page 1 of 3

School of Geography and the Environment Understanding Environmental Knowledge Controversies

Work packages

The project is divided into a four distinct work packages, each dealing with different aspects of flood risk management. The final phase of the project will involve integrative analysis if the outcomes of the separate packages.

Work Package 1 - Environmental Knowledge Production and Controversy Work Package 2 - MIR Science and Modelling Work Package 3 - New Forms of Interdisciplinary Working in Environmental Science Work Package 4 - Transferring Lessons and Skills to Other Diffuse Land Management Issues

Environmental Knowledge Production and Controversy

Using in-depth interviews, ethnography and document analysis, researchers set out to understand three aspects of the relationship between flood science and policy;

(i) how the knowledge claims of flood science are produced, analysing the working practices of modellers; (ii) how these modelling practices become standardised through particular technologies and contractual arrangements with key policy agencies and hard-wired into flood risk management; (iii) how this complex mesh of flood science/policy ‘expertise’ sometimes becomes the subject of public controversy, and with what consequences. Flood risk management relies on the scientific practice of computer modelling. As modellers acknowledge, the knowledge claims advanced are uncertain and provisional. However, these provisos are dulled as software packages facilitate the standardisation of modelling practices amongst the engineering consultancies on which government agencies rely for their flood risk estimations. The public face of this expertise is the Environment Agency and anyone motivated by personal experience to dispute it is likely to encounter scientific knowledge presented in final form, divested of any uncertainty.

Two key themes emerged: (i) what ‘modelling’ involves varies significantly in different contexts, notably between commercial and academic cultures; (ii) the contractual terms set by government agencies are a major influence on the standardisation of modelling practice.

http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/work-packages/ 1/18/2011 Work Packages - Understanding environmental knowledge controversies - Research Project - Oxford University Centre for the Environm... Page 2 of 3

MIR Science and Modelling

This Work Package has developed an alternative approach to modelling that we term ‘knowledge-theoretic’ that captures the much richer sources of knowledge available to us. The models that we developed were co-produced through the collective ways of working of our Competency Groups. These groups reformulated the expertise of scientists and local members of our groups to produce models specific to flood risk management in the two locations. These models were spatially-explicit, time-dependent flood risk models that allowed active exploration of possible interventions to reduce flood risk by all group members. Although the models were coded by one of the university members, the content of the models and their use in practice was grounded in the wider, collective practices of the Groups.

The models produced through our Competency Group work combine the general with the particular, such that they are ‘bespoke’ models that are not transferable. However, we conclude that, all models have to be made to perform for particular places and times. Our approach was distinctive in the point in the practice of flood risk science that the performance was made to happen. In the case of Ryedale, our ‘performance’ was sufficient to define a new flood risk reduction strategy that has been taken up by the regional Environment Agency and won funding as a DEFRA demonstration project and is now in the process of being trialled and delivered.

New Forms of Interdisciplinary Working in Environmental Science

The Competency Group experiment is a conscious attempt to translate the ‘generative capacity’ of knowledge controversies into a research methodology. CGs involve scientists in the project team collaborating with volunteers in localities in which flood risk management is already a matter of public controversy. This methodology has three goals: - (i) to trace existing flood management policies back through to the scientific knowledge claims that inform them; (ii) to enable those affected by flooding to try out alternative ways of ameliorating the local flooding problem; and (iii) to produce a collective model of local flooding to enable the Group’s work to travel and, potentially, to make a difference.

Group activities centred on bi-monthly meetings in which hands-on modelling became the key practice through which knowledge claims about the local flood problem could be tried out. Meetings were supplemented by other activities (field visits, video recording, and interviews with local figures).

The collective ethos of this way of working required group members to participate as individuals rather than as representatives of any constituency; and to be open to, and respectful of, different points of view. Disagreements were expected and considered to be generative.

In Ryedale (first case study area), the group collectively decided to go public with a report and exhibition. In Uckfield, the group presented their findings to a meeting of local stakeholders.

Transferring Lessons and Skills to Other Diffuse Land Management Issues

This Work Package aims provide a web-based ‘civic resource’ that draws upon the project’s wider findings and to broaden the empirical focus from flooding to areas of environmental science. The web-based resource has the following objectives

(1) To explore the nature of Knowledge Controversies. (2) To demonstrate the possibility of science as a means of redistributing expertise to allow new forms of political intervention. (3) To document Competency Group methodology and use innovative forms of communication, whilst providing a long-term project archive.

The tool chosen for this purpose is a visualisation system called prezi, an interactive digital resource that can contain text, imagery, sound recordings, video-recordings and even models. This system allows us to map component parts into a coherent whole, and to undertake this mapping in different ways to produce different ‘wholes’.

This resource was tested on two other areas of environmental science – (i) The position of ecological knowledge in public policy, spurred by a tension between the ‘science’ of ecology and the ‘art’ of conservation. (ii) A means of engaging diverse communities of people in climate model science. Central to our approach here is bridging the separation of anthropological understandings of climate with those predicted by climate models

Professor Sarah Whatmore, School of Geography, Oxford University Centre for the Environment Professor Stuart Lane, Department of Geography,Durham University Professor Neil Ward, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of East Anglia Copyright © 2007-2011, UEKC Research Project, SoGE, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 (0)1865 285523. About this website | Privacy | Accessibility | Last modified: Wednesday, 31-Mar-2010 14:14:47 UTC Valid XHTML & CSS | Contact Webmaster

http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/work-packages/ 1/18/2011