Abstract
Despite repeated calls for grassroots participation in climate policy making, the epistemic agency of marginalized voices remains little understood. While local knowledge is increasingly regarded as an antidote to top-down climate expertise, it is often not heard, or ends up reinforcing dominant framings of risk. The concept of civic epistemologies (CEs), often understood as the sociocultural norms by which societies authorize knowledge claims, can provide insights into the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in climate governance, but has rarely been applied to such concerns. At the same time, such questions affect how scholars conceptualize CEs, which have seldom been examined where civics are fragmented or marginalized. In this article, I argue that understanding CEs as “expectations of democracy” can indicate how they authorize climate expertise in such settings. I illustrate this argument by examining hurricane governance in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where vulnerable fishers constitute a sociopolitically and economically excluded part of a fragmented civic that shapes the production of risk expertise. Here, fisher expectations that the government will behave corruptly, and government expectations that fishers prefer to remain socioeconomically separate from the state reify biophysical approaches to risk. This analysis contributes to understanding why many attempts to include marginalized voices in climate policy fail to achieve their anticipated outcomes, expanding understanding of how CEs mediate epistemic agency in contested political contexts. Furthermore, examining CEs as expectations of democracy can inform upon conditions under which political-epistemic orders change, revealing opportunities for intervention in climate risk governance.
Introduction
Clemente, a fisherman from Puerto Escondido, Mexico, is standing by his boat on a 3 km stretch of white sandy beach, throwing scraps to pelicans as he sorts through cool boxes after a night at sea. It is 6 am and we are talking about Hurricane Paulina, which made landfall there in 1997. I have been asking about changes in government policy towards governing the storm and hurricane risks faced by local fishing communities: “They do nothing,” he says
“But don’t they issue weather warnings?”
“Yes, but they don’t support us! They close up – they’re just closed. They want a profit – they’re always going to look for a profit for giving support.”
Clemente's words reflect experiences that are multiplying across the world: as the effects of climate change generate an increased risk of storms and hurricanes, more and more people find themselves living increasingly vulnerable and precarious lives. Yet the key concern here is not just the rising incidence of storms, but that policies for addressing storm risk are not believed to be attending to the needs of citizens like Clemente. For Puerto Escondido's fishers, the government's focus on reducing the physical risk to life through weather warnings is insufficient—and at worse exacerbates their livelihood precarity—if it fails also to deliver socioeconomic support for how the warnings prevent them from earning a living.
Some scholars have referred to such outcomes as “maladaptation”—adaptation strategies that “actually worsen the situation” of vulnerable people (Schipper, 2020; Eriksen et al., 2021). Some have echoed Clemente's concerns that vulnerable people might not only receive no benefit from climate forecasting, but actually be harmed by it (Lemos and Dilling, 2007; Lemos et al., 2002). For many, these disconnects between local community and government understandings of vulnerability reflect how sociopolitical inequalities are enacted in the performances and practices of adaptation expertise (Eriksen et al., 2021; Nightingale, 2017). This has prompted some to call for conceptual frameworks that can “capture how politics are embedded in society's management of change” (Eriksen et al., 2015: 523).
For many scholars, responding to such concerns requires bringing neglected political voices into climate policy making (Chambers, 1995, 1997; Fischer, 2003; Reed et al., 2014; Beier et al., 2016; Chilvers and Kearnes, 2019; Turnhout et al., 2020; Erkisen et al., 2021). This boom of including marginalized voices in the production of climate expertise has been expressed in a variety of concepts and terms, including knowledge co-production, the democratization of expertise, transdisciplinarity, integration, deliberation, and participation (Turnhout et al., 2020). Underlying this literature is often the assumption that local voices are key to generating “new narratives of life and culture” (Escobar, 1996: 65) that can challenge dominant epistemologies of climate expertise, and all that is required is to “allow [conventionally excluded] discourses to speak for themselves” (Peet and Watts, 1996: 34).
Yet, more critical work has complicated a necessary linear connection between local knowledge and the disruption of dominant ways of knowing issues such as climate risk (e.g. Mosse, 2019; Cooke and Kothari, 2001). This work has argued that calls for marginalized actors to “speak truth” to policy makers often inadequately account for current structures and institutions of colonialism that prevent these voices from being heard or received by relevant audiences (e.g. Spivak, 1988; Hooks, 1990; Sharp, 2009; Liboiron, 2021). Others have noted ways in which much of this work's focus on methodologies of inclusion risks depoliticizing how knowledge gains authority in society by implying it is a technical linear process (Chilvers and Kearnes, 2019; Turnhout et al., 2020; Beck, 2011). Knowledge here does not travel as an “immutable mobile” (Latour, 1986), but rather its social stickiness depends upon it finding resonance with the (often contested and unjust) political contexts in which it is embedded (Mol and Law, 1994; Law and Singleton, 2005). Moreover, there is no pure form of local consciousness that can be disentangled from its political context (Spivak, 1988), rather (epistemological) acts of “resistance” are always “partly implicated in the very systems of oppression they set out to oppose” (Hale, 2006: 98), complicating the search for a (local) epistemological silver bullet.
Indeed, research at the interface of political ecology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) has cautioned that local knowledge might actually replicate or reinforce existing dominant epistemologies. For example, Forsyth (2004, 2019a) shows how critical social movements often form “discourse coalitions” (Hajer, 1993) with state narratives, leading to the reification of hegemonic environmental imaginaries, or “songlines of risk” (Jasanoff, 1999) that are “sung into existence by each new episode of activism” (Forsyth, 2004: 393). Other research has shown how well-known examples of environmental resistance such as the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand, India have become co-opted into the wider ecological concerns of international environmental NGOs (Jackson, 1995) and regional politics of statehood (Rangan, 2000). This work indicates how local knowledges might unwittingly uphold existing dominant framings of risk while cognitively advocating alternative agendas (e.g. Forsyth, 2019b).
These debates raise important questions around how to understand the relationship between dominant epistemologies and local voices in climate governance. How, and in what ways, is the epistemic agency of marginalized citizens shaped by the interaction of local knowledge with political orders? And with what effects for what knowledge is heard and what order is maintained? In this article, “epistemic agency” refers to the capacity of actors to shape expertise and the capacity of their knowledges to travel to different sociopolitical settings. “Expertise” refers to ways of knowing phenomena that have attained sociopolitical authority.
The concept of civic epistemologies (CEs) is relevant and useful here yet has received little attention among these debates. CEs have been defined as the “culturally situated practices of interpretation and reasoning” by which knowledge is deemed usable and reliable in societies (Jasanoff, 2011b: 129; Jasanoff, 2005; Miller, 2008; Haines, 2019). As such CEs mediate the capacity of certain ways of knowing phenomena such as climate change to gain authority in different social settings. For example, research has shown how varying CEs in Western liberal democracies produce different responses to the same scientific statements (Jasanoff, 2005). In this way, CEs can indicate why grassroots knowledges might not have the authority or capacity to alter dominant risk epistemologies that are anticipated by participatory approaches to climate governance. At the same time, there has been less examination of CEs in places where the “civic” is socially marginalized, or, how the work of CEs achieved in locations that are not characterized by formal and dependable channels of deliberation between citizens and the state (Haines, 2019). How do CEs mediate the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in these contexts, and with what implications for how we conceptualize them?
In this article, I examine CEs as expectations of democracy to understand how they mediate the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in such locations. These expectations can be understood as mutually constituting anticipations of behaviors and roles by publics and the government. They indicate how dominant epistemologies shape and are shaped by marginalized civics in noncognitive ways via the interdependent and intersubjective anticipatory vectors through which democratic settings are constituted between citizens and the state. I seek to show that examining CEs in marginalized civic contexts, and, in such contexts understanding CEs as expectations of democracy, can deliver insights into the epistemic agency of marginalized citizens in participatory approaches to climate knowledge-production, and expand understanding of CEs in such locations.
In what follows I examine CEs as expectations of democracy in hurricane governance in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, and reveal how expectations of fishers and government actors about the sociopolitical order in which they are embedded reify dominant biophysical understandings of risk that exclude more socioeconomic understandings of vulnerability, thereby shaping the epistemic agency of marginalized fishers and their concerns. The analysis indicates relations, practices, and actions at the local microscale that perform these expectations and authorize biophysical visions of storm risk, and through which the mutability of political-epistemic orders—and hence alternative visions of governing climate risk—might be accessed.
In this article, I use the term “marginalized” to refer to citizens who have little involvement in mainstream political, cultural, social, and economic activities, either because they are excluded from them or because the democratic setting is fractured such that it has few “mainstream” characteristics. In such ways, marginalized actors can be understood as involved in a contested relationship with the democratic state. Marginalized is used rather than “subaltern”, in recognition that not all marginalized actors are subaltern (Spivak, 1988) yet, acknowledging that subaltern actors are often marginalized, this analysis seeks to be relevant to the analysis of the visibility of subaltern knowledge.
In the next section, I develop the article's core theoretical arguments of why examining CEs as expectations of democracy might be useful both to current approaches to participatory climate knowledge production and for understanding the effects of CEs in more fractured socio-political settings. The article then presents material from fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico. First, it examines the norms, acts, and artifacts through which storm risk is known as a biophysical concern in Puerto Escondido. Next, the article analyses the expectations of democracy, articulated by fishers and the government, that authorize and reify these ways of knowing and how they shape the epistemic agency of marginalized fishers. A concluding section discusses the implications of this research for generating climate risk expertise that is more relevant to the needs of marginalized groups.
Epistemic agency and inclusive climate governance
Much research in climate risk governance has raised concerns that despite greater participation of local voices in the creation and application of expertise, there remains a disconnect between biophysical framings of risk and local people's experiences of climate vulnerability as sociopolitically determined (Eriksen et al., 2015; Nagoda and Nightingale, 2017; Ribot, 2011; Donovan, 2016; Gaillard and Mercer, 2014; Mikulewicz, 2020b). In particular, scholars have highlighted a trend for “characterizing adaptation decision-making processes as exclusively beneficial and primarily technical or managerial, bounded only by economic and technical capacities” (Eriksen et al., 2015: 524; O’Brien et al., 2007). For many, understanding this apparent paradox requires examining how authoritative ways of knowing environmental risk and political orders mutually sustain one another (Jasanoff, 1999; Eriksen et al., 2015). Indeed, in a recent paper, Eriksen et al. (2021: 1) sought “a pluralism of ideas about adaptation while critically interrogating how these ideas form part of the politics of adaptation and potentially the processes (re)producing vulnerability”.
At least two current approaches to this can be discerned in the literature on inclusive climate risk governance. On one hand, scholars have sought participatory procedures that are more equitable in their implementation and design (Eriksen et al., 2021). This often responds directly to a concern that “elite capture” of knowledge production can result from participatory processes that require significant investments of time or material resources thereby excluding socioeconomically marginalized people (Nagoda and Nightingale, 2017; Mikulewicz, 2020a). In a similar vein, participatory interventions that structure the dialogue between actors of different socioeconomic resources have sought to flatten power imbalances by ensuring equal opportunities to speak (Ojha et al., 2020; Mees et al., 2014). Less attention however has been directed to how power imbalances play out through processes of meaning making, even when actors are procedurally given an equitable platform from which to speak. This might require greater focus on how noncognitive epistemic structures mediate the audibility of marginalized knowledges, not only the dialogic formats through which these knowledges are expressed.
Another strand of research has focused less on procedural improvements to participation and directed “more empirical and analytical attention on the contexts within which authorities, knowledges, and subjectivities come together to shape what counts as adaptation” (Eriksen et al., 2015: 524). The role of shifting and contested relations between citizens and the state has been a key site of investigation here (Nightingale, 2018; Nightingale, 2015). For example, the “socioenvironmental state” (Nightingale, 2018: 688) conceptualizes how “contested, shifting, emergent boundaries” of nature, society and the state contain the possibilities for alternative ways of governing and living with climate change to emerge. At the same time, there has been less focus on how such shifting constitutional relations between citizens and the state (Jasanoff, 2011a) shape the audibility of marginalized epistemologies in particular.
Epistemic agency and civic epistemologies
The concept of civic epistemologies (CEs) is useful here because it connects the agency of local knowledge producers to the constitutional political-epistemic relations in which they are embedded (Bridel, 2021). CEs have been used to refer to the “social and institutional practices by which political communities construct, review, validate and deliberate politically relevant knowledge” (Miller, 2008: 1896; Jasanoff, 2005, 2011a; Morvillo, 2020). These practices might include “styles of reasoning, modes of argumentation, standards of evidence, and norms of expertise that characterize public deliberation and political institutions” (Miller, 2008:1896). In this way, CEs point to the epistemic structures that mediate epistemic agency and how those structures are embedded in sociopolitical orders.
Existing research on CEs has indicated two vectors through which this civic epistemic agency might flow: in their characteristics and effects (what forms CEs take and how these mediate the visibility of different ways of knowing) and in the practices in which they are enacted (how they are shaped and sustained in democratic societies) (for example, Miller 2001; Acero 2010; Hennen and Nierling 2015; Haines 2019). Jasanoff (2005) details five dimensions of CEs that reflect these vectors, including dominant participatory styles of knowledge-production, methods of accountability, and registers of objectivity; and how these vectors manifest through performance and reperformance at sites where the politics of knowing public issues is contested and staged, such as newspapers, demonstrations, public hearings, lawsuits, electoral administration, and environmental indices (see also Miller, 2004, 2005; Yagodin and Kunelius, 2016). As such, at least two opportunities exist for grassroots actors to have epistemic agency via CEs: in their capacity to shape and deploy them.
At the same time, examining the epistemic agency of marginalized civics presents opportunities for the concept of CEs. Much work on CEs has examined the civic as a space of membership to an established (usually national) liberal political citizenship that has access to due process and institutionalized forms of deliberation through which it makes claims to the government over trajectories of development (Jasanoff, 2005; Miller, 2004; Daemmrich, 2004; Felt and Muller, 2011). Research on how CEs mediate epistemic agency in these contexts has examined how they are shaped and deployed by actors often in cognitive, visible ways (Miller, 2005; Iles, 2007; Haines, 2019).
Yet, recently scholars have begun to examine how political communities at the subnational scale (Tironi et al., 2013), activists (Pereira et al., 2018; Haines, 2019), subaltern groups (Haines, 2020), and politically marginalized communities (Forsyth, 2019a) engage with CEs. For example, Haines (2019) shows how nuclear activists in India draw upon CEs to make their claims heard by powerful state authorities, while Forsyth's (2019b) analysis of forest governance in Thailand shows how in the context of an essentially authoritarian regime, forest communities bought into reductive socio-epistemic codes to make their needs heard.
At the same time, this existing research has examined how CEs mediate the epistemic agency of marginalized citizens through those citizens deploying preexisting CEs, rather than through their capacity to shape them. As such, it remains unclear how knowledge-makers on the fringes of the civic seeking to disrupt epistemic hegemonies might not only utilize existing CEs but contribute to their formation. By extension, it similarly remains under-explored how CEs might be shaped or upheld by civics in ways that are noncognitive, influencing their epistemic agency in ways they are unaware of.
CEs as expectations of democracy
In this article, I propose examining CEs as expectations of democracy to understand the epistemic agency of marginalized citizens in locations where the civic is not a cohesive liberal democratic group and might be characterized by features such as patchy membership, contestation, sociocultural and linguistic heterogeneity, clientelist networks and exclusion (Haines, 2019). Expectations of democracy can be understood as mutually- and relationally producing expectations of the roles of government institutions, citizens, and the sociopolitical order, temporarily constituted and shaped through epistemic artifacts and performative acts (Butler, 1988). STS scholars have examined how expectations have constitutive effects in the context of biomedicine (e.g. Hedgecoe and Martin, 2003), but their effects have not yet been studied in relation to CEs and the epistemic agency of marginalized actors. Yet the concept presents various opportunities for addressing the questions raised above.
First, expectations suggest ways in which marginalized citizens might shape as well as deploy CEs, by foregrounding the vectors of belief and anticipation by which political orders are made. Different groups will have different expectations of the sociopolitical order called democracy and what it can provide to them, which both shape the characteristics of CEs, and how they mediate the epistemic agency of the citizens who use them. Second, expectations indicate how the work of the civic is done by broad, messy, and contested sets of relations, which might condition the agency of knowledge producers in unexpected and noncognitive ways. One reason for this is that expectations are not always consciously enacted but are often tacit or unconscious. Furthermore, while existing work on the interface of imaginaries and epistemology has examined desired collective futures (e.g. Ezrahi 2012; Jasanoff 2015), expectations may be regarded as unfair, undesirable, and/or uncontrollable. For example civics might expect the state to provide welfare assistance (desirable), or government actors to give assistance only to its political allies (undesirable), with both these expectations influencing how they conceptualize the meteorological risks they face. On the other hand, expectations have multiplying and dynamically constitutive effects as actors apply them to themselves and one another suggesting how a “subtle network of compromises” (Orwell, 2004 [1940]: 22) might elide the political outcomes of epistemic negotiations and settlements and thereby have unexpected effects. Expectations thus make visible how epistemic agency is expressed and shaped in the constant constitutive interaction between marginalized civics, contested democratic orders and risk knowledges. In this way, conceptualizing CEs as expectations of democracy indicates vectors through which political-epistemic orders shift and change.
The remainder of this article examines CEs as expectations of democracy in the context of storm governance in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. In order to do so, it addresses the following questions:
How is climate risk known in Puerto Escondido, and through what acts and artifacts are these ways of knowing performed? What are the expectations of democracy that authorize and reify these ways of knowing and how do they shape the epistemic agency of marginalized fishers? How can thinking about expectations of democracy increase understanding of the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in participatory climate governance, and the production of alternative political-epistemic orders more broadly?
The article examines these questions through a study of hurricane risk governance in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where expertise relating to vulnerability appears unchallengeable by local fishers who are exposed to its effects.
Case study: Hurricane risk and the epistemic agency of marginalized fishers in Puerto Escondido, Mexico
Hurricanes, civic epistemologies, and democracy in Puerto Escondido
Climate risk governance presents opportunities for analyzing expectations of democracy and the epistemic agency of marginalized citizens. At the same time, “much remains to be done in developing civic epistemologies (CEs) as a lens through which to understand environmental policymaking” (Iles, 2007: 373). Large climate events such as hurricanes bring particular attention to the role played by expectations of democracy in mediating the epistemic agency of marginalized citizens. Such environmental hazards often involve the suspension of democratic norms in the name of responding quickly to extraordinary circumstances (Lakoff, 2007) and so can be considered spaces of democracy-in-flux, or “constitutional moments” in which “basic rules of political practice are rewritten, whether explicitly or implicitly, thus fundamentally altering the relations between citizens and the state” (Jasanoff, 2011a: 623). These alterations are fertile conditions for the renegotiation of entangled political and epistemic norms: with new expressions of political governance come new descriptions of who is at risk and why, indicating conditions under which CEs might emerge and change. They also suggest spaces and moments at which marginalized citizens might shape CEs through negotiations over the political order.
The experiences of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca are illustrative of the interaction between civic expectations concerning the political order, and risk expertise. Mexico has one of the highest incidences of environmental hazards in the world and is a prolific producer of risk expertise through the National Centre for the Prevention of Disasters (CENAPRED) and the National School for the Civil Protection (ENAPROC). At the same time, Mexico's political order is a space of flux and contestation. Democratic governance is a key goal of the Obrador government elected in 2018, yet a historic lack of institutional accountability and popular mistrust of government corruption challenge government authority at local and federal levels (Salazar, 2009), while political culture is shaped by a history of social movements and populist uprisings against state authority (Joseph and Nugent, 1994). Indeed, research has shown low popular support for government institutions, and scholars have argued that elections have historically been ritualistic and unconcerned with outcomes (Ai Camp, 2012; Smith, 2012; Eckstein, 1990).
Oaxaca has a particularly contested relationship with Mexican democracy through its history of rejecting official state governance. The state is characterized by social diversity (58% of the population speaks an indigenous language compared to the national average of 15%) and substantial political decentralization (it is divided into a vast 570 administratively autonomous municipalities yet based on population and national average should have only 66), 75% of which are governed through usos y costumbres (Sanchez et al., 2018): localized forms of self-governance and juridical practice that are officially recognized in Oaxaca. The legal recognition of these traditional community practices in 1995 was the outcome of protests by indigenous groups against the construction of a $478 million development (Mattiace, 2012), and since then usos y costumbres have come to represent the self-determination and autonomy of indigenous groups, and the possibility of realizing alternative imaginings of democracy within the Mexican state (Stolle-McAllister, 2005). At the same time, STS research on the politics of environmental expertise in Oaxaca has shown how indigenous communities and government officials “collaborate in making knowledge and ignorance” thereby upholding deficient dominant epistemologies (Mathews, 2008: 492). In this way, Oaxaca provides opportunities to understand how contested and fractious citizen-state relations can indicate how CEs are made and deployed by marginalized civics in a dynamic political-epistemic relationship with the state.
The following research examines how fishing communities from Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca contest official government expertise that the risks they face from hurricanes should be addressed predominantly by minimizing biophysical kinds of harm. That is, while the government prioritizes preventing fishers from going to sea to keep them safe from the physical impacts of wind and waves, fishers argue that this policy exacerbates their livelihood vulnerability by severely constricting their incomes. Indeed, this concern reflects current debates in climate risk governance, which seek to understand why socioeconomic aspects of vulnerability have little epistemic authority despite being how many communities experience risk (Gaillard and Mercer, 2014).
The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between January and April 2019. Policy documents relating to storm governance, newspaper articles, and attendance at government disaster management conferences, in addition to 42 semi-structured interviews with fishers and government representatives in Puerto Escondido and the city of Oaxaca provided the empirical material. These government representatives belonged to local departments directly involved in managing storm risk among fishers, including the Civil Protection, Captain's office, Fisheries Department as well as representatives from state and national level ministries such as ENAPROC, CENAPRED, and the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). Additional background interviews were also conducted with representatives from local and international NGOs. Research suggests that such government departments often display a biophysical approach to environmental hazard governance (Donovan, 2016) and the purpose of this research was to understand why this persists despite epistemic challenges from local people. Nevertheless, research conducted in other government departments not referenced in this article also suggested that this emphasis on biophysical risk was prevalent throughout other governmental departments such as SEMARNAT (which has been principally responsible for climate change policy) and The Secretariat for Home Affairs (SEGOB) (which has been principally responsible for disaster risk reduction) (Aragon-Durand, 2011).
Interviews were carried out in Spanish, and recorded with informed consent, which involved explaining the research project and the role of their responses within it. Interviews were transcribed on the same day, and all names of fishers and government officials have been altered. This empirical material was subjected to discourse analysis (DA) (Fairclough, 2016; Hajer and Versteeg, 2005) which is appropriate for examining CEs since it positions them in their sociohistorical context and indicates how they are interactionally sustained, as in DA, meaning “never solidifies, but is constantly the object of political contestation” (Hajer and Versteeg, 2005: 177). Using these methods, the next section examines the acts and artifacts that perform cyclone risk expertise in Puerto Escondido. The following sections analyze how they are reified by the mutual democratic expectations of the town's fishers and government actors, and implications for understanding the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in participatory climate governance.
Knowing risk in Puerto Escondido
Conversation with government official:
- “What are the main challenges you face in governing hurricane risks here?” - “Here, first and foremost we regulate saving the human lives of people who go out in the boats. The biggest challenge? It's making them understand the dangers… But then, they do understand the dangers, but the other risks they face are greater, so they go anyway” - “Do you fear storms?” - “One problem is that when there is a big storm we can’t go to work. Another is that the cold fronts affect the fish. The fish hide on the other side because of the cold…” - “Do the warnings help?” - “The information bulletins inform us about hurricanes, which means we can’t go to work – to fish – for 3,4,5,6, days… Storms affect us because when they come we can’t go out to work, so we cannot earn. That's how it is”.
Conversation with Mario, fisher:
These two quotes illustrate how official hurricane risk expertise in Puerto Escondido is characterized by a biophysical approach to vulnerability despite fishers experiencing it as a socioeconomic concern. That is, the way that vulnerable people know and experience hurricane risk in their daily lives has little epistemic authority in political society here. For the government official, keeping fishermen “safe” from storms requires keeping them out of the sea; yet for fishers, this approach exacerbates their livelihood precarity. Federal, state, and municipal authorities carry out different aspects of hurricane governance in Puerto Escondido, yet all focus on safeguarding fishers from physical corporeal harm. This section examines the acts, artifacts, and discourses that sustain and perform this biophysical risk epistemology, and what happens when they are enacted.
Perhaps the most potent discourse through which cyclone risk is known biophysically in Puerto Escondido is the expression of vulnerability as a function of natural weather patterns. When asked about the risks faced by Puerto Escondido's fishing communities, municipal and state authorities nearly always responded about the inevitability of hurricane season: “the risks that we have are natural – that every year, there is the rainy season that lasts from 15th May to 30th November” (PE municipal officer). Similarly, when asked who was to blame for hurricane risk, all fishers responded that no one was to blame because this risk was “natural”. Hence for both, there is a slippage between the meteorological causes of hurricanes and the causes of human exposure to hurricanes. This has various effects. On one hand, it depoliticizes harm by implying that it is the unavoidable outcome of capricious nature. On the other hand, it reifies an understanding of risk as physical impacts, rather than say, social, economic, or psychological exposure. At the same time, it is worth noting that this discourse has different meanings for fishers compared to government actors. While for the government nature is to blame for harm, for the fishers no-one is to blame for harm because these weather patterns are natural processes that can’t be helped. That is for the fishers, the weather (nature) is something that humans inevitably must live with, whereas for the government weather is something humans can and must be protected from. And while for the fisher there is little separation between humans and nature, for the government this separation is a core justification for their risk policies of protecting humans from it.
This dominant discourse of risk as naturally occurring in the physical environment is performed through weather prediction, warning systems, and evacuation protocols. These activities are carried out by both government actors and by fishers who are legally required to obey risk protocols. As a senior official at the civil protection explained, “understanding and mapping deep cloud structures is the key to minimizing risks”. Risk here is meteorological (not sociopolitical). Mapping the weather, and the artifacts and activities that accompany these processes uphold and shape risk as a physical, mathematical, mappable, and apolitical phenomenon. The physicality of these artifacts and objective register of these practices also work to render the question of what risk is settled, not open to debate. For example, when asked about the causes of hurricane vulnerability, nearly all government officers responded with a detailed description of how storms and hurricanes are generated: “if a storm is forming – and the majority are formed in the Caribbean and then gain strength in the Gulf of Tehuantepec, which is the most famous cyclonic zone in the pacific (and all the tropical zones that form here will become hurricanes) then, depending on the magnitude or the evolution that it has, we begin to alert the population” (civil protection officer). Such descriptions of risk as a meteorological phenomena rolled off the tongue, were rendered fixed and unquestionable through their performance and reperformance in trainings and the testing of protocols, and evinced in the undeniable shared experiences of bad weather. Fishers also reified these visions of risk-as-weather through their legal obligation to participate in policies of weather communication and security, such as the receipt of SMS warnings, obeying the red warning flags that are put out on the beach when a storm is predicted, and the life jackets they must carry on their boats.
Laws and protocols are hence important sources of the performance of Puerto Escondido's risk epistemologies. Indeed, the government often expressed cyclone risk as a function of citizen responsibility and tendency to obey port laws. For many government employees, law obedience and physical safety are inseparable: “we try to protect the lives of the fishers, and mainly this is done by ensuring that they obey the law…We monitor and ensure that the boats have their registration and their safety kits to protect themselves – vest, windshields etc.” Following hurricane protocols is hence the solution to hurricane risk: “since Hurricane Paulina, the people now know what they have to do when we emit meteorological bulletins, and they adopt preventative measures. It's a shame that this misfortune had to happen for them to listen.” Fisher vulnerability becomes a function of their acceptance or rejection of government authority here. Not obeying the law, not taking responsibility for yourself, and not properly understanding the risks that you face all become synonymous problems of fisher behavior that cause exposure to hurricane risk—and reiterate a vision of risk as an exogenous, direct physical threat to the body, rather than something that is endogenous to political society. At the same time, the law's focus on the necessity of safety kits reifies a particular temporal dimension of risk: risk happens in the immediate moment that the storm is happening, not the vulnerability that has been generated via long-term sociopolitical histories (and for which life jackets would be little use).
Lastly, biophysical risk epistemologies are articulated through language that is concise, straightforward, structured, and scalable and thereby communicable without ambiguity as to what the risk is. This linguistic style grants authority to physical visions of hurricane risk by rendering them simple, one-dimensional, and incontestable. Examples include basic meteorological updates expressed through graphs, tables, diagrams and numbers. This simplicity also makes a physical epistemology of risk mobile and scalable, as these numbers and graphs can be quickly input into hurricane protocol and communicated via linear strategies and technologies such as loudspeakers, SMS, radio, posters and television broadcasts. A biophysical risk epistemology is thereby converted into simple and minimal language, which disseminates this (supposedly) unambiguous expression of exposure.
For example, the simple codes and signifiers of the hurricane protocol depend upon a simple vision of physical risk. One day the Port Captain explained, “if [the hurricane] intensifies, every six hours, it is a constant monitoring from when they start, to when they form as tropical depressions, to when they turn into tropical storms, and hurricanes. Then we put a number – 1,2,3,4” (Port Captain). The notion of safety as corporeal, temporally bounded, and apolitical is reified here through tables, maps, and color coding and their performance through the protocol's repitition. When asked about hurricane policy, ten out of thirteen officials interviewed recited the communication strategy, some tapping their fingers, exasperated, to indicate the incontrovertibility of this risk truth. As one government employee said frustratedly, “we explain all of this with very small words, so that people understand. That is to say, they are not difficult terms. We explain it with simple words. Also when we give training, depending on who we are talking with, we use different language so that people understand”. The articulation of risk through such simple expressions as tables and maps here reinforces its incontrovertability such that the problem becomes simply that people just won’t listen—or can’t comprehend the language.
These three themes express risk as natural, physical, and meteorological, assured via obedience to government protocols, and communicated via simple linguistic signs, graphs, and tables that are simple and detachable. They exclude more complex, sociopolitical, and temporally distributed visions of vulnerability that aren’t so easily reified or communicated. The next section examines how these epistemologies become authoritative through the expectations that fishers and the state have of each other within Puerto Escondido's sociopolitical order.
Fisher expectations of democracy
What expectations do Puerto Escondido's fishers have of the sociopolitical order in which they carry out their lives and livelihoods? And how do these expectations influence the authority of biophysical risk epistemologies, and consequently, the audibility of their demands? The fishers interviewed expressed deeply-held opinions about what democracy meant and how it was experienced in Mexico's political order. Most prominently, corruption was a focus of nearly every discussion, bringing with it a deep sense of frustration of trusting politicians and cynicism towards the electoral process and the sociopolitical order in general. This coalesced around two interrelated sets of expectations about the democracy in which they saw themselves as embedded, which paradoxically worked to lend legitimacy to a biophysical epistemology of risk that they cognitively found problematic: (i) that seeking help from the government was futile, and (ii) that fishers should maintain their independence from government as much as possible.
A sense of futility in seeking support was a key theme in fisher discussions of the risks they faced from storms. This feeling was derived from an expectation that the government would always behave corruptly to serve its own economic needs, and since they were poor, fishers stood no chance of making the government listen and respond to their demands. Asked about how the government could help them, many interviewees simply responded that, “politicians just help those with money”. This expectation of automatic rejection from the government was shot through with fear of violence. Speaking of his joy at the recent election of Obrador in 2018, who was elected on a promise of cleaning up national politics, one fisher noted that, “any government that wants to carry out these rights, they kill you. And this is the risk this government is running, that they are killed. The truth is, in Mexico, it's really difficult”. For the fishers, both their expectation—and fear—of government corruption (at both a local and a national scale) means it is not worth approaching them to attain the kind of support they require to attend to their vulnerabilities. This expectation leads them to seek assistance elsewhere—to actively distance themselves from the government—as this remark from Jesús indicates: “they only help distinguished people, those who are connected. You might get a boat or an engine if you’re lucky. But most look after themselves. We’ll go to the bank, a company but not the government. Never the government”. This sense of futility reifies biophysical epistemologies of cyclone risk in Puerto Escondido, because it perpetuates the notion that economic risk is something that the government will not assist with.
At the same time, this expectation does not stop the fishers from cognitively thinking the government should support them. Many fishers expressed a sense of injustice and frustration; and all interviewees felt acutely aware that their social contract with the government was unfair. For Luis, this was expressed in the simple feeling that if fishers obey government laws, then the government should help them in return: “we have a certificate, which we pay for, and with that credential we have the right to fish. Ok. So now we are registered with the government. They take us into account with that concept. Therefore we would like them to support us during the rainy season”. There is a sense of transactional justice here that the fishers feel the government, even if it is regarded as corrupt, should respect. At the same time, they fully expect them not to, and accept this injustice with a heavy-hearted resignation. As Mario said, “they give us very little, but what are we going to do? We can’t ask for more. You have to accept what they give you”. This gap between what is desired and what is expected shows how expectations reflect unwanted experiences of risk. It also shows how expecting the government to neglect their needs prevents fishers from making more concerted demands of the authorities, since they are resigned to not receiving anything, which authorizes an approach to risk focused solely on physical safety, and not the economic support that they require. In this way, their expectations about their democratic context serve to uphold undesirable epistemic (and hence policy) outcomes.
This sense of futility in engaging with the government about the complex risks they face often grows into a resolve that it is better to live independently. Luis, discussing his desire for greater support for fishers during the rainy season, indicates this connection between a perceived pointlessness of turning to the govenment and a move towards separation and self-sufficiency: “The government says it's going to support you, it tells you it's coming tomorrow, tomorrow they don’t come, you set yet another date, until you get angry and give up. And you ask yourself, why do I keep doing this when they pay me no attention? This is the reality. And then you just think I’ll look after myself. That's the way it is, unfortunately.”
This independence often takes the form of a conscious rejection of a perceived immoral code. Discussing the role the government plays in minimizing their risks from hurricanes, José Luis commented that, “we look for ways to solve our problems ourselves…we don’t want it [government assistance] that much because then the people who have the government think that the government has them, but then they cheat and exploit you. And this is not what we want. So it is preferable not to get into all that… We earn our tortillas without any help from the government. We earn them alone”. Here, rejection of the government's moral code is also a rejection of assistance, which upholds and shapes risk epistemologies that do not include livelihood support. In this sense, fisher’s assertion of economic independence is not simply a strategy for livelihood survival—“don’t depend upon those who can’t be trusted”—but also a moral identity, and enacting this epistemology is so entangled with enacting membership in a particular marginalized civic community. Ignacio made a similar comment to that of José Luis, but emphasized how independence from government is also foundational to how they see themselves: “fishing is a way of being free. We are not constrained. If we want to earn money, we give ourselves to our work, and if we don’t want to earn, we sleep and earn nothing. No one will ask us, ‘why aren’t you working?’… this is freedom. The police don’t come and tell us we are drunk so we cannot go to sea. The police don’t tell us anything. We are independent”.
This shows how the political expectations of marginalized civics concerning their own roles and identities have epistemic effects. That is, by signaling to one another their affirmation of a cultural code of independence from the state, fishers contribute to political-epistemic orders that uphold physical framings of risk since, by asserting this distinction between themselves and the state, fishers reinforce an order in which their livelihood vulnerability is separate from political accountability. Their active rejection of government interference as a core of their cultural identity and authority shows how self-expectations of the roles that the civic should play vis-à-vis the state can un-cognitively reinforce undesired visions of risk.
Another arena in which the signaling of a cultural code reifies a physical risk epistemology is in fishers’ expression of their unique relationship to nature. As discussed above, fishers regarded themselves as embedded within, not separate from, nature. Articulating this relationship involved articulating membership with a unique and specific civic culture. Here, nature is regarded as the pure, incorruptible opposite of Mexican politics as represented by the state and its policies on hurricane risk governance. By being in nature through their livelihood, fishers hence retreat to a space that represents freedom from a corrupt and immoral political-human existence. Nature is also a space where, through their unique connection to and understanding of the sea, fishers expressed feeling in control, in contrast to the seemingly capricious domain of corrupt sociopolitical life in Puerto Escondido. Another key aspect of this cultural identity involves pride in their livelihood as inherently dangerous, because this danger derives from being subjected to the sea's wild and natural forces: “it's very risky to be in nature like that, every day. It is like the lottery. If you have luck you win. But if not you will lose. You are with god every day”.
Nature here represents a danger that is pure, honest, and noble, in direct contrast to the danger associated with corrupt politics. Much self-worth and cultural capital are derived from being subjected to these forces. Yet, assertion of membership to this civic via the performance of this relationship to nature also serves to uphold the dominant biophysical risk epistemology by positing nature as the cause of hurricane risk. In this way, the fishers’ cultural code upholds a vision of risk as external, natural, physical, and unpredictable, and forecloses alternative approaches to vulnerability based on the livelihood support that they cognitively desire. As such fisher expectations of the state produced relationally with—the expectations they have of themselves as a community. This shows how multiple, interrelated expectations grant social authority to knowledge that is cognitively undesired or reductive. It also indicates avenues through which political-epistemic orders might be altered or governed.
Government expectations of democracy
How do the expectations that the government has of itself, its citizens, and the broader political order condition CEs of risk in Oaxaca? Conversations with government employees revealed that government officials expect all citizens to only engage with a fraction of their disaster expertise, and that there are additional, specific expectations of fishers in particular, which are discussed below. A common complaint was that Oaxacan citizens do not understand the risks they face, nor do they understand that following government protocols helps them. This was frequently expressed as citizens lacking a “culture of protection”. As one officer in PE said, “we face many challenges, but the primary one is the culture of the people. We don’t have a culture of prevention. All Mexicans – all the people on the coast – say ‘never mind…there is a team that will protect us, so we don’t need to worry’…it's the culture. We don’t have the right culture”. Yet, officials also found this alleged lack of culture hard to account for. Many regarded it as something that could be fixed by streamlining hazard communication: “the structure is there, what we need to do is permeate into society what they need to do to prepare and protect themselves” (PC Enlace Oaxaca). Others regarded it as an intrinsic psychological-cultural relationship with environmental danger—“Mexicans forget the most quickly. At the moment everyone is worried about earthquakes. Oaxacans have already forgotten the impact that hurricanes have on them. Then the earthquakes will pass…At least in Costa Rica, Chile, over there, with regards to the culture, it is there”. But when pushed on why this culture exists in those countries but not Mexico, there was a tentative recognition that this could not be blamed on the inexperience of physical risks: “Yes, we have a long history of disasters, hurricanes, volcanoes, fires, explosions. Many chemical and road accidents, every day there is loss of life. But the people still don’t have the culture”.
The most common explanation for Oaxacans’ lack of a culture of protection was their tendency towards political protest. Schools were regarded as the biggest impediment in this regard, which was traced to a violent demonstration that occurred in 2006 when the state governor refused to concede to teaching union demands for pay increases. Persistent mistrust between teacher unions and the government is directly reflected in the way government officials explain the lack of a culture of protection, and hence the cause of citizen risk. This is most evident in the anger officials expressed towards teachers for withholding access to schools, hampering their capacity to create the culture they envision:
- “Twenty years ago, we started with the civil protection in the education sector. It took a lot of work, going to the schools to do the training. We managed to train just 500 schools in 15 years, out of 13 thousand.” - “Why so few?” - “The teaching establishment is very complicated here in Mexico. In Oaxaca it is the worst They are against the system. Like the Irish who don’t want to be part of the island, no? Although they are obedient to an extent, they rule the roost and respect no one here. And if it is an order from above, then even less so, because they don’t want you to order them. So they don’t allow us to come into the schools.”
The expectations that government employees have of Oaxacans here shapes how they think about hurricane risk. Officials do not expect to be able to work closely with citizens (as attention to their livelihood needs would require), and focusing on the external, meteorological dimensions of risk articulates and maintains that distance. Addressing complex socioeconomic determinants of vulnerability would require engaging in political-economic discussions with citizens, which is regarded as dangerous given Oaxacans’ propensity for political protest. It is better to just focus on the apolitical task of moving them physically out of harm's way. In this way, government expectations of Oaxacans' behaviour leads it to govern cyclones using predominantly biophysical epistemologies of risk.
Fishers, as a specific marginalized and separate social group, are expected to behave with an autonomy that reflects a particular imagining of their culture and identity. For example, a government official notes that fishers “aren’t businessmen, they are pure fishers. I’ll give you a very clear example. A fisher catches a marlin. Let's suppose its various kilos, so you say, why don’t you filet it and sell it for a higher price? But he says, no, no, and sells it to the permit-holder for much less. And the permit-holder makes a lot of money”. To the government, fishers behave in an economically dysfunctional way. More specifically, the government expects fishers to behave in a way that excludes themselves from the wider national economy. When seen through the lens of hurricane risk, this expected economic independence generates a CE in which economic vulnerability is not the responsibility of the state. Rather, fisher economic vulnerability is their own responsibility, a result of their unique sociocultural and behavioral makeup, not the responsibility of structural disadvantages, and hence not improvable by government policies. In this way, the economic vulnerability of fishers becomes seen as fixed - not able to be changed by any policies the government might develop.
Fishers are also expected to be rule-breaking, adventure-seeking, and sometimes irrational—inalienable cultural traits that government employees frequently regarded as the predominant cause of their vulnerability: “many fishers dedicate themselves to sharks, they go out 25–30 miles. They’re crazy, reckless. They will get, say, one fish. Their boats don’t ensure their safety if conditions worsen”. When asked why they do this, the government official responded that, “they’re foolhardy. This is a word we use for people who are brave, but in a stupid way”. These characteristics are viewed as innate to who fishers are, rather than a trait that could be changed by greater welfare assistance or a more trusting relationship with the government. In this way fisher risk becomes a function of their identity and culture, rather than socioeconomic factors that government policies could address.
Relatedly, fishers are not expected to abide by government laws. As one official explained, “a fisher will say ‘I needed to do illegal fishing because I don’t have anything to eat’, but they planned to do it. I don’t know why they don’t obey the law, it's something we have to work on”. Fishers here become a law unto themselves: “there are many who have these customs [of illegal fishing], ideology – they have done it all their lives”. There is a distance here between the government and its fisher citizens: the government does not meddle in their lives any more than it needs to, leading to the most basic and fundamental: pure, apolitical corporeal safety. The following comment from a government official illustrates this perceived and accepted separateness as something the fisher’s desire: “the fishers, yes it's complicated. They don’t want to stop doing what they want to do. So they have formed institutions like the fishing cooperatives, which were formed with the goal of making them more powerful” (Port Captain). These expectations of recklessness, rule-breaking, and separation justify an epistemic rendering of risk as the provision of fundamental corporeal safety and nothing more.
Government expectations of citizens are also inextricable from their expectations of themselves and Oaxaca's political order. Many officials said that the development of Civil Protection departments was crippled by the political system of appointing its heads. As one employee explained, “the problem is that the positions are political. There's no continuity…when there's an election, it's like, ‘Luis, you’ve never worked, but work for the company! Come and be director of the Civil Protection!’” Municipal presidencies last 3 years in Mexico and, “in three years you can scarcely develop the programmes. Then the new person brings his new ideas and throws out the previous plans. And we start all over again. And it's a never ending story”. The inadequacies of hurricane risk governance here are a problem of short election cycles and an endemic culture of political graft. The system of usos y costumbres is also regarded as an impediment to proper governance of risk, as one official explained, “unfortunately the laws in Oaxaca don’t function in the same way as in your country. Here we are a pluri-cultural state…the authorities arrive at an agreement with the syndicates…they generate a compromise and in return they are allowed to build in areas that are not suitable for living”. Here, government employees see a limited capacity to develop more complex policies of long-term structural socioeconomic support, because it might be overturned by your successor or blocked through the historical political arrangements through which Oaxaca maintains its social order. Expecting the politics of the Civil Protection department to be limited thereby limits the expectations officials have for implementing different, more complex visions of risk. These expectations uphold simple, replicable ways of knowing vulnerability, for example through the repetition of protocols for physical safety, because they don’t foresee having the longevity to develop alternative approaches.
A democratic deluge: Expectations and epistemic agency in climate governance
How can the knowledge of marginalized actors be made more audible in inclusive climate policy making? This article has argued that the epistemic agency of marginalized actors can be better understood by examining how local environmental knowledge is mediated by civic epistemologies (CEs), but also that this might require expanding how CEs are conceptualized in fractured or highly contested democratic contexts with marginalized civics. In this article, CEs were conceptualized as expectations of democracy in Puerto Escondido's storm risk governance. Analysis showed how expectations of marginalized fishers and the state around the local sociopolitical order reified biophysical risk epistemologies, despite fishers cognitively seeking more socioeconomic approaches to their vulnerabilities. In this way expectations of democracy mediated the visibility of the socioeconomic risk epistemologies that fishers cognitively sought to promote, affecting their epistemic agency. With this analysis, I sought to advance inclusive approaches to climate governance—and understanding of CEs in contested political locations—in at least three ways.
First, much work seeking to disrupt dominant risk epistemologies has sought to make the processes of participatory knowledge production more equitable. Examining CEs indicates how the epistemic agency of marginalized actors might still remain weak even when actors procedurally have equal opportunities to speak and participate, because of the broader and noncognitive political-epistemic structures that mediate the audibility of their statements. For example, despite voicing alternative approaches to cyclone risk, the audibility of fisher demands in Puerto Escondido was mediated by their expectations of the political order and government expectations of their behaviour. This suggests that new policy approaches for making inclusive climate risk expertise need to address not simply the visible formats of participatory spaces, but also how the less visible sociopolitical structures in which these participatory activities take place influence what solutions are deemed acceptable.
Second, this research adds to current scholarship that seeks to understand how relations between contested, shifting boundaries of society, the state, and the environment contain opportunities for alternative epistemologies to emerge and shape climate governance. By examining specifically how expectations of democracy mediate the articulation and authorization of biophysical visions of risk, the article highlights how constitutional relations between citizens, the state, and the environment shape the epistemic agency of marginalized actors and their alternative visions for living with climate risk. Moreover, it suggests avenues—expectations—through which these constitutional relations—and associated political-epistemic orders—might be refashioned. For example, changing political events that would alter fisher expectations around the allegedly corrupt behavior of the government might prompt fishers to trust that they could ask for and receive more economic support, and thereby enable socioeconomic visions of vulnerability to gain greater authority amid the constitutional relations of citizens and the state. This also highlights how transforming climate policy requires understanding political-epistemic relations between citizens and the state, which can be accessed by investigating expectations.
Third, this work also adds to scholarship on CEs. Much work on CEs explained the authorization of knowledge in society through the epistemic work of a liberal, cohesive civic that has reliable access to due process and institutionalized forms of deliberation. That is, the civic of CEs has tended to be conceived as a reflection of liberal democratic norms and institutions. Thinking of CEs as mutually dependent and intersubjective expectations of democracy enables their effects to be examined in contexts where the civic is not characterized by these norms, but where democracy might be more contested. This opens space for examining the capacity of marginalized actors—those who may be traditionally considered as existing outside a cohesive liberal democratic civic—to shape CEs and not just deploy them. Moreover, examining CEs as expectations points to how they are shaped and deployed in noncognitive ways, and through undesired as well as desired anticipations of governmental behavior and outcomes.
As a final consideration, examining the epistemic agency of marginalized people through expectations of democracy might also involve reflection on the role of academics in constituting and upholding CEs. Indeed, Spivak (1988: 84) argues that confronting and understanding the experiences of marginalized people requires not “constructing a homogenous Other”, which involves not representing them, but learning to represent ourselves. Many attempts to include marginalized voices fail to live up to their desired outcomes in part because of the expectations that scholars and policy makers have about the epistemic function they should perform. Including the work of academics in the domain of the civic might present opportunities for examining how our own ideas surrounding marginalization and participation circulate and with what effects.
Highlights
The epistemic agency of marginalized voices to influence climate expertise is mediated by civic epistemologies (CEs).
Understanding CEs as expectations of democracy can improve understanding of CEs in settings where the civic is fragmented or certain groups are marginalized.
In Puerto Escondido, Mexico the epistemic agency of marginalized fishers to influence hurricane risk expertise is mediated by their expectations of government corruption, and government expectations of fisher financial irrationality.
Examining democratic expectations indicates how CEs are fluid and mutable, revealing opportunities for intervention and change in the democratization of climate expertise.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.