'Our' Science, 'Their' Science-Conflicting Agendas and Disputed Theories Concerning Amazonia

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This project involves ethnographic study of the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere (LBA) project, a US, EU, and Brazil funded international science initiative focused on the sustainability of Amazonia and its role in regulating the global environment. The research examines how science and politics shape each other in international affairs involving the global environment. The project attends to the interpretation, mobilization and contestation of science as it is produced and discussed within the LBA. Competing interpretations advanced by US, EU and Brazilian LBA scientists are examined, with special attention to Brazilian scientists and to uses and impacts of the various interpretations for Brazil at the levels of national and international politics. The study explores suggestions that the forestry-related positions that national governments take under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) map onto differences in hypotheses generation. The views of US and EU LBA scientists about the role of the Amazon in the global carbon cycle are studied for their correlations with national governments' positions. To the extent that similar cohesion at the national level is lacking among Brazilian scientists, this fact will be identified and analyzed. The proposed research involves full-time fieldwork in Brazil. The investigator will use a variety of methods to study LBA leaders and participants, as well as relevant science administrators and policy makers and environmental NGO representatives in Brazil. These include semi-structured interviews; a survey derived from interview data and from other surveys of environmental values in the US, EU, and Brazil; participant-observation; social network and media analyses; and archival research. The International Division of the National Science Foundation is also contributing to the support of this research. The study will improve understanding of the interplay of science, culture, power and politics in international affairs and of the fragmented nature of "epistemic communities" as social units variously bound and unbound by national, transnational and geopolitical frames of meaning. Ethnographic tracking of the links between macro and micro processes will contribute to efforts in many disciplines to identify these interactions and explore their relevance for environmental governance. The study will promote discussion between the social and natural sciences in the multidisciplinary field of global change research. Study products will include publications; conference and seminar presentations; informal exchanges with global change scientists and policy analysts; and collaborations with social scientists in Brazil and the US. Products from this study will also be made accessible through websites at Harvard University and the University of Colorado designed to disseminate global change science research and policy studies (www.sustainabilityscience.org and http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu). The study has important pedagogical dimensions involving students and curriculum development in both the US and Brazil. Longer-term outcomes include hoped-for contribution to the formation of more robust institutions to address global environmental issues and understanding of the limits of universalism and objectivity in science. Results can serve to reduce (1) political use of these concepts to advance what are in fact more locally-framed concerns and interests and (2) suspicions and controversies about scientific objectivity and value neutrality among actors whose perspectives and experiences lead them to doubt.