Climate Research

Scientists have long since become accustomed to explaining the future value of their work. Nowadays token statements are no longer sufficient. Societal impact must be embedded in the organisation of research. The call for societal impact is most explicitly expressed in and actively shaped by trans-disciplinary research programmes. We have examined two questions related to compliance in the principal-agent relation between a programme and its projects. The first question concerns the risk of moral hazard: is societal actor involvement a token activity or a substantial component of the research process? The second question relates to possible adverse selection: does societal actor involvement produce the expected benefits and, if so, under which conditions? We surveyed members and project leaders of 178 projects in two transdisciplinary climate research programmes in The Netherlands. There is no reason to suspect large-scale moral hazard. Projects formally labelled as transdisciplinary have characteristics typically associated with transdisciplinarity but academic projects share those characteristics. Neither is there reason to suspect adverse selection. The archetypical properties of transdisciplinary research are associated with the expected societal benefits. An important finding is that there are different types of benefit, each of which requires its own approach. Benefit is achieved through informal involvement and a diversity of outputs, and much less by giving societal actors a prominent role or influence in the research process. Based on our conclusions we recommend customizing the design of climate research programmes and projects towards the needs of the specific societal benefits they aim to generate and reconsidering the emphasis on formal involvement of societal actors in funding procedures.

This paper reports experiences from an art-science project set up in an educational context as well as in the tradition of placing artists in labs. It documents artists' and scientists' imaginations of their encounter and analyses them drawing on the concepts of ''boundary object'' and ''boundary work''. Conceptually, the paper argues to broaden the idea of boundary objects to include inhibitory boundary objects that hinder rather than facilitate communication across boundaries. This focus on failures to link social worlds brings the boundary object concept closer to Gieryn's boundary work and allows for a co-application of the two concepts in the analysis of cross-boundary communication. Empirically, the paper provides an in-depth ethnographic description of an art-science project as a resource for future practice. In conclusion, the art-science encounter included meeting points as well as multiple levels of boundary work which engaged the artists in a different way than as illustrators of scientific representations of climate change. The closer they got to the research practice the more the public and policy construct of climate change disappeared. Rather than political activism, the approach triggered explorations of the scientific context, including affirmative as well as critical re-imaginations of research practices. Artists and scientists acted as publics for one another, as resources to draw on for reflection and self-identification. But instead of cutting back or renegotiating standards of one's own practice, especially the artists engaged in boundary work creating space to produce a piece of art according to their own criteria of quality and relevance.

Recent surveys show that the communication about climate change between science and the public is severely disturbed. In this article we discuss this problem in focusing on both regional climate services and other, local forms of knowledge. The authors suggest that climate science and its public services have to critically revise their own practices and to acknowledge other forms of knowledge about climate as constitutive. Based on approaches from geography and anthropology, the article first discusses the short history and "normal practices" of regional climate services and how they approach the public. Outlining the potentials and constraints of this concept, the article focuses on the friction, on "its openness to change as it rubs up against society" (Hulme 2007). The focus then shifts to local knowledge systems and how they deal with the challenges of a changing climate. In addition to the "extended peer review" as a new option for climate research in a post-normal setup, the authors discuss the possibility of an "extended knowledge basis," that is, the integration of different forms of climate knowledge with a special focus on regional populations.

The synthesis project is an elemental part of the MSc Geomatics program. The students use their knowledge on positioning technologies, location-based services, 3D modeling and geoinformation systems in all different phases of the geo-information chain. A learning objective from an educational point of view is the valuable experience of project management and teamwork within the OTB institute of the TU Delft.