In industrialized societies, scientists often serve as experts to both government and industry on issues ranging from natural resource management to environmental protection. In contrast, in many developing countries, the position of experts is informal, erratic or invisible. This dissertation asks how scientific research groups differ in terms of their connections to government and industry in a rapidly developing country, Chile, and what impact this has on the nature, purpose and dissemination of their environmental research activities.
Intellectual Merit: Network analysis is used to map the flow of environmental knowledge from four communities where it is produced - physicists, ecologists, geologists, and forest scientists - to two types of users - government and industry. These four successful scientific communities occupy very different organizations, from traditional public universities to loosely networked institutes. The interviews provide a better understanding of how these science and non-science communities interact and mutually shape each others' agendas. The PIs also undertake a statistical analysis of submitted and approved research proposals to the Chilean equivalent of the National Science Foundation to examine how political and scientific priorities have shifted in the past 30 years, and how these shifts relate to changing political conditions.
Broader Impact: Chile is Latin America's economic success story, yet the country continues to rely on natural resource extraction for economic growth and faces intractable levels of inequality. There is little understanding of the role that can be played by the scientific community in Latin America, despite the doubling of the science budgets in response to science and innovation policies recommended by the World Bank. This research provides empirical evidence on how Chilean scientists relate to science-users in industry and government, whether these relationships favor the production of environmental science in the public interest or impact the forms of disseminating knowledge used, and how scientific interests respond to changing political priorities.
Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) are highly technocratic and common policy tools for managing the environmental impacts of economic projects. EIAs can be thought of as "registers of objectivity", institutionalized practices that create objective knowledge in the public sphere. Although considered an exemplary developing country with a tradition for technocracy, Chile has lived a number of intense conflicts around the EIA. The information produced through the EIA process is increasingly central in environmental conflicts. In the conflict around the pulp mill Celco Valdivia (2004-05), the EIA was largely irrelevant. During the Pascua Lama mining conflict, from 2001 to 2004, glaciologists were increasingly called on to produce more and better information for the EIA. Most recently (2008-10), the hydroelectric project HidroAysén’s EIA is an inventory of the landscape meant to inspire confidence in the state’s and the firm’s capacity to protect it. Through the lens of civic epistemology and registers of objectivity, tensions related to disagreements over what counts as independent or prestigious science emerge as important in these three conflicts. University scientists and environmental consultants are the knowledge producers in Chile’s EIA system. The viewing public includes firms, government agencies, and communities, and within each of these there are different viewing practices. Their attention is increasingly focused on baseline descriptions of the landscape, a far cry from risk and impact assessments. As evidenced by the EIA, public demonstration practices are contested in Chile, posing a special challenge for a country seeking to build effective democracy with real accountability. I am currently writing my dissertation and continue to analyze the information collected under my NSF award. Results are therefore still tentative. Overall, there is a tension between a desire to trust in numbers to depoliticize issues and a deep distrust of numbers due to the conditions underwhich they are generated. These conditions are driven by the market for knowledge, that privileges low cost, fast information, and where actors disagree whether "he who pays the piper picks the tune". This produces a governance gap that accumulates frustration and breeds further distrust. Standard responses - accountability, transparency, better technical expertise - are of limited effectiveness in addressing the gap.
