Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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et al., 2014b). We were wrong. As it turned out, climate adaptation was way too rich for such a “small” project. Though adaptation is only one of the facets of the discussion on climate change, its complexity is breathtaking for at least four reasons.
First, adaptation is largely (although not entirely) a problem of the future. The debate does not concern how we have messed up the climate in the past or what we can do to fix it in the present, but rather what we will do when the effects of climate change eventually hit us in the future. Since we do not know exactly what these effects will be, a first set of disagreements concerns questions of prediction, modeling, and simulation, such as how bad climate change will be, how fast it will unfold, and who or where it will hit first.
Second, the adaptation debate is multiplied by the diversity of local microclimates and communities. Another set of disagreements thus concerns the priorities of adaptation: which regions will be more vulnerable to climate impacts; which sectors will be more affected; and which arrangements will make our societies more flexible and resilient.
Third, adaptation involves the transformation of existing sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, infrastructure, industrial production, rural land use, or cities, and discussions about adaptation therefore always become mixed up with pre-existing sociotechnical debates. This leads to disagreements about what should count as an adaptation action and whether they are genuinely an additional effort or merely a re-branding of pre-existing engagements.
Fourth, adaptation mobilizes an increasing amount of human and financial resources. Social and institutional actors know this all too well and use climate adaptation as leverage to advance other interests, just as they use other interests as leverage to advance climate adaptation. A last set of disagreements therefore concerns who should fund adaptation, who should benefit from the funding, through which channels these resources should flow, who should decide how to use them, and who should assess the results.
Because of these four sources of disagreement, adaptation constitutes an exceedingly multiple controversy. This, of course, does not mean that it does not deserve to be mapped. On the contrary, adaptation turned out to be one of the most interesting controversies we have ever worked on. It does mean, however, that the practicalities of the cartography are a mouthful even for a large and well-resourced project.
Cold and hot controversies
We have argued above that the main attraction of controversies is their ability to break open black boxes that would otherwise remain sealed. But opening up what is taken for granted requires work (at least as much as was invested in its black boxing) that actors are very unlikely to undertake unless forced to by the situation. Controversies serve as forges where, as Sarah Whatmore puts it, “the things on which we rely as unexamined parts of the material fabric of our everyday lives become molten and make their agential force felt” (Whatmore, 2009, pp. 588–9). Just like real forges, however, they only work if they are hot enough to unsettle existing arrangements and push actors to contest them explicitly. Callon’s definition of a “cold situation” provides a counterexample:
In “cold” situations, on the other hand, agreement regarding ongoing overflows is swiftly achieved. Actors are identified, interests are stabilized, preferences can be expressed, responsibilities are acknowledged and accepted. The possible world states are already known or easy to identify: calculated decisions can be taken. The sudden (but nevertheless foreseeable because already experienced) pollution of a watercourse by a chemical factory falls into this category: sensors are already calibrated, analytical procedures are codified; the protagonists already know how to calculate their costs and benefits and are ready to negotiate (if necessary on the basis of clearly formulated insurance contracts) in order to determine the level of compensation payable. (Callon, 1998, p. 261)
In practice, this often translates into prioritizing issues that are hot at the moment the mapping takes place. It is not impossible to study past disputes by drawing on archives and documents, but it is generally more difficult both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, because once an issue is closed it is difficult to resist the temptation to “naturalize” its outcome and believe that the dispute could not have played out differently. Practically, because the actors will be less willing to offer their testimonies: those who “won” the conflict will present the conclusion as unavoidable; those who lost may prefer to forget about it. The black boxes are closed and few people are motivated to reopen them. Cartographers, in this situation, cannot just “follow” or “monitor” their objects, but are forced to “excavate” and “reconstruct” them.
The same is true, a fortiori, for upcoming issues: everyone expects some new product to revolutionize the market; some new law to wreak havoc once adopted by parliament; some new technology to incur moral objections when developed. Yet, until this actually happens there is little for the controversy mapper to do. The temperature only rises when actors become “sufficiently affected by what is at issue” (Whatmore & Landström, 2011, p. 583).
Commonplace and specialized controversies
While one might be tempted to pick issues that are trending over the media and on everybody’s lips, it is important not to mistake the liveliness of a controversy with its popularity. The mere number of people interested in a debate is not necessarily an indicator of its quality as a mapping subject. In fact, it is often better to stay clear of debates that are too commonplace and instead seek out more specialized discussions, in particular those with an expert component.
This penchant for scientific quarrels is not only a legacy of the STS origins of controversy mapping. Controversies are easier to follow in scholarly disputes than in other arenas. The quarrel about gravitational waves (Collins, 1975) lends itself more easily to the prying eyes of a controversy mapper than, for instance, the quarrel about the complicity of paparazzi and the sensationalist press in the death of Princess Diana (Bishop, 1999). True, one must pay the price of learning the specialized jargon of theoretical physics, but the very specificity of this jargon and the strict definitions of what counts as a valid argument can facilitate the analysis. This does not necessarily mean that scientific discussions are more rational or coherent, but it does mean they tend to abide by more formalized and disciplined rules of argumentation.
“Scientific” should here be understood in the widest possible sense and certainly not restricted to the natural sciences. Disciplines such as ecclesiology, art history, and pedagogy offer great and feasible topics for controversy analysis (see, respectively, Flesseman-van Leer, 1962 on the dispute between Thomas More and William Tyndale; Senie & Webster, 1992 for a whole anthology of controversies surrounding public art; Dworkin & Block, 1976 on the longstanding debate about IQ measures) because they mobilize specialized knowledge, a well-defined research community, and a specific set of actions and arguments. Furthermore, scientific controversies do not necessarily happen within the walls of a laboratory and are not limited to “white coats” (see Lorenzet, 2013, pp. 47–51).
The advice to privilege controversies with an expert component, therefore, is less strict than it sounds. In fact, it is difficult to find a debate that does not concern, at least in part, some field of expertise. We mentioned the coverage of Princess Diana’s death as a “commonplace controversy,” but also provided a reference – Bishop (1999) – proving that even popular debate is indeed studied (and thereby made more legible) by an academic discipline (in this case, Bishop analyzed the debate from the viewpoint of journalism studies, to show how the discussion became the occasion for mainstream journalists to distance themselves from the tabloid press).
Secret and accessible controversies
To be mapped, a dispute must be available for observation. Sensitive or classified issues that have been purposely removed from public scrutiny therefore make difficult topics. This does not mean they are not interesting. It simply means that their investigation would have to overcome some overwhelming odds (Galison, 2005). The discussions around the September 11 attacks, for instance, may be fascinating,