Methods one: engaging with climate risk technologists

The major problem in [the systems simulation modelling] framework is likely to be communication both between disciplines and with decision- makers. The ultimate limitation on the utility of simulation models (and indeed of the scientific method) is the significance of the qualitative. It is politic to recall Julian Huxley’s observation: ‘When everything has been reduced to mathematics something essential has been evaporated from reality’ (White 1978:84).

In this chapter I tell the story of my engagement with climate risk technologists. My involvement with these researchers was not solely as an interviewer. Instead, I became a fringe-dweller among climate risk technologists, a reflexive participant in my community of study. This chapter, therefore, provides a narrative of method.

Before proceeding, I would like to note the terminology used in Part 2 of the thesis. I refer to researcher interviewees as ‘participants’, and reference their quotes using an interview code prefixed with an ‘R’ for researcher, as distinct from the geographical prefixes relating to study areas used for grazier quotes in Part 3. I have occasionally used pseudonyms for participants to preserve anonymity. Other identifiers such as organisation or discipline of participants are provided only where they do not allow easy identification of subjects, and in cases where such information serves an analytic purpose. Otherwise, information that might identify subjects has been removed, except in the case of two prominent participants who consented to this identification in the contexts in which I have quoted them. These two participants – Dr Neville Nicholls and Dr Roger Stone – were identified because the quotes used were not de-identifiable within their community without losing their meaning.

Funding and proximity to the research community

In planning this research, I quickly realised that it would be expensive, impossible without funds above and beyond the standard research budget allocated to doctoral candidates at the University of Tasmania. My intention was to interview graziers at home in the expansive semi-arid interior of eastern Australia. Intermittently on this field-trip, I intended to stop off in the towns and cities where climate risk technologists worked to interview these people as well. The fuel costs alone would be substantial. As an El Niño event was being deciphered in the equatorial Pacific, I made the first telephone call to seek funding.

Barry White, then coordinator of the Managing Climate Variability Program (MCVP), appeared interested in my research proposal. In retrospect, I expect Barry was pleased to hear about someone taking an approach that drew on the stories of people. Later, I was given a copy of the Barry White’s (1978) doctoral monograph in which he developed a systems approach to wool growing which spanned domains from the biophysical and behavioural, to economics and policy. His concluding thoughts, quoted above, were prescient of the qualitative work that I have undertaken.

At the time I contacted Barry, I believed quantitative research was institutionally appropriate. I proposed that, as part of my broader doctoral research, I would ask questions of graziers comparable to those climate applications researchers had asked previously in order to assess their ‘needs’ for climate information. In writing the proposal I sought advice from older and wiser colleagues and my supervisors, who advised that I should make the deliverables clear, and the epistemology realist. I crafted three primary objectives that gelled with my interpretation of the broader MCVP program:

1. determine how climate information is utilised and applied by sheep graziers in the three study areas;

2. investigate, the climate information needs of graziers with regard to reliability, preferred lead-time, delivery techniques and format, and; 3. analyse the data obtained to assess impediments to and opportunities for

improved management of climate variability within the study areas. The short version of a substantially more convoluted story is that the project was funded. The Land, Water & Wool (LWW) Managing Climate Variability sub- program would provide financial support for my field work. I would undertake an analysis of graziers’ ordinal, nominal and scale responses to questions that appeared to cohere with the LWW sub-program brief. I would write these up as a report to LWW and then get back to the thesis.

Being funded by LWW had unexpected side-effects in terms of my relationships with both graziers and scientists. I will discuss how funding affected relations with graziers in Chapter 7. The notable point for this chapter was that my position shifted from being outside a research community to being embedded, at least on its periphery. I was invited to attend meetings, to present seminars, to sit on the Review Panel for the LWW Climate Variability Sub-program. My work became a part of a larger initiative. The solitude of doctoral scholarship was punctuated by the obligations that funding imparts – milestones, reports, presentations, interactions. These were to align with the sub-program aim: to increase wool producer awareness and use of seasonal forecasts to contribute to sustainable grazing management. I was invited to watch the internal arguments, conditional, at least to some degree, on my participation in them. My research with researchers was transformed into a more participatory mode of qualitative and interpretive practice. For some of my participants, I became a colleague and collaborator on the socio-cultural edge of a diverse research network. Simply put, some deemed me and my work useful.

Generally, my research interest was in asking researchers and graziers to talk about their experience of climate variability and predictability in relation to their work and lives. I wanted to investigate these people’s relationships to climate variability, and how they made sense of climate and the various attendant

knowledges that go into producing climate. I wanted to ask researchers about how they came to be interested in climate variability, the particular challenges and opportunities in their area of work and in managing for climate variability more generally. I wanted them to explain to me what they saw as the critical issues in building a useful and useable science. I hoped the interviews would allow me to explore the constitution of boundaries among sciences, organisations, and especially among scientists, and between scientists and agricultural publics.

Recruiting researcher participants

A community of scientists or scholars, like any community, has soft edges that defy the drawing of lines which demarcate who is inside and who is outside. This is particularly the case when one tries to define a ‘community’ that operates across disciplinary boundaries, let alone when the group’s constitution is further loosened to include its political and public faces. Nonetheless, a literature search on climate variability in Australia quickly distinguished the luminaries, the collaborators, the old hands and the rising stars. One edited book in particular, Applications of Seasonal Climate Forecasting in Agricultural and Natural Ecosystems -: The Australian Experience (Hammer et al. 2000), seemed to more-or-less contain the community. Later I heard it referred to as ‘the blue book’ or ‘the bible’. Acknowledgements in this book were also rewarding for tracing the formation of a cross-disciplinary research community, as were bibliographies.

The research community that I would come to call ‘climate risk technologies’ was also usefully defined by its primary funding body. The Managing Climate Variability Program (MCVP) had contributed to a substantial volume of research. I tracked the history of funding allocations from the MCVP and its earlier manifestations keeping lists of who appeared to be key players and who they seemed preferentially to work with. Web searches of the print and broadcast media quickly pointed to key actors who represented climate variability in the public domain. I developed a list of the rough sub-groups I wanted to include. I

saw that some participants worked across these groups, in some cases all of them. Nonetheless the rough groupings were useful in selecting participants:

1. The key players in climate variability science, particularly the model- builders and those whose seminal work lay the foundations for further research;

2. Climate applications researchers who had integrated climate variability models and science into agricultural systems models, particularly pasture growth and grazing models;

3. The researchers and extensionists who had responsibility for communicating climate information to publics;

4. Researchers or bureaucrats who worked at the interface between climate variability science and policy development.

I selected participants under these sub-groups, limiting their number initially to 25 individuals. I allowed for a degree of snowballing (Biernacki and Waldorf 1981; Liamputtong and Ezzy 2005) which was largely prompted by asking participants whom they saw as important actors in their field, and gradually updating my list. I ended up recording 35 interviews with ‘researchers’.

Doing interviews

Prior to the fieldwork, I attended a conference called Droughtcom, hosted by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABoM) in Melbourne, in July 2003. Many of the researchers I hoped to interview were present. Many of the themes I hoped to ask them about were raised. Returning home from this conference, I drafted an interview schedule (Appendix 1) for climate risk technologists, drawing on themes that had been discussed. The interview schedule for scientist participants indicates that many questions are closed, and the interviews are structured. However, this schedule was used only as a guide in all interviews. I was keen to follow up on particular issues that would become the focus of my analyses; that is, regarding how knowledges are made and made to travel among epistemic communities. Thus the interviews were semi-structured. When I asked closed

questions, I noted that, in the setting of a semi-structured interview, giving people a choice of categories into which they were asked to fit seemed to provide opportunities to problematise such classifications. These problematisations were often useful for getting to grips with boundaries between knowledges, institutions and discourses and the argumentative positioning of actors.

In the interviews I also wanted participants to discuss their own work and how it fitted into the broader domain of climate risk technologies. Thus I read as many of each participant’s publications as I could prior to the interview, and raised questions that appeared to be key concerns for them in the interviews. Through focusing in on their work, I tried to encourage participants to express more about their positioning within the broader community and thus elucidate the boundary-work that is a key focus of this research. Such discussion of their own research and interests provided opportunities for individuals to express their positioning with regard to tensions within and across institutions, disciplines and discourses.

The field

Between September 2003 and March 2004, I completed 31 of the 35 interviews with researcher participants and interviewed 70 graziers (Chapter 7). Starting in Melbourne, I interviewed scientists in the two wings of the ABoM: the National Climate Centre (NCC) and the (then) Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre (BMRC)30_{. While the NCC provides climate information including seasonal} forecasts to the public and to other state and commonwealth agencies, the BMRC has several research groups which do much of the primary research and modelling underpinning the NCC’s information provision.

30 _{Unless otherwise indicated I have used the names of organisations during the time of} the interviews. In the intervening years, many of these names have changed or the groups have been disbanded altogether.

In Canberra I interviewed two individuals at the interface of science and policy in the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), as well as a private consultant who had a long work history at the boundary between science and policy.

From here, my wife, Cath, and I had planned to have a holiday for a month with our then 18 month old boy, Tarn, and then start the fieldwork. We intended to drive to Darwin, via the Flinders Ranges and Central Australia undertaking an interview or two along the way. We planned to steep ourselves in the top-end, its National Parks and waterholes. Then, well-rested, we would drive to Longreach where I would recommence interviewing graziers and researchers for the next three months, family in tow. As we prepared to leave Canberra, however, we realised Cath was pregnant. Nevertheless, we pushed on with our plans. The hideous ‘morning sickness’ of her first pregnancy returned, this time exacerbated by heat and the endless road. After a tortuous ‘holiday’, we rented a grimey flat in Longreach. The (then) Queensland Department of Primary Industry (QDPI) provided me office space as in-kind support for my LWW project. I interviewed a couple of people at the QDPI and conversed with many more. Mostly I organised and conducted interviews with graziers (see Chapter 7). Six weeks and 25 interviews later, we drove form Longreach to Brisbane. Cath and Tarn flew south and I continued on. I visited Toowoomba for a week, commuting from a caravan park to the QDPI offices for interviews with climate applications researchers and extensionists at the Predictive, Precision Systems (PPS) Business Unit.

I returned to Brisbane. Greg McKeon, then Principal Senior Scientist at the Climate Impacts and Natural Resources Science group at the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines (QDNR&M), had invited me to stay at his house. I had agreed. We had previously met on two occasions at conferences, and as with many of the researchers I interviewed, I was impressed by his passion and commitment. Yet, unlike most other researchers, he wanted to know what I knew, what I thought, and how I thought. During long commutes between his suburban home and the CINRS demountable offices, over dinner,

communication, knowledges, the media, politics, and science. My requests to schedule a formal interview with him were evaded. After four days, he then told me that we had already ‘contaminated’ each other. There would be little point in a formal interview, he argued, because I already knew where he was coming from, and more importantly, he knew where I was coming from. I pressed on with my requests, to no avail. My status as participant observer was cemented. Thus, I have few direct quotes from Greg McKeon but much valuable ‘data’. Neither, I believe, was I ‘contaminated’. In the relational milieu of associations there will always be proximities, smaller and greater (cf. Latour 1987), and these must be cautiously balanced against professional commitments to critical engagement. I would argue that good rapport allows for stronger and more productive forms of critical engagement; strangers are easily ignored, friends must at least be heard out. This is not to argue that one needs to be inside to affect change, but rather that one needs to have a recognisable position to move within the epistemic frames of others. Although I ended up working with the individuals that are subjects of the research, I neither took sides nor feigned neutrality (Wynne 1996c, and see Chapter 3).

As a qualitative researcher in a quantitative field, one is always likely to be seen as scribbling in the margin, yet even to be allowed to work on the same page is an achievement. I was allowed in, I think, for two main reasons: Firstly, I appeared to be representing the needs of the so-called ‘end-users’ of climate information. The broader LWW climate variability project focused solely on graziers, and thus provided for me a small research network that was grappling with issues that directly related to my research. On one level, I was a representative from across a boundary. Secondly, my background in climate science meant I could understand and speak at least some of scientific jargon of climate science. When I raised my earlier research in climate science with researchers, my standing appeared to increase. I was clearly not just interested in the ‘social’ and ‘institutional’, but the ‘technical’ and the ‘natural’ too. As I will explore later in the thesis, though, there was also a genuine concern, particularly

among systems-oriented climate risk technologists, to improve practices and institutions and, for some, my work was welcomed as contributing to such ends. Nonetheless, I believe I have remained on the edges, working the periphery. Turnbull (2000:91) advocates working similar ground when he suggests that the social researcher can metaphorically take the role of ‚the jester who confirms the King's power through mocking him‛. It is through being situated on the institutional periphery that a researcher can be engaged enough to be meaningful, and detached enough to freely critique. In a similarly reflexive vein, Turnbull contends that ‚we need to remind ourselves of the role of the jester or the trickster in order to avoid taking our knowledge for truth – thus becoming victims of our own folly‛. It is particularly with this sense of serious play that I have long mused on the cultural cartography of the knowledge domain I call climate risk technologies.

Leaving south-eastern Queensland on New Year’s Day, 2004, I traveled on, interviewing applications researchers/extensionists from New South Wales Agriculture (NSW Ag). Then I headed west to the Warrego region between Bourke and Cunnamulla. In Bourke, I was also provided in-kind support by the NSW Ag in Tamworth. Conversations in the office with an extensionist, a vet and the rural counselors were inevitably around coping with the climate, about managing for it and enduring, and in various ways about knowledge. It was the hottest January on record. The Warrego River flooded, making half of the study area inaccessible. I conducted 20 interviews.

In February 2004, I drove south to Hillston in south western New South Wales. In Hillston Library, I pawed through local histories noting the way droughts and floods were inscribed as punctuation in the timeline of the town, its people and politics. The immense presence of these intermittent hardships was only rivaled by the great depression of the 1920s and World War One. Again, the heat of the month was unsurpassed. I undertook 25 interviews.

Other „data‟

In qualitative research data is everywhere. It is found from the slightest inflection in an individual speech act, to rallies around controversies and the framing of data or inscriptions. The interviews are thus grounded in a broader context. While the interviews make up the most important source for interpretation, and are the data with which I have most closely and scrupulously engaged, they are attended to in relation to various other ‘data’: literature, meetings and forums, and media representations. These provide a vast source of matter for interpretation at various analytic levels. They are also things to which participants commonly referred to at interview, and it is in the latter context that they are taken as ‘data’. By this I mean that I have not sought to detail these