Paper short abstract:

This paper argues the need to transform ways in which ‘science’ is pursued by the Scientific Administrative Organizations—institutions tasked with providing ‘scientific advice’ to government decision-makers/ policy planners—to facilitate climate change adaptation and climate action (SDG13).

Paper long abstract:

The struggle to conceptualize climate change adaptation for the policy process has been acknowledged for a long time, especially in developing countries, where adaptation is the primary policy response to address climate change. This struggle manifests itself in terms of challenges faced in mobilizing climate action (SDG 13). Recent literature argues for the need to rethink adaptation as an issue of growing knowledge divided between the scientifically calibrated assessment of weather and locally situated everyday experience of it on the ground (Ogra, 2022). However, addressing this knowledge divide in the policy space requires an evolved science-society relationship than the one which has previously existed and has informed the formation of Scientific Administrative Organizations (SAO). Here SAOs refer to the scientific institutions under the government’s patronage structured to cater to the needs of the government policy decision-making process. This paper introduces a framework for administering the knowledge production process in the SAOs to help better design adaptation action strategies on the ground. The framework is designed using the feminist science studies concept of situated knowledge which argues the need to situate/contextualize science (Haraway, 1988). The proposed framework uses this concept in the specific case of SAOs.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599.

Ogra, A. (2022). Situating climate change narrative for conceptualizing adaptation strategies: a case study of coffee growers in South India. Regional Environmental Change, 22(2), 72.