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Paper short abstract

This paper revisits the longstanding question of the role of expertise in governance by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with hydrologists who are grappling with the Japanese state’s effort to transform its flood management practices in the face of climate change.

Paper long abstract

This paper revisits the longstanding question of the role of expertise in governance by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with hydrologists who are grappling with the Japanese state’s effort to transform its flood management practices in the face of climate change. While critical scholars have long pointed out the depoliticizing tendency of technoscientific expertise, hydrologists in Japan increasingly recognize that efforts of climate adaptation can create distributional conflicts. In asking what happens when scientific experts acknowledge these thorny questions entailed in the interventions they work on, I argue that scientists have emerged as a major actor in developing theories of governance. As the scientists became aware of the potential frictions embedded in the measures being proposed for climate adaptation, I show how they began to engage in ideas and debates about what good governance might look like amid the urgency of climate change. These dynamics point to an underexplored dimension of the politics of crisis governance.