Paper short abstract:

The paper describes the dilemmas faced in the process of transitioning between two networks of trust: a well-established "data assemblage" (Kitchin, 2014) shared by the scientific community, and governmental data assemblage that contained representations that at first were at odds with the former.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we are interested in exploring the role of data between different societal actors. In particular, we are interested why people trust (or mistrust) data and how this is performed. The focus of the paper will be in the development of the agriculture, forestry and land-use (AFOLU) component of a research project led by the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication (MCTIC) used in the implementation of Brazil's mitigation targets to the Paris Agreement. Here a group of established researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) faced the challenge of working within a governance structure that required the use of officially endowed data at the expense of data sets used by the international academic community. The paper describes the dilemmas faced by the UFMG group in the process of transitioning between two networks of trust: a well-established "data assemblage" (Kitchin, 2014) shared by the UFMG group and its international peers, and an official data assemblage that contained representations that at first were at odds with the former. From this the paper asks how different actors (re)negotiate trust relationships with climate data assemblages.