Paper short abstract

Focusing on knowledge infrastructures that support expert assessment of climate technologies, I develop an account of practical wisdom as an infrastructurally mediated capacity and show how uneven research capacity can constrain participatory parity and impede the cultivation of prudent judgment.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ethical implications of expert assessment in the governance of solar radiation modification (SRM), arguing that ethical analysis should attend not only to the justice implications of potential deployment but also to the infrastructural conditions under which assessments are conducted. In the absence of large-scale empirical experience with SRM and amid ongoing controversy surrounding field experimentation, in silico modeling has become central to exploring potential impacts and informing policy-relevant evaluations. As a result, expert judgment about SRM is profoundly mediated by knowledge infrastructures, including high-performance computing resources and data storage, high-resolution datasets, and climate models and downscaling tools. Focusing on these sociotechnical arrangements, the paper conceptualizes practical wisdom as an infrastructurally mediated capacity. It argues that unevenly distributed research capacity affects experts’ abilities to participate as peers in shaping judgments about what questions matter, what knowledge counts as relevant for decision-making, how uncertainties should be interpreted, and which knowledge gaps warrant priority. Such asymmetries can constrain participatory parity in epistemic inquiry and impede the cultivation of prudent judgment within expert communities. By analyzing the role of research capacity in SRM research and assessment, the paper shows that capacity building is not merely a technical or instrumental matter but an ethical concern tied to the arrangements that enable inclusive and context-sensitive deliberation. Building research capacity thus emerges as an integral ethical task for fostering more reflexive, equitable, and practically wise assessments of emerging climate intervention technologies.