Presentation short abstract

This paper conceptualizes the ‘global glacier knowledge industry', a network of global institutions that control crucial geospatial data used in cryosphere research and its implications for cryosphere research in the Global South, particularly in the Indian Himalayan Region.

Presentation long abstract

This paper investigates the entanglement between knowledge politics and environmental governance using a critical political ecology approach. It uses this to analyse the question: How does the politics of knowledge generation and use on glaciers shape environmental governance in the cryosphere across the world? Governments rely on expert assessments to decipher the changes taking place within their glaciated territories. With increasing concerns of glacier melt and the degradation of the world’s frozen terrains, efforts to expand cryosphere research have intensified. Understanding glacier melt requires systematic and long-term observation, and thus, glacier monitoring activities have expanded over the last few decades. In the Global South, particularly in the Himalayan cryosphere, such research has been subject to intense scientific scrutiny and political debate over concerns surrounding data authenticity, methodological rigour, and epistemic exclusion. Using the case of the cryosphere community operating within the Indian Himalayan Region and its involvement with global institutions that order and control the use of crucial geospatial data used in cryosphere research, this study aims to investigate the interactions between the cryosphere community in India, the Indian government, and the global institutions. Methods employed include semi-structured interviews, observations, and analysis of scientific literature, policy documents, and government reports. The study argues that the growing reliance on remotely sensed glacier data, managed through a network of global institutions, conceptualised here as the global glacier knowledge industry, reproduces unequal epistemic and institutional structures organised around practices of monitoring glaciers, generating data, and translating data into meaningful policy-relevant climate science.