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Cultural Epistemologies and Ecologies of Practice in Regional Environmental Disaster Resilience Innovation Policy and Practice
Wed, September 4, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, EstherwoodAbstract
Drawing on three European case studies, this paper explores the divergencies in perceptions of, and attitudes towards environmental disaster resilience innovations as embedded within local cultural epistemologies. By focussing on innovation policy at the European level this paper not only subverts the dominant discourse of the universalist model of innovation as strategically supported by the European Commission, but also explores the consequences of the relationship between universal and regional approaches to innovation upon the local development, testing and application of novel climate change related disaster mitigation innovations.
Cultural epistemologies, as derived from Jasanoff’s Civic Epistemologies, is developed in line with de la Cadena’s use of Ecologies of Practice, as a way of exploring the divergencies and incommensurabilities between top down European innovation imperatives and bottom up natural disaster resilience and response strategies. This approach takes into account the consequences that material and environmental variation, such as annual flooding and/or droughts, as well as political, economic and cultural variation, has upon regional innovation strategies.
This paper offers an empirically grounded conception of European innovation policy and practice that cuts through dichotomous conceptions of bottom up or top down policy instrumentalisation, as has commonly dominated the policy space in which natural disaster resilience innovations sit. Instead, regional innovation policy and practice is positioned as the relational negotiation of national, regional and international institutional incommensurabilities as a way to best serve their specific local cultural and material needs. The case studies selected will show the significance of this variation across distinct European regions.