Project-Based Futures: Climate Change and the Development of Agricultural Foresight Models in Loosely Coordinated Organizations

• In Event: How Has Climate Change Reshaped Scientific Expertise and the Expert? - I

Abstract

The contemporary injunction to anticipate and prepare against increasingly numerous risks and uncertainties is ubiquitous (Beck, 2009; Power, 2007). But in societies characterized by constant innovation and the awareness of complex, non-linear interactions between multiple systems – e.g. earth, climate, human systems – uncertainty often fails to be reduced to measurable risks: not only is the future uncertain, it is also undetermined (Bennett, 2015).
I propose to analyse how agro-economists working in a research consortium combine imaginaries, narratives and data in foresight models addressing the long-term future of agriculture. The modular structure of those data-driven models now makes it possible to run simulations for a number of configurations of climate change and socio-economic evolution scenarios. Focusing on the career of the Impact model, developed by Ifpri, I argue that climate change has been instrumental in the emergence and structuration of a market for long term foresight in food security research. It also had a decisive influence on the construction of an initiative to intercompare rival foresight models to “improve” them.
More generally, it has been an opportunity to federate loosely coordinated organizations, and to gain centrality and visibility for some scientific disciplines. However, the introduction of climate change in the picture of the future of agriculture has not radically changed to point of view on food security. The analysis of the infrastructural and organizational work performed by agro-economists offers an original approach to path dependency effects regarding how food security is framed and narrated.

Author

• Vincent Cardon, University Picardie Jules Verne