The Daily, and Uncertain, Forecasting of the Future: An STS Approach to the Production of Environmental Performance Tools

• In Event: Is There a New PLACTS Wave? Towards a Stocktaking of Current Latin American (STS) Thought

Abstract

During the past four months, I had the opportunity to work next to an extraordinary team of people interested in forecasting the occurrence of political conflict in a given place at a given time within the next 36 months. While the Violence Early Warning System (ViEWS) is focused on the analysis of conflict, my participation through these months was focused on the possible relation between droughts and conflict. During the endless trial and error and “fixes” that had to be done for this project I could relate to the work done by other members not only of ViEWS but of the Uppsala University (UU) Department of Peace and Conflict Research (DPCR); and the role that different emotions including uncertainty and frustration play while numbers and data are being adequately tailored for a specific purpose. ViEWS could be understood plainly as the result of a strict scientific methodology continuously improving through the inputs of internal and external members. However, it is also the result of personal projects; understandings of what data represents for them; informal negotiations of how procedures should be conducted and recorded, to respect the goal of transparency.
The understanding of how these tools are constructed, considering that most of them tend to be framed at institutions in the Global North, play an important role to understand different processes of environmental valuation that affect the Global South.

Author

• José Antonio Ballesteros Figueroa, University of Edinburgh