Abstract
Uncertainty is a debated issue in climate research, in research on the governance of climate adaptation, and in research on the social limits to adaptation. As a contribution to this debate, a constructivist discourse research approach is chosen to analyse and interpret how stakeholders handle uncertainty related to climate change knowledge. Four diverse conceptualisations of how uncertainty is handled serve as the discourse analysis framework: rational discourse, no-regret discourse, blissful discourse, and formative discourse. This framework is applied to analyse and interpret interviews of diverse stakeholder groups from a local governance adaptation network. In this network, conflicts between irrigation farmers, water authorities and nature conservation are negotiated. For most interviewees, uncertainty about climate change knowledge is not judged as problematic. This paper elaborates on why this is so and provides tentative assessments for each discourse type.
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Notes
For readers who are not familiar with qualitative research and discourse analysis, Feindt and Netherwood (2011) provide a good introduction with climate change and adaptation examples.
See the Electronic Supplemental Material for quotations and further reasoning.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their thorough support and the four anonymous reviewers for their critical review and constructive suggestions on a previous version of the present paper. They propelled me to rewrite large parts of it and helped to clarify the approach and findings. Furthermore, I am especially grateful to my colleague, Dr. Jürgen Schaper, who conducted most of the interviews that I was allowed to analyse.
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This article is part of a Special Issue on “Uncertainty and Climate Change Adaptation” with Guest Editors Tiago Capela Lourenço, Ana Rovisco, Suraje Dessai, Richard Moss and Arthur Petersen.
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Gottschick, M. How stakeholders handle uncertainty in a local climate adaptation governance network. Climatic Change 132, 445–457 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1203-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1203-3