Martin Mahony

@article{95bca181d8be496fab93dcb3c76b88bf,

title = {Three institutional pathways to envision the future of the IPCC},

author = {Shinichiro Asayama and Kari De Pryck and Silke Beck and Béatrice Cointe and Paul N. Edwards and Hélène Guillemot and Karin M. Gustafsson and Friederike Hartz and Hannah Hughes and Bård Lahn and Olivier Leclerc and Rolf Lidskog and Jasmine E. Livingston and Irene Lorenzoni and Joanna Petrasek Macdonald and Martin Mahony and Jean Carlos Hochsprung Miguel and Marko Monteiro and Jessica O'Reilly and Warren Pearce and Arthur Petersen and Bernd Siebenhüner and Tora Skodvin and Adam Standring and Göran Sundqvist and Renzo Taddei and Bianca Bavel and Mark Vardy and Yulia Yamineva and Mike Hulme},

doi = {10.1038/s41558-023-01780-8},

issn = {1758-678X},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-09-01},

journal = {Nature Climate Change},

volume = {13},

number = {9},

pages = {877–880},

publisher = {Nature Publishing Group},

abstract = {The IPCC has been successful at building its scientific authority, but it will require institutional reform for staying relevant to new and changing political contexts. Exploring a range of alternative future pathways for the IPCC can help guide crucial decisions about redefining its purpose.},

note = {Acknowledgements: This work partly originates from a workshop organized by National Institute for Environmental Studies in April 2023, where S.A., K.D.P. and M.H. participated. S.A. acknowledges the financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grants-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists [20K20022]. M.H. acknowledges the financial support from the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.},

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@article{aa4b99b155c243489c8aad29ec2181db,

title = {Geographies of science and technology III: Careful entanglements, responsible futures},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1177/03091325231165965},

issn = {0309-1325},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-08-01},

journal = {Progress in Human Geography},

volume = {47},

number = {4},

pages = {613–623},

publisher = {Sage Publications},

abstract = {In my previous progress reports I suggested that geographers might attend more to the leaky boundaries of ‘science’ and ‘technology’ and to their imbrications in the mundane spaces of the everyday, and that stances of analytical critique might be joined by practices of engaged imagination of alternative lifeworlds in the shadow of the Anthropocene. In this final report, I zoom in on care as a ‘concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation’. This has recently provided a focus for much innovative and impactful research in critical geography. I explore the analytical and political potential of centring care within geographical engagements with science and technology, and suggest that nuanced engagements with the concept contain valuable insights into the everyday geographies of technoscience, and into how practices of care are central to – but not exhaustive of – political strategies for building alternative lifeworlds in uncertain times.},

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@article{def3d3f9d7a2465aa43cf78687cd74e3,

title = {Urgent need to move toward solution-orientated environmental assessments},

author = {Silke Beck and Tim Forsyth and Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1016/j.oneear.2022.05.021},

issn = {2590-3322},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-06-17},

journal = {One Earth},

volume = {5},

number = {6},

pages = {586–588},

publisher = {Elsevier},

abstract = {The trend of moving away from global environmental assessments and toward solution-oriented assessments raises new challenges because of the need to engage directly with politics, values, and deliberation. Here, we argue that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have still not developed sufficient capacity to engage with these novel challenges and that the IPBES assessment of transformative change is an opportunity to put this right.},

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@article{1ab31f19bf31442cb54d1899b03559b1,

title = {Insights from 20 years of temperature parallel measurements in Mauritius around the turn of the 20th century},

author = {Samuel O. Awe and Martin Mahony and Edley Michaud and Conor Murphy and Simon J. Noone and Victor Venema and Thomas G. Thorne and Peter W. Thorne},

doi = {10.5194/cp-18-793-2022},

issn = {1814-9324},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-04-14},

journal = {Climate of the Past},

volume = {18},

number = {4},

pages = {793–820},

publisher = {European Geosciences Union},

abstract = {There is considerable import in creating more complete, better understood holdings of early meteorological data. Such data permit an improved understanding of climate variability and long-term changes. Early records are particularly incomplete in the tropics, with implications for estimates of global and regional temperature. There is also a relatively low level of scientific understanding of how these early measurements were made and, as a result, of their homogeneity and comparability to more modern techniques and measurements. Herein we describe and analyse a newly rescued set of long-term, up to six-way parallel measurements undertaken over 1884–1903 in Mauritius, an island situated in the southern Indian Ocean. Data include (i) measurements from a well-ventilated room, (ii) a shaded thermograph, (iii) instruments housed in a manner broadly equivalent to a modern Stevenson screen, (iv) a set of measurements by a hygrometer mounted in a Stevenson screen, and for a much shorter period (v) two additional Stevenson screen configurations. All measurements were undertaken within an ∼ 80 m radius of each other. To our knowledge this is the first such multidecadal multi-instrument assessment of meteorological instrument transition impacts ever undertaken, providing potentially unique insights. The intercomparison also considers the impact of different ways of deriving daily and monthly averages. The long-term comparison is sufficient to robustly characterize systematic offsets between all the instruments and seasonally varying impacts. Differences between all techniques range from tenths of a degree Celsius to more than 1 ∘C and are considerably larger for maximum and minimum temperatures than for means or averages. Systematic differences of several tenths of a degree Celsius also exist for the different ways of deriving average and mean temperatures. All differences, except two average temperature series pairs, are significant at the 0.01 level using a paired t test. Given that all thermometers were regularly calibrated against a primary Kew standard thermometer maintained by the observatory, this analysis highlights significant impacts of instrument exposure, housing, siting, and measurement practices in early meteorological records. These results reaffirm the importance of thoroughly assessing the homogeneity of early meteorological records.},

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@article{7e95178d83a94c4987168ba912fc209d,

title = {Geographies of science and technology II: In the critical zone},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1177/03091325211073142},

issn = {0309-1325},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-04-01},

journal = {Progress in Human Geography},

volume = {46},

number = {2},

pages = {705–715},

publisher = {Sage Publications},

abstract = {Amidst an unfolding environmental crisis, suspicion about the totalising and homogenising spatial grammars of the ‘Anthropocene’ has spurred the development of a new spatial concept which, its proponents hope, can better ground the science and politics of environmental change in local geographies. In this second report on science and technology, I use this concept as a lens onto recent work in geography concerned with the space-times of ‘environmental’ sciences and technologies, broadly construed. The notion of the ‘critical zone’, and the practice of ‘critical zone science’, directs our attention to geographical work on situated practices of interdisciplinarity, on new modes of producing and working with ‘big data’, and on the volumetric, vertical and subterranean spaces of technoscientific practice. Emerging research has also engaged with the technologisation of critical zone management, while new insights into ‘lively capital’ and nonhuman labour push us to see the critical zone not just as an increasingly technologised space, but as itself a technology of human autopoiesis. Amidst the febrile politics of sustaining this planetary living-system, new questions are being asked about what it means to be critical in the critical zone.},

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@article{47c5b8cd3c1c4903a15f6a2359cec963,

title = {Effectively empowering: A different look at bolstering the effectiveness of global environmental assessments},

author = {Timo Maas and Jasper Montana and Sandra Hel and Martin Kowarsch and Willemijn Tuinstra and Machteld Schoolenberg and Martin Mahony and Paul Lucas and Marcel Kok and Jan Bakkes and Esther Turnhout},

doi = {10.1016/j.envsci.2021.05.024},

issn = {1462-9011},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-09-01},

journal = {Environmental Science & Policy},

volume = {123},

pages = {210–219},

publisher = {Elsevier},

abstract = {Global environmental assessments are widely considered to play a prominent role in environmental governance. However, they are also criticised for a lack of effectiveness in informing policy and decision-making. In response, GEAs have adopted a number of strategies to bolster their effectiveness, including by orienting themselves towards solutions (solution-orientation), increasing the diversity of included experts (participation), and producing more targeted assessments (contextualisation). In this article, we analyse these strategies as attempts to be effective for multiple audiences while also identifying the limitations of these strategies. Based on this analysis, we propose to conceive of GEAs as processes that are able to empower diverse actors – ranging from diplomats in international negotiations to civil society activists, or indigenous and local knowledge holders – to act towards socio-environmental objectives. Seen in this light, the effectiveness of GEAs can be improved by reflecting on which actors can benefit from assessments and how assessments can contribute to their empowerment. This strategy goes beyond current proposals that aim to strengthen the authority of assessments by boosting the scientific quality and credibility of the reports. Indeed, it complements them with an explicitly political perspective. Using examples of empowerment in different phases of GEA production and use, we argue that this reconceptualisation of effectiveness requires assessments to reflect a diversity of problem and solution frames, thereby creating entry points for the empowerment of a broad range of actors. We conclude by providing three illustrative ideas to improve effectiveness for the design and execution of assessments.},

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@article{309d9132fead48aa97ef0a4de2c70056,

title = {Geographies of science and technology 1: Boundaries and crossings},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1177/0309132520969824},

issn = {0309-1325},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-06-01},

journal = {Progress in Human Geography},

volume = {45},

number = {3},

pages = {586–595},

publisher = {Sage Publications},

abstract = {In a world of accelerating environmental crises, global pandemics and seemingly unstoppable datafication of anything that moves, thinks or feels, the politics of science and technology are pervasive. In this first of three progress reports on the geographies of science and technology, I home in on some definitional questions which an account of anything like a new or emerging subfield must necessarily concern itself. I examine how geographers have addressed the spatial effects of the making and unmaking of boundaries between science, technology and their various outsides. While work on historical and contemporary geographies of technoscience has often pulled in slightly different directions, I identify some promising convergences around questions of political economy and on the topic of scale as an emergent property of technoscientific practices. New attention is also falling on the spatial practices through which technoscience gets plugged into wider worlds, such as politics and policymaking, while geographers have also been busy disrupting, in a more experimental mode, conventional boundaries and hierarchies of technoscientific practice. Finally, the report examines recent and welcome efforts to convene new conversations around the geography of technology but cautions against the potential seduction of the new, the innovative and the ‘disruptive’. Important recent work in cultural geography has purposively unsettled assumed hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech, new and old, and suggests that any nascent subfield of ‘geography of technology’ needs to reflexively attend to how boundaries get drawn around ‘technology’, and with what effects.},

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@article{bf2ea1cf57fe473ca806cc6ecc96a0d4,

title = {Knowing like a global expert organization: Comparative insights from the IPCC and IPBES},

author = {Maud Borie and Martin Mahony and Noam Obermeister and Mike Hulme},

doi = {10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102261},

issn = {0959-3780},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-05-01},

journal = {Global Environmental Change},

volume = {68},

number = {May},

publisher = {Elsevier},

abstract = {In this paper we draw on Science and Technology (STS) approaches to develop a comparative analytical account of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The establishment of both of these organizations, in 1988 and 2012 respectively, represented important ‘constitutional moments’ in the global arrangement of scientific assessment and its relationship to environmental policymaking. Global environmental assessments all share some similarities, operating at the articulation between science and policy and pursuing explicit societal goals. Although the IPCC and IPBES have different objectives, they are both intergovernmental processes geared towards the provision of knowledge to inform political debates about, respectively, climate change and biodiversity loss. In spite of these similarities, we show that there are significant differences in their knowledge practices and these differences have implications for environmental governance. We do this by comparing the IPCC and IPBES across three dimensions: conceptual frameworks, scenarios and consensus .We argue that, broadly speaking, the IPCC has produced a ‘view from nowhere’, through a reliance on mathematical modelling to produce a consensual picture of global climate change, which is then ‘downscaled’ to considerations of local impacts and responses. By contrast IPBES, through its contrasting conceptual frameworks and practices of argumentation, appears to seek a ‘view from everywhere’, inclusive of epistemic plurality, and through which a global picture emerges through an aggregation of more placed-based knowledges. We conclude that, despite these aspirations, both organizations in fact offer ‘views from somewhere’: situated sets of knowledge marked by politico-epistemic struggles and shaped by the interests, priorities and voices of certain powerful actors. Characterizing this ‘somewhere’ might be aided by the concept of institutional epistemology, a term we propose to capture how particular knowledge practices become stabilized within international expert organizations. We suggest that such a concept, by drawing attention to the institutions’ knowledge practices, helps reveal their world-making effects and, by doing so, enables more reflexive governance of both expert organizations and of global environmental change in general.},

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@article{9ab5b026db3742dc8b79850377607447,

title = {The enemy is nature: Military machines and technological bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment’},

author = {Martin Mahony},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-01-01},

journal = {Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History},

volume = {Spring 2021},

abstract = {The link between warfare and technological innovation has been well documented by historians. World War II was a particularly intense crucible of technological change, and the repurposing of military technologies and industries in the forging of a new post-war consumer capitalism is crucial for understanding the “Great Acceleration” phase of the Anthropocene. Processes of technological bricolage turned the machines of war onto the natural world, as global powers competed to cement their economic and imperial hegemony.},

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@article{dfe0a139eda040e49c83e563648594a9,

title = {Introduction—Up, down, round and round: Verticalities in the history of science},

author = {Wilko Graf von Hardenberg and Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1111/1600-0498.12347},

issn = {0008-8994},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-11-01},

journal = {Centaurus},

volume = {62},

number = {4},

pages = {595–611},

publisher = {Wiley},

abstract = {History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contributions that follow, verticality appears as a condition of knowledge production—a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships—and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three‐dimensional world.},

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@article{4275f673340a4abe8026c896b32c5db1,

title = {Review of 'Into the Woods: An Epistemography of Climate Change' by Meritxell Ramírez-i-Ollé},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1080/2325548X.2020.1781458},

issn = {2325-548X},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-01-01},

journal = {AAG Review of Books},

volume = {8},

number = {4},

pages = {213--215},

publisher = {Taylor and Francis},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

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@article{c723e595ab03480cb04655a528d8119d,

title = {Climatography for the Anthropocene},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1007/s11016-019-00445-7},

issn = {0815-0796},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-11-01},

journal = {Metascience},

volume = {28},

number = {3},

pages = {435--440},

publisher = {Springer},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

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@article{72683937413f421a81b0b351ee860826,

title = {Historical geographies of the future: Airships and the making of imperial atmospheres},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1080/24694452.2018.1530968},

issn = {2469-4452},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-07-01},

journal = {Annals of the American Association of Geographers},

volume = {109},

number = {4},

pages = {1279--1299},

publisher = {Taylor and Francis},

abstract = {This article explores the elemental encounters and imaginative geographies of empire to develop a new means of engaging with the historical geographies of the future. Futures have recently become an important topic of historical and cultural inquiry, and historical geographers have an important role to play in understanding the place of the future in the past and in interrogating the role of posited futures in shaping action in historical presents. Drawing on literature from science and technology studies, a framework is developed for engaging with the material and imaginative geographies that coalesce around practices of imagination, expectation, and prediction. This framework is then used to reconstruct efforts to develop airship travel in the British Empire in the 1920s and 1930s. At a moment of imperial anxiety, airships were hoped to tie the empire together by conveying bodies, capital, and military capacity between its furthest points. Confident projections of the colonization of global airspace were nonetheless undermined by material encounters with a vibrant, often unpredictable atmospheric environment. The article aims to spur renewed work on the historical geographies of the future, while also contributing to debates on the cultural and political geographies of the atmosphere and of atmospheric knowledge making.},

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@article{be1dd8ba7b584d4a814466d2f0e5127f,

title = {Review of Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America},

author = {Martin Mahony},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-03-01},

journal = {Isis},

volume = {110},

number = {1},

pages = {194–196},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

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@article{1a5199735ddb498f945192f8c2ff14ed,

title = {A “geopolítica infraestrutural” do conhecimento climático: o Modelo Brasileiro do Sistema Terrestre e a divisão Norte-Sul do conhecimento},

author = {Jean Carlos Hochsprung Miguel and Martin Mahony and Marko Synésio Alves Monteiro},

doi = {10.1590/15174522-0215102},

issn = {1517-4522},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-01-01},

journal = {Sociologias},

volume = {21},

number = {51},

pages = {44–75},

publisher = {Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul},

abstract = {This article examines how geopolitics are embedded into the efforts of Southern nations that try to build new climate knowledge infrastructures. It achieves this through an analysis of the composition of the international climate modelling basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), viewed from the perspective of the Brazilian Earth System Model (BESM) – the scientific project which placed a Latin American country for the first time inside the global modelling bases of the IPCC. The paper argues that beyond the idea of “infrastructural globalism”, a historical process of global scientific cooperation led by developed countries, we also need to understand the “infrastructural geopolitics” of climate models. This concept seeks to describe the actions of developing countries towards minimizing the imbalance of global climate scientific production, and how these countries participate in global climate governance and politics. The analysis of the construction of BESM suggests that national investments in global climate modelling were aimed at attaining scientific sovereignty, which is closely related to a notion of political sovereignty of the nation-state within the international regime of climate change.},

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@article{cce4f52ec28c48bbbed3d4d7ad4d1987,

title = {The 'genie of the storm': cyclonic reasoning and the spaces of weather observation in the southern Indian Ocean, 1851-1925},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1017/S0007087418000766},

issn = {0007-0874},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-12-19},

journal = {British Journal for the History of Science},

volume = {51},

number = {4},

pages = {607--633},

publisher = {Cambridge University Press},

abstract = {This article engages with debates about the status and geographies of colonial science by arguing for the significance of meteorological knowledge-making in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Mauritius. The article focuses on how tropical storms were imagined, theorised and anticipated by an isolated - but by no means peripheral - cast of meteorologists who positioned Mauritius as an important centre of calculation in an expanding infrastructure of maritime meteorology. Charles Meldrum in particular earned renown in the mid-nineteenth century for theoretical insights into cyclone behaviour and for achieving an unprecedented spatial reach in synoptic meteorology. But as the influx of weather data dried up towards the end of the century, attention turned to new practices of 'single-station forecasting', by which cyclones might be foreseen and predicted, not through extended observational networks, but by careful study of the behaviour of one set of instruments in one place. These practices created new moral economies of risk and responsibility, as well as 'a poetry', as one meteorologist described it, in the instrumental, sensory and imaginative engagement with a violent atmospheric environment. Colonial Indian Ocean 'cyclonology' offers an opportunity to reflect on how the physical, economic and cultural geographies of an island colony combined to produce spaces of weather observation defined by both connection and disconnection, the latter to be overcome not only by infrastructure, but by the imagination.},

note = {Special Issue: Science and Islands in Indo-Pacific Worlds},

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@article{632b802901bc44f2b500bc86a0cf8868,

title = {The IPCC and the new map of science and politics},

author = {Silke Beck and Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1002/wcc.547},

issn = {1757-7780},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-11-01},

journal = {Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change},

volume = {9},

number = {6},

publisher = {Wiley},

abstract = {In this study, we review work which seeks to understand and interpret the place of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) within the science and politics of climate change in the context of a post‐Paris polycentric governance regime and the culture of “post‐truth” politics. Focusing on studies of how the IPCC has sought to maintain a boundary between the scientific and the political, we offer an historical account of “boundary work” within the IPCC which is instructive for thinking, in an anticipative mode, about emerging and likely challenges to the IPCC's position as a science–policy boundary organization. We suggest that the relationships between climate science and policy are undergoing fundamental transformation in light of the Paris Agreement, and contend that the IPCC will need to be nimble and reflexive in meeting new challenges. Growing calls for more “solution‐oriented” assessment question the IPCC's positioning at the science—politics boundary, where it can function to put some policy options on the table, while obscuring others. Recent controversies over proposed mitigation solutions are indicative of likely future challenges. We suggest that by adopting a mode of “responsible assessment,” the IPCC can continue to exercise its world‐making power in a relevant and legitimate fashion.},

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@article{6afd37f8ef7a46999499a2934d8a1f8d,

title = {The politics of anticipation: the IPCC and the negative emissions technologies experience},

author = {Silke Beck and Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1017/sus.2018.7},

issn = {2059-4798},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-08-01},

journal = {Global Sustainability},

volume = {1},

publisher = {Cambridge University Press},

abstract = {Non-technical summary: In the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a ‘world-making’ power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways. Technical summary: Following the adoption of the Paris Agreement of December 2015, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has begun to reconsider its role in the climate regime. Based on work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we reconstruct how the IPCC has historically positioned itself between climate science and policy-making. We then discuss particular challenges raised if the IPCC is shifting along the spectrum from attributing causes and detecting impacts of global warming towards projecting policy solutions, including emerging technologies, by examining recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs). We conclude that the IPCC exercises a ‘world-making’ power by providing new, politically powerful visions of actionable futures, for example, based on speculative technologies of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The task of providing future pathways poses great challenges to conventional ideals of scientific neutrality. We argue that the growing political demand for pathways, and their politicalsignificance, requires rethinking modes of assessment that go beyond expert-driven neutral input. Assessment processes must take into account their political contexts and implications in a systematic way.},

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@article{11ddc425cea64342b47e46513c5af295,

title = {Epistemic geographies of climate change: Science, space and politics},

author = {Martin Mahony and Mike Hulme},

doi = {10.1177/0309132516681485},

issn = {0309-1325},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-06-01},

journal = {Progress in Human Geography},

volume = {42},

number = {3},

pages = {395–424},

publisher = {Sage Publications},

abstract = {Anthropogenic climate change has been presented as the archetypal global problem, identified by the slow work of assembling a global knowledge infrastructure, and demanding a concertedly global political response. But this ‘global’ knowledge has distinctive geographies, shaped by histories of exploration and colonialism, by diverse epistemic and material cultures of knowledge-making, and by the often messy processes of linking scientific knowledge to decision-making within different polities. We suggest that understanding of the knowledge politics of climate change may benefit from engagement with literature on the geographies of science. We review work from across the social sciences which resonates with geographers’ interests in the spatialities of scientific knowledge, to build a picture of what we call the epistemic geographies of climate change. Moving from the field site and the computer model to the conference room and international political negotiations, we examine the spatialities of the interactional co-production of knowledge and social order. In so doing, we aim to proffer a new approach to the intersections of space, knowledge and power which can enrich geography’s engagements with the politics of a changing climate.},

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@article{870b07a26e5e41fd8d263658441a5ae9,

title = {Climate and colonialism},

author = {Martin Mahony and Georgina Endfield},

doi = {10.1002/wcc.510},

issn = {1757-7780},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-03-01},

journal = {Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change},

volume = {9},

number = {2},

publisher = {Wiley},

abstract = {Recent years have seen a growth in scholarship on the intertwined histories of climate, science and European imperialism. Scholarship has focused both on how the material realities of climate shaped colonial enterprises, and on how ideas about climate informed imperial ideologies. Historians have shown how European expansion was justified by its protagonists with theories of racial superiority, which were often closely tied to ideas of climatic determinism. Meanwhile, the colonial spaces established by European powers offered novel ‘laboratories’ where ideas about acclimatisation and climatic improvement could be tested on the ground. While historical scholarship has focused on how powerful ideas of climate informed imperial projects, emerging scholarship in environmental history, history of science and historical geography focuses instead on the material and cognitive practices by which the climates of colonial spaces were made known and dealt with in fields such as forestry, agriculture and human health. These heretofore rather disparate areas of historical research carry great contemporary relevance of studies of how climates and their changes have been understood, debated and adapted to in the past.},

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@article{867cc1e4f7b04b1fb710f11bce0d7cc5,

title = {Science advice for global challenges: learning from trade-offs in the IPCC},

author = {Warren Pearce and Martin Mahony and Sujatha Raman},

doi = {10.1016/j.envsci.2017.11.017},

issn = {1462-9011},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-02-01},

journal = {Environmental Science & Policy},

volume = {80},

pages = {125–131},

publisher = {Elsevier},

abstract = {In the context of ongoing debates about the place of knowledge and expertise in the governance of global challenges, this article seeks to promote cross-sectoral learning about the politics and pitfalls of global science advice. It begins with the intertwined histories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the global climate policy regime, before examining the politics of different ‘framings’ of the climate problem and the challenges of building and communicating scientific consensus. We then identify three important trade-offs which the IPCC has had to negotiate: global versus local; scientific disinterestedness versus policy-relevance; and consensus versus plurality. These lessons are especially timely as global institutions begin to convene knowledge to address urgent sustainable development challenges posed by anti-microbial resistance (AMR). While the IPCC experience does not provide a wholly transportable model for science advice, we show why similar trade-offs need to be addressed at an early stage by architects of advisory systems for AMR as well as other global challenges.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{7ec179ef4fd54de3b927b666689896f1,

title = {Relocating meteorology},

author = {Martin Mahony and Angelo Matteo Caglioti},

issn = {1555-5763},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-01-01},

journal = {History of Meteorology},

volume = {8},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{36bc8ed7a88a45b4a4c1d52deeed9c31,

title = {The IPCC and the politics of anticipation},

author = {Silke Beck and Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1038/nclimate3264},

issn = {1758-678X},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-01-01},

journal = {Nature Climate Change},

volume = {7},

number = {5},

pages = {311--313},

publisher = {Nature Publishing Group},

abstract = {In the emerging post-Paris climate governance regime, the role of scientific expertise is radically changing. The IPCC in particular may find itself in a new role, where projections of future climate function as a kind of regulatory science. This poses great challenges to conventional ideals of scientific neutrality.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{8afc37efd615491ca798f3d987dc3728,

title = {Modelling and the Nation: Institutionalising Climate Prediction in the UK, 1988–92},

author = {Martin Mahony and Mike Hulme},

doi = {10.1007/s11024-016-9302-0},

issn = {0026-4695},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-12-01},

journal = {Minerva},

volume = {54},

number = {4},

pages = {445--470},

publisher = {Springer},

abstract = {How climate models came to gain and exercise epistemic authority has been a key concern of recent climate change historiography. Using newly released archival materials and recently conducted interviews with key actors, we reconstruct negotiations between UK climate scientists and policymakers which led to the opening of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in 1990. We historicize earlier arguments about the unique institutional culture of the Hadley Centre, and link this culture to broader characteristics of UK regulatory practice and environmental politics. A product of a particular time and place, the Hadley Centre was shaped not just by scientific ambition, but by a Conservative governmental preference for ‘sound science’ and high evidential standards in environmental policymaking. Civil servants sought a prediction programme which would appeal to such sensibilities, with transient and regional climate simulation techniques seemingly offering both scientific prestige and persuasive power. Beyond the national level, we also offer new insights into the early role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an evolving international political context in the shaping of scientific practices and institutions.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{f0d974423c5e452b8db5f706828d8626,

title = {Picturing the future-conditional: montage and the global geographies of climate change},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1002/geo2.19},

issn = {2054-4049},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-07-01},

journal = {Geo: Geography and Environment},

volume = {3},

number = {2},

publisher = {Wiley},

abstract = {A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the ‘whole Earth’ have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional – ‘if x, then y’ – has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these ‘global montages’ problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{fb8b4784ddce4259beccc30f80579fcd,

title = {For an empire of ‘all types of climate’: meteorology as an imperial science},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1016/j.jhg.2015.11.003},

issn = {0305-7488},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

journal = {Journal of Historical Geography},

volume = {51},

pages = {29--39},

publisher = {Academic Press Inc.},

abstract = {This article explores the relationship between meteorology, British imperialism and evolving forms of scientific internationalism in the twentieth century. Focussing on a series of imperial meteorology conferences begun in 1919, it is shown how the British Empire was positioned in the interwar period as a corrective to skewed forms of scientific internationalism which were emerging in meteorology, with standards and data formats biased towards Northern climates. Possessed of an empire of ‘all types of climate’, British meteorologists identified themselves as a counterbalance to a perceived eurocentrism in international meteorology. The Empire was thus a convenient shortcut to a truly ‘global' science, while meteorology itself emerged as a potentially powerful new resource as aviation and agricultural developmentalism took hold. The paper contributes to debates about the spatialities of scientific practice, offering the imperial as an interstitial space where a new globalism might be reconciled with the Empire's diversity of climates and meteorological techniques. It argues that empire was an important way in which meteorology became global – both in its subject matter and in its practices.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{9c9ecf01fb4a4ce3a73c223004ea016a,

title = {Climate change and the geographies of objectivity: the case of the IPCC's burning embers diagram},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1111/tran.2015.40.issue-2},

issn = {0020-2754},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-04-01},

journal = {Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers},

volume = {40},

number = {2},

pages = {153--167},

publisher = {Wiley},

abstract = {The challenge of meaningfully communicating an issue like climate change has vexed those trying to convey the risks, probabilities and uncertainties of the impacts of climate-warming greenhouse gases. This paper investigates the history of one such effort – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) so-called ‘burning embers’ diagram. This colourful visual rendering of global ‘reasons for concern’ has had a chequered institutional and publication history – embraced by some, rejected by others, and used by yet others to argue both for and against the reality of a global threshold where climate change becomes ‘dangerous’. Through interviews and documentary analysis I reconstruct the production and circulation of this diagram in the cultural circuits of climate science, policy and advocacy. I suggest that the notion of ‘objectivity’ is spatial in origin, concerned with distance and visual perspective. As a practice and performance, objectivity is also found to be situated within particular cultural and political formations. In applying these arguments to the history of the burning embers, I narrate a geography of objectivity concerning the visual composition of particular subject–object relations, and of contestation over the practice and objectivity of ‘expert judgement’ as the diagram circulates and encounters actors with diverse interpretive commitments and political objectives. Although excluded from the IPCC's 2007 report after governmental objections, the diagram has continued to haunt climate change debates. I suggest in closing that geographers of science pay greater attention to the visual image and to how norms of scientific conduct are performed and contested through the production, circulation and reception of visual knowledge. This would in turn enable geographers of science to supplement the interest in circulating knowledges with insights into situated interpretations of the meaning of science itself.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{0a4c399920314837b28ca01a0a5fb2c8,

title = {The Geographies of the Conference: Knowledge, Performance and Protest},

author = {Ruth Craggs and Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1111/gec3.12137},

issn = {1749-8198},

year  = {2014},

date = {2014-06-01},

journal = {Geography Compass},

volume = {8},

number = {6},

pages = {414–430},

publisher = {Wiley},

abstract = {Conferences are an ubiquitous and important part of political and academic life, acting as key sites of knowledge creation, public performance, legitimation and protest. Reviewing the current literature and drawing on our own work, this paper suggests that geographers are well-placed to provide insight into conferences through the concepts of visibility, performance and space. We explore the politics of academic, climate and geopolitical conferences, focusing on their production of epistemic communities and their role as sites for the performance of ideological positions and identities. We then explore international summits as protest spaces. We draw attention to a number of scales in our analysis, suggesting the need to attend to the global, national, local and micro-scale of conferences to ask what space and location contribute to conference outcomes and how conferences in turn act back on the landscapes in which they are embedded. We conclude with four reasons why we believe that conferences provide a fruitful – and important – focus for research in geography.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{27260cdb65fc4702894a108bf941149b,

title = {The predictive state: Science, territory and the future of the Indian climate},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1177/0306312713501407},

issn = {0306-3127},

year  = {2014},

date = {2014-02-01},

journal = {Social Studies of Science},

volume = {44},

number = {1},

pages = {109–133},

publisher = {Sage Publications},

abstract = {Acts of scientific calculation have long been considered central to the formation of the modern nation state, yet the transnational spaces of knowledge generation and political action associated with climate change seem to challenge territorial modes of political order. This article explores the changing geographies of climate prediction through a study of the ways in which climate change is rendered knowable at the national scale in India. The recent controversy surrounding an erroneous prediction of melting Himalayan glaciers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides a window onto the complex and, at times, antagonistic relationship between the Panel and Indian political and scientific communities. The Indian reaction to the error, made public in 2009, drew upon a national history of contestation around climate change science and corresponded with the establishment of a scientific assessment network, the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment, which has given the state a new platform on which to bring together knowledge about the future climate. I argue that the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment is indicative of the growing use of regional climate models within longer traditions of national territorial knowledge-making, allowing a rescaling of climate change according to local norms and practices of linking scientific knowledge to political action. I illustrate the complex co-production of the epistemic and the normative in climate politics, but also seek to show how co-productionist understandings of science and politics can function as strategic resources in the ongoing negotiation of social order. In this case, scientific rationalities and modes of environmental governance contribute to the contested epistemic construction of territory and the evolving spatiality of the modern nation state under a changing climate.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{6a9d641d324c4ac0b4c36608a7e3954f,

title = {The IPCC and the geographies of credibility},

author = {Martin Mahony},

issn = {1555-5763},

year  = {2014},

date = {2014-01-01},

journal = {History of Meteorology},

volume = {6},

pages = {95--112},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{3da06607bcf74b75a90cf9827d19d56a,

title = {Boundary spaces: Science, politics and the epistemic geographies of climate change in Copenhagen, 2009},

author = {Martin Mahony},

doi = {10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.05.005},

issn = {0016-7185},

year  = {2013},

date = {2013-10-01},

journal = {Geoforum},

volume = {49},

pages = {29–39},

publisher = {Elsevier},

abstract = {Modern democracies have conventionally handled the complex delegation of epistemic and normative authority through an understanding of science and politics as occupying distinct cultural domains. This work of delegation has been observed in the context of ‘boundary organisations’ which straddle the divide between science and politics and which regulate the flow of information and authority between the two domains. These observations have contributed to understandings of how science and politics are co-produced – how they evolve together in ongoing, iterative processes which contribute to the ephemeral attainment of social order. In the context of issues like climate change, which pose distinct challenges to scientific certitude, democratic politics and institutional stability, boundary questions become increasingly significant. This paper seeks to advance the notion of ‘boundary spaces’ in order to capture the diversity of settings in which the boundaries between science and politics are negotiated. Drawing together literatures from geography and science and technology studies (STS), it is argued that attention to the epistemic geographies of boundary spaces can reveal the heterogeneous processes of ordering at what is commonly referred to as the ‘science–policy interface’. The argument is illustrated empirically through a study of two efforts which were made to bring-together scientific knowledge in order to inform the ultimately ill-fated international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009. Questions of epistemic credibility, normative authority and uncertainty about the veracity of the 2 °C warming target became particularly acute amid an atmosphere of political urgency. It is suggested that by attending to such boundary spaces as sites of co-production, we may be able to attain a fuller understanding of the late modern geographies of science and of the entangling of the epistemic and the normative at the shifting boundaries of science and politics.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{3ec80e1a123e4480ba5da7d61eb41cfe,

title = {Boundaries, territory and public controversy: the GM debate re-materialised},

author = {Martin Mahony and Helen Pallett},

doi = {10.1111/area.12014},

issn = {0004-0894},

year  = {2013},

date = {2013-06-01},

journal = {Area},

volume = {45},

number = {2},

pages = {249–251},

publisher = {Wiley},

abstract = {In the UK, public debate about the science and applications of plant genetic modification (GM) recently re-surfaced in a conflict between researchers and protesters over a field of experimental wheat crop. Protesters threatened to destroy the crop in a mass action, while researchers and pro-GM campaigners rallied to the defence of this corner of the countryside in a bid to ‘defend science’ itself.1 Yet on the day of the proposed action the protesters were kept at a distance from the heavily policed field. In this short essay we consider the spatiality of this debate – its boundaries, territories, transgressions – and explore the significance of this particular controversy for the wider public debate and for geographers' engagement with knowledge controversies.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}