New book on climate change policy making: Hot Science, High Water

Hot Science, High Water (NIAS Press 2013). The book addresses the roles of scientists, policy makers and NGO representatives in crafting a response to climate change in Vietnam during 2007-2012. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in universities, government offices, and foreign embassies, as well as coastal conservation and aquaculture sites, the study unravels a complex network of social and economic relationships that combined with scientific data and natural processes to establish the facts of climate change. More generally, this book is an ethnography of science and environmental policy making in a developing country grappling with the local implications of global networks of knowledge production, and shifting trends in international development policy. It shows how and why the facts of climate change can be widely different amongst different groups of individuals and organizations, even when there is a superficial appearance of agreement.