Coproducing Flood Risk Knowledge: Redistributing Expertise in Critical ‘Participatory Modelling’

This paper suggests that computer simulation modelling can offer opportunities for redistributing expertise between science and affected publics in relation to environmental problems. However, in order for scientific modelling to contribute to the coproduction of new knowledge claims about environmental processes, scientists need to reposition themselves with respect to their modelling practices. In the paper we examine a process in which two hydrological modellers became part of an extended research collective generating new knowledge about flooding in a small rural town in the UK. This process emerged in a project trialling a novel participatory research apparatus—competency groups—aiming to harness the energy generated in public controversy and enable other than scientific expertise to contribute to environmental knowledge. Analysing the process repositioning the scientists in terms of a dynamic of ‘dissociation’ and ‘attachment’, we map the ways in which prevailing alignments of expertise were unravelled and new connections assembled, in relation to the matter of concern. We show how the redistribution of knowledge and skills in the extended research collective resulted in a new computer model, embodying the coproduced flood risk knowledge.