DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-854825
title: Situating and Understanding Global Delta-knowledge Networks in Relation to Other Global Knowledge Networks, 2016-2019

description: The project starting point was the realisation that the rules of the game for producing effective and authoritative environmental knowledge and technologies are radically different today as compared to the past. For instance, the green turn (Disco 2002) has led to a radical re-appraisal and re-definition of environmental problems and solutions, and has produced serious challenges to established ways of understanding (and dealing with) society–nature interactions as well as the kinds of information, data and knowledge used to inform decisions. Therefore, the kinds of data collected for the project were defined by a research design following a mixed-methods approach drawing mainly from social anthropology, social network methods, and policy analysis. The design followed an epistemological position of pragmatism. The research design also departs from the general interest in studying social practices, organisations and networks. This research applied an interdisciplinary focus to contexts, situations and actions which inform antecedent conditions. The situations of inquiry grounded the research strategy as well as the kinds of data collected. Data was gathered from observational and open interviews in combination with desktop research, social network analysis and policy analysis throughout the duration of the project. Ethnographic observations and interviews: For the given period, the interviews concern European and Asian experts, working at such institutes as the UK Met Office, working on climate models, but also on international organisations conducting technology transfer activities and hydrological technology transfer from one context to another (including in The Netherlands, Denmark, Thailand and Myanmar. The purpose of the interviews was to get an understanding of how these models are set up, what their history of development is, and most importantly, how they are disseminated to the South-East Asia. Secondary data: Data was collected during fieldwork and subsequently applying desktop research. The documentation was classified according to themes and coded to trace expert knowledge, and narratives of expert assessments contained in the reports analysed. The data contains text and documents coded and analysed in Nvivo, including reports, publications and other types of grey literature. Social Network Data for Analysis: We applied qualitative methods of coding, analysis and interpretation of data from the interviews, participant observation and field notes. Secondly, we combined the interview data with secondary data (e.g., government reports, project reports and MoUs), policy analysis (e.g., policy problems, stakeholders, institutional frameworks and uncertainties) and social network analysis (e.g., identifying connections, measuring centrality and selecting a cluster for further analysis). Accordingly, the descriptions of interactions between organisations and events served to map a global network with which to identify activities and evaluate the performance and behaviour of such connections. Notably, we paid attention to organisations with an active presence in Thailand and Myanmar dealing with climate and hydrological modelling and conducted Social Network Analysis using three measures of network centrality: Closeness centrality, Betweenness centrality and Eigenvector centrality. Centrality is a measure of the information about the relative importance of nodes and edges in a graph. Centrality measures the number of links incident on a node and is used to identify nodes that have the highest number of connections in the network. High degree centrality represents a crucial role in the information flow and cohesiveness of the network; thus, such nodes are considered central to the network due to their role in the flow of information. Using a total network of 198 organisations identified and added to the dataset for analysis.