Speaker
Description
Climate adaptation is becoming increasingly critical in urban spatial planning as extreme weather events necessitate climate-adaptive measures. Effective planning relies on climate information to provide insight in potential climate impacts and/or the effectiveness of proposed adaptive measures. Such information is often provided by ‘climate services,’ such as maps or decision support tools, which spatial planners and other stakeholders use to guide decision-making (Vaughan et al., 2016). However, usability gaps - e.g., mismatches between user needs and provided data, or a lack of user expertise to interpret the information - limit their usability (Raaphorst et al., 2020; Lemos et al., 2012).
Recent research also highlights the role of contextual factors in shaping climate service usability. Contextual influences, such as institutional settings or competing priorities, significantly impact how stakeholders perceive and interact with these services (Findlater et al., 2021; Koers et al., 2024). However, most contemporary evaluation methods focus on human-centric perspectives, emphasizing the direct interactions between users and climate services (e.g., Vaughan & Dessai, 2014). While valuable, this approach is limited as it overlooks broader contextual influences and the positioning of climate services within wider decision-making systems (Koers et al., 2024). As a result, indirect contextual factors often remain overlooked in evaluations.
To address these limitations, we propose the use of an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective. ANT views the world as a collection of interacting actors—both human and non-human—within networks that shape behaviours and outcomes (Law, 2004). Applying ANT to climate service usability evaluation shifts the focus from user-centric evaluations towards understanding usability as an intrinsic property of climate services as non-human actors. In other words, an ANT-perspective examines how climate services interact with other actors within broader networks, and in turn reveals how contextual factors influence usability. This helps to identify overlooked aspects of climate service usability by examining how human actors (e.g., planners, politicians) and non-human actors (e.g., legislation, policy documents, climate services) interact with and shape usability of the climate service. This study aims to demonstrate how integrating an ANT perspective broadens the understanding of climate service usability. By moving beyond user-centric evaluations, ANT provides a more comprehensive lens to assess the interplay of human and non-human actors within complex decision-making contexts. This results in a more nuanced understanding of usability, enabling the identification of barriers and opportunities for improving the use of climate services in practice.
For this paper, we follow and analyse a project of the municipality of Dordrecht (the Netherlands). Within this project, the municipality is utilizing a climate service to support decision-making among spatial planners, water managers, project leaders, and politicians to develop new policies for improving the climate resilience of the neighbourhood of ‘Dubbeldam’. Data collection includes interviews with stakeholders, observations during project meetings, and analysis of policy documents, agendas, and reports. Furthermore, found contextual factors are analysed following the method utilized by Koers et al. (2024). This allows for comparison with the results from this state-of-the-art overview to identify previously overlooked contextual factors that were identified with our proposed ANT-approach to show the added value of such a perspective.
References
Findlater, K., Webber, S., Kandlikar, M., & Donner, S. (2021). Climate services promise better decisions but mainly focus on better data. Nature Climate Change, 11(9), 731–737. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01125-3
Koers, G.J., Raaphorst, K.C.M., van der Wal, M.M., Ellen, G.J. & Meijerink, S.V. (2024). A Systematic Literature Review on the Operationalization of Usability in Urban Pluvial Flooding Climate Services and the Influence of Contextual Factors. WIREs Water, e1763. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1763
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN: 978-0199256051
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge: London. ISBN: 9780415341752
Lemos, M., Kirchhoff, C. & Ramprasad, V. (2012). Narrowing the climate information usability gap. Nature Climate Change, 2(11), 789-794. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1614
Raaphorst, K., Koers, G., Ellen, G.J. … & van der Brugge, R. (2020). Mind the Gap: Towards a Typology of Climate Service Usability Gap. Sustainability, 12(4), 1512. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041512
Vaughan, C., Buja, L., Kruczkiewicz, A. & Goddard, L. (2016). Identifying research priorities to advance climate services. Climate Services, 4, 65-74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cliser.2016.11.004
Vaugan, C. & Dessai, S. (2014). Climate services for society: origins, institutional arrangements, and design elements for an evaluation framework. WIREs Climate Change, 5(5), 587-603. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.290
| Keywords | Actor Network Theory; Climate services; Urban climate adaptation; The Netherlands |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
