The Tyranny of Metrics, the Power of Stories and Epistemic Diplomacy
Building bridges, not silos in climate-risk mapping in the global South
Johannes Bhanye, Gaynor Paradza
Abstract
This working paper argues that climate-risk mapping in the global South is trapped between ‘precisionism’ (indices, dashboards, model pipelines) and ‘groundtruthing’ (ethnography, participatory mapping, lived narratives). Precisionism offers speed, comparability and auditability but often produces a ‘metrics mirage’ that depoliticises inequality, flattens justice claims and misdiagnoses needs – especially for marginalised people living in informal settlements with unregistered land rights and/or insecure tenure, gendered and generational vulnerabilities and data-poor contexts. While groundtruthing restores meaning and accountability to the narrative, the approach has struggled to scale, translate across bureaucracies or secure policy traction in legal-centric and economics-biased indicator-driven systems. The result is ineffective policy and poorly targeted interventions. To break this stalemate, the paper proposes ‘epistemic diplomacy’: a power-aware, procedural approach to integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence under post-normal conditions (uncertain facts, disputed values, high stakes, urgent timelines). The framework sets out five principles (pluralism, power-awareness, procedural clarity, proportionality, public value) and a three-phase, ten-step operating model covering co-framing, mixed evidence generation with triangulation and disagreement rules, and joint interpretation linked to equity filters and decision translation. It also codifies governance safeguards, authorship equity, iterative consent and stewardship, anti-tokenism requirements and versioning, to prevent extraction and ensure accountability. Practical method pairings (e.g. hydraulic models with community story-maps; heat sensors with social diaries; SLR scenarios with tenure/livelihood profiles) show how ‘boundary objects’, ‘procedural compacts’ and ‘stewardship regimes’ can convert contested evidence into policy-ready artefacts (O&M-first specs, trigger matrices, managed-retreat briefs). The payoff is not softer rigor but broader quality: risk maps that carry both precision and meaning, improving allocation fit, distributional fairness and institutional uptake while making disagreement visible and governable.
Keywords: climate risk, global South, climate change, adaptation, climate justice, informal settlements, quantitative, qualitative
