Gatekeeping the Greenland ice sheet: climate change data and the “upstream” production of global governance objects

Abstract

In this article, I develop the concept of “gatekeeping” as it is exerted in the “upstream” of knowledge production. “Upstream” denotes the stage of knowledge production where unprocessed data is scoped, extracted, and preliminarily analyzed, before it later—“downstream”—is published as results on the basis of which political decisions are made. The focus on the upstream of knowledge production and how it is gatekept is an argument to prompt theoretical work on global governance objects to pay attention to the physical data that underlies the formation of epistemic objects. Moreover, the concept of gatekeeping speaks to scholarship concerned with data sovereignty by showing how gatekeeping as a mechanism of control of raw climate data is also exerted by non-sovereign actors or by multiple state actors simultaneously. By following climate scientists around as they scope, extract, and analyze ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet, I show how climate science is full of institutional hierarchies, mutually exclusive scientific interests, and power struggles “inside” science with direct effects on the flow and content of knowledge produced. Conceptualizing gatekeeping as it is exerted by state actors and scientific institutions contributes to our understanding of how power, hierarchy, and political interests are imprinted on climate science from the point of extraction of its physical data. The article follows ice core science ethnographically and asks how and by whom data is extracted from the Greenland ice sheet, building on participant observation and semi-structured interviews during multi-sited fieldwork across Greenland, Germany, and Denmark.