contexts. Is it asked in Denmark, which has a liberal track record, was the first country to allow registered partnerships between same-sex couples, and has a state church controlled by parliament? Or is it asked in France, which has a secular constitution, but a far more vocal Catholic and conservative right? Or in Italy, which harbors the Vatican and the papal seat? On top of that comes the question of what you are actually for or against? Is it the legal right of gay couples to form civil unions? Is it the right to do so in a religious establishment? Is it the prospect of gay couples “qualifying” as parents for adoption? There are many intersecting ways of being for or against same-sex marriage, which is part of the reason why it is a worthwhile controversy to map.
Truly binary controversies are not really in need of mapping. They are like tugs of war with two teams opposing each other and a clear definition of when one team will have lost to the other. As controversies get more multiple, they become more like bar brawls with actors battling each other in shifting coalitions and on several different fronts at once. This is when cartography begins to make sense.
Importantly, in controversies, multiplicity does not only come from the fact that a multitude of actors with a multitude of positions are engaging a multitude of issues. Multiplicity can also be ontological (Mol, 2002), which is to say that the matter of a disagreement is actually different realities that different actors refer to by the same name. Two actors may, for example, both be talking about “a worthy end of life” in a controversy about euthanasia, or about “the risk of flooding” in a controversy about land use and urban planning, but enact those expressions in completely different ways, bringing them into being as materially different things. In the context of a hospice, a worthy end of life could be associated with the ability to uphold meaningful relationships with family and with a sense of self determination, while in a hospital emphasis might be put on a lack of emotional stress and physical pain. Importantly, those two versions are materialized and thus upheld in the equipment and procedures of the hospice and the hospital respectively. Similarly, an insurance company would typically understand flood risk in financial terms and therefore as something that depends on the size of their portfolio of flood-prone policy holders in the same local area, which is enacted in the way they model the risk, while to the individual homeowner it is really the risk of water coming into their particular basement (Munk, 2012). If that is the case, then ontology quickly becomes political (Mol, 1999) because the ability of actors to make their case is not so much a matter of debate as it is a matter of materially constructing the world in a way that makes their position self-evident.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, exceedingly multiple controversies are certainly interesting to map, but can pose a problem in terms of time and resources. We introduced this chapter with a cartographic project that we carried out a few years ago on the climate change adaptation debate. When preparing our submission for the European agency that funded the project, it seemed to us that the topic was rich enough to require the collaboration of six research centers over three years and to justify spending 1.5 million euros (cf. climaps.eu and Venturini et al., 2014b). We were wrong. As it turned out, climate adaptation was way too rich for such a “small” project. Though adaptation is only one of the facets of the discussion on climate change, its complexity is breathtaking for at least four reasons.
First, adaptation is largely (although not entirely) a problem of the future. The debate does not concern how we have messed up the climate in the past or what we can do to fix it in the present, but rather what we will do when the effects of climate change eventually hit us in the future. Since we do not know exactly what these effects will be, a first set of disagreements concerns questions of prediction, modeling, and simulation, such as how bad climate change will be, how fast it will unfold, and who or where it will hit first.
Second, the adaptation debate is multiplied by the diversity of local microclimates and communities. Another set of disagreements thus concerns the priorities of adaptation: which regions will be more vulnerable to climate impacts; which sectors will be more affected; and which arrangements will make our societies more flexible and resilient.
Third, adaptation involves the transformation of existing sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, infrastructure, industrial production, rural land use, or cities, and discussions about adaptation therefore always become mixed up with pre-existing sociotechnical debates. This leads to disagreements about what should count as an adaptation action and whether they are genuinely an additional effort or merely a re-branding of pre-existing engagements.
Fourth, adaptation mobilizes an increasing amount of human and financial resources. Social and institutional actors know this all too well and use climate adaptation as leverage to advance other interests, just as they use other interests as leverage to advance climate adaptation. A last set of disagreements therefore concerns who should fund adaptation, who should benefit from the funding, through which channels these resources should flow, who should decide how to use them, and who should assess the results.
Because of these four sources of disagreement, adaptation constitutes an exceedingly multiple controversy. This, of course, does not mean that it does not deserve to be mapped. On the contrary, adaptation turned out to be one of the most interesting controversies we have ever worked on. It does mean, however, that the practicalities of the cartography are a mouthful even for a large and well-resourced project.
Cold and hot controversies
We have argued above that the main attraction of controversies is their ability to break open black boxes that would otherwise remain sealed. But opening up what is taken for granted requires work (at least as much as was invested in its black boxing) that actors are very unlikely to undertake unless forced to by the situation. Controversies serve as forges where, as Sarah Whatmore puts it, “the things on which we rely as unexamined parts of the material fabric of our everyday lives become molten and make their agential force felt” (Whatmore, 2009, pp. 588–9). Just like real forges, however, they only work if they are hot enough to unsettle existing arrangements and push actors to contest them explicitly. Callon’s definition of a “cold situation” provides a counterexample:
In “cold” situations, on the other hand, agreement regarding ongoing overflows is swiftly achieved. Actors are identified, interests are stabilized, preferences can be expressed, responsibilities are acknowledged and accepted. The possible world states are already known or easy to identify: calculated decisions can be taken. The sudden (but nevertheless foreseeable because already experienced) pollution of a watercourse by a chemical factory falls into this category: sensors are already calibrated, analytical procedures are codified; the protagonists already know how to calculate their costs and benefits and are ready to negotiate (if necessary on the basis of clearly formulated insurance contracts) in order to determine the level of compensation payable. (Callon, 1998, p. 261)
In practice, this often translates into prioritizing issues that are hot at the moment the mapping takes place. It is not impossible to study past disputes by drawing on archives and documents, but it is generally more difficult both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, because once an issue is closed it is difficult to resist the temptation to “naturalize” its outcome and believe that the dispute could not have played out differently. Practically, because the actors will be less willing to offer their testimonies: those who “won” the conflict will present the conclusion as unavoidable; those who lost may prefer to forget about it. The black boxes are closed and few people are motivated to reopen them. Cartographers, in this situation, cannot just “follow” or “monitor” their objects, but are forced to “excavate” and “reconstruct” them.
The same is true, a fortiori, for upcoming issues: everyone expects some new product to revolutionize the market; some new law to wreak havoc once adopted by parliament; some new technology to incur moral objections when developed. Yet, until this actually happens there is little for the controversy mapper to do. The temperature only rises when actors
