doi:10.1111/disa.

12313

Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise

for disaster management in Chile
Manuel Tironi Associate Professor, Instituto de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Chile, and Principal Investigator, Centro de Investigación para la Gestión
Integrada de Riesgo de Desastres, Chile, and Tania Manríquez Researcher, Centro
de Investigación para la Gestión Integrada de Riesgo de Desastres, Chile

Deemed as technocratic and exclusionary, disaster management has failed in its promise of
knowing, let alone controlling, catastrophic events. Consequently, disaster managers are searching
outside of science for sense-making analytics. This paper analyses the emergent narratives articu-
lated by disaster managers in Chile to cope with the uncertain nature of their object of inter-
vention. It explores how knowledge of disasters is modified and enriched by disaster managers
in what is termed here as ‘lateral knowledge’: the epistemic adjustment by which practitioners
revalidate their expert status by expanding key assumptions about disaster risk reduction. The
study, which draws on in-depth interviews with disaster managers in Chile, suggests that lateral
knowledge is established both through the increasing validation of community knowledge and
the recognition of politics as a critical mediator in the practice of disaster management. The paper
concludes by making the larger point that public understanding of science scholars should pay
more attention to the adapting capacities of expertise.

Keywords: disaster management, expertise, local knowledge, politics, uncertainty

Introduction
The theory and practice of disaster management has come under increasing scru-
tiny over the past decade. Forged in the midst of the Cold War in the United States
in the 1950s, and fuelled by the expectation of applying expert knowledge to pre-
paredness, response, and recovery interventions, disaster management has been
criticised for its technocratic approach to the causes and effects of crises and emer-
gencies (Knowles, 2011). Since the 1970s, non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
and practitioners, especially those working in ‘underdeveloped countries’, have been
questioning the rational and science-led approach of disaster management, and, more
amply, its claim to know disasters (cf. Wade, 1974; O’Keefe, Westgate, and Wisner,
1976; Wisner, O’Keefe, and Westgate, 1977).
  Indeed, the prediction of catastrophes, a crucial promise of disaster management,
has remained largely unattainable despite rapid advances in geodesic, seismic, and
global forecasting technologies (Hough, 2009). The modelling of collective and
individual reactions to disasters, using ever-more sophisticated computational tech-
nologies, has also proved elusive. Well-established assumptions about behavioural
patterns in disaster situations have proved problematic (Stott and Drury, 2000; Santos

© 2018 The Author(s). Disasters © Overseas Development Institute, 2018

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

and Aguirre, 2004), while the heterogeneity of site-specific cultural, institutional,

and physical conditions has made it difficult to define general behavioural models
(Cornwell, 2003). Moreover, while disaster-related casualties have decreased over the
years, anthropogenic factors and geo-economic conflicts have led to an augmenta-
tion of the frequency of disasters and humanitarian crises around the world. Some
760,000 people have died owing to disasters in the past decade alone (EM-DAT,
2018), evidence enough, many claim, of the inability of disaster management to
know–and let alone manage–geophysical, institutional, and social complexity. In
other words, disaster management, regardless of its promise of command and con-
trol, is constantly overflowed by uncertainty.
  This paper examines the emergent narratives articulated by disaster managers in
Chile to cope with the uncertainty of their object of intervention. Following the
interest of public engagement with science (PES) students in the way in which
expert knowledge is articulated, mobilised, and transformed (Wynne, 1991, 1996;
Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, 2001; Irwin and Michael, 2003), it explores how
knowledge of disasters is modified and enriched to make sense of their incommen-
surability. The analysis challenges critical accounts that have deemed disaster man-
agement to be a homogeneous technocratic endeavour, and indicates the capacity of
disaster management, as a particular type of expertise, to adapt to changing techno­
political settings. What emerges from the findings of the study is what is termed
here as ‘lateral knowledge’: an epistemic adjustment by which practitioners reinforce
their attempt at planning for disasters by expanding key assumptions and under-
standings about the nature of such events and what kind of knowledge is required
for action.
  In one of the first reflections on the epistemic conditions of disaster management,
Hilhorst (2003, p. 43) suggests that portraying the science-based paradigm of dis-
aster management as hegemonic ‘not only dismisses rival, parallel or previous dis-
courses and paradigms, it also ascribes too much consistency and homogeneity to
the paradigm’. She calls instead for explanatory frameworks that recognise the mul-
tiplicity of epistemologies, methods, and sensibilities at work within and through
disaster management. This study heeds her advice, viewing disaster management
as a dynamic knowledge practice that by no means is ruled by a single paradigm. It
assumes that disaster management is a plural field entangled in and shaped by hetero-
geneous forms of expertise—and thus is a field in which the technocratic imaginary
surrounding science-led interventions, modelling, and forecasting might be predom-
inant but by no means absolute.
  At the same time, however, it extends the call of Hilhorst (2003) by demonstrating
to what extent paradigms themselves are mutable and even ambivalent. The tech-
nocratic framework of disaster management not only has to deal with competing
perspectives, but also it is in itself ductile and open to epistemic calibrations. These
arrangements do not jeopardise the validity of disaster management in contempo-
rary Chile. Rather, they enhance its political and technical legitimacy in a context
marked by intense critiquing of expert knowledge, science, and technical rationality.
 Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

‘Lateral knowledge’ allows for precise reference to these arrangements and to the
epistemic capacity of disaster management to endure in a hostile environment.
  Methodologically, this study follows a pragmatist approach. It assumes that social
action is not explained by language, value systems, or other structural forces, but
instead by the situated and problem-specific practices of individuals and collectives.
Instead of concentrating on the symbolic macro structures conferring meaning on
an objective world ‘out there’, the epistemological focus is on the consequences of
action, and how they articulate specific versions of the world. The study is inter-
ested in how actors perform the social—with which arrangements, assumptions, and
materials—rather than on how cultural categories or social norms are applied to
objects, relations, or situations (Pihlström, 2015).
  The investigation draws on 20 interviews with a wide range of Chilean profes-
sionals and researchers, including disaster experts from the army and navy, public
officials working on risk management at the national and municipal level, and
scholars from the realm of the geosciences. These experts are involved in different
practices, mobilise different types of knowledge, and are oriented towards different
objectives, but they all describe themselves as being engaged in ‘disaster management’.
Many of them have coincided on specific projects and they all know each other, form-
ing a disparate although functional epistemic community.1
  The composition of this disaster management community, gathering together
military experts, public officials, and university researchers, might be explained by
the institutional particularities of disaster management in Chile. Located in the
‘Ring of Fire’ in the basin of the Pacific Ocean (more specifically in the subduction
zone between the Nazca and the South American Plate), Chile is one of the most
seismic countries in the world. Following the Valdivia earthquake on 22 May 1960,
the most powerful ever recorded in human history,2 Chile implemented a number
of regulations to secure appropriate infrastructural and social safety. The National
Emergency Plan, the first disaster management agency in the country, was estab-
lished immediately after the Valdivia earthquake. In 1974 it evolved into the Oficina
Nacional de Emergencia del Ministerio del Interior (ONEMI), the national emer-
gency office, in charge of in-situ response and the national seismological warning
system—a function shared with the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of
the Chilean Navy. Under this framework, the country’s disaster management com-
plex remained dominated by a technological and top-down approach focused on
immediate humanitarian response and early warning systems, with little or no
consideration of preparedness, mitigation, or recovery. The fragmentation of the
state, and the reallocation of many civil responsibilities to the private sector that
ensued with neoliberal adjustment in the mid-1970s, hampered the constitution of
an integrated and multidimensional disaster management system (Gould, Garcia, and
Remes, 2016).
  For the above reasons, disaster management in Chile is constituted as a disparate
network of otherwise disconnected experts and organisations—and this is reflected
in the heterogeneity of the interview sample. Indeed, the results of the study actually
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

indicate growing tensions regarding the fragmentation of the disaster management

community in Chile. Most of the interviews were conducted in 2014 when the
earthquake and tsunami that struck on 27 February 2010 were still an urgent, and
contested, object of policy intervention—with a moment magnitude of 8.8, the
events devastated southcentral Chile. While the country received international praise
for its seismic engineering,3 the disaster revealed profound deficits in urban planning
and social engagement throughout all phases of the disaster cycle. This precipitated
an ongoing national debate on the nature and form of disaster management. 4 The
interviews captured this convoluted context: the need of disaster managers to resitu-
ate their knowledge practices in the light of increasing uncertainty about their
efficiency and mission. The notion of ‘lateral knowledge’ attempts to conceptualise
the particular solution crafted by disaster management.
  The remainder of the paper is organised as follows: the second section locates the
theoretical argument within the relevant literature on disaster management and
expert knowledge against which the concept of ‘lateral knowledge’ is articulated.
The third section looks at how narratives concerning technological fixes, predicta-
bility, and control within the Chilean disaster management community are shifting
towards recognition of disasters as incommensurable entities. Sections four and five
turn to the main epistemological apertures characterising lateral knowledge: the
increasing validation of local and community knowledge; and the recognition of
politics as a critical mediator in the practice of disaster management in Chile. The
concluding section reflects on the relevance of lateral knowledge for the study of
expertise within PES.

Lateral knowledge: crafting expertise for disaster

management
[Risk Management] ensures that everyone – from governments to individuals – will make
the right decisions to reduce the risks and consequences of disasters. By making the right
decisions, a looming storm or flood will not trigger the expected disaster (ONEMI, 2007).

The quotation above illustrates the emphasis on causality and rational decision-making
that has turned disaster management into contested terrain. Under the purview of
the geosciences and behavioural disciplines, disasters management was articulated
around a phenomenology of disasters that entailed very specific definitions of action,
nature, and the social. A disaster, so the conventional definition goes, is viewed as an
‘exogenous, unexpected and extreme event that randomly impacts otherwise “normal”
developing societies’ (Lavell and Maskrey, 2015, p. 8). Such an understanding con-
strues disasters as independent and discrete entities disconnected from social and
political contexts, and thus amenable to—actually demanding—top-down, tech-
nical interventions (Krüger et al., 2015). These assumptions reinforce the Western,
modernist reliance on technoscience as a source of truth and validity, and hence
 Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

perpetuate the conditions of possibility at the origin of many disasters (Beck, 1992).
Crucial in this regard is the constitution of disaster management as a specific form
of expert knowledge. More than just a professional practice, disaster management is
sustained in and constituted by a set of theories, assumptions, and analytical frame-
works with which to depict the world and act accordingly. Hilhorst (2003) relates
disaster management to the Western understanding of nature as an entity that can be
controlled through ever-more creative technological solutions. Disasters, according
to this paradigm, are primarily the result of insufficient modernisation, and disaster
management has to be geared, therefore, to developing technological solutions for
planning, monitoring, and predicting otherwise ‘normal’ situations. Similar to the
scientification undergone by other disciplines and practices (see, for example, Van
Horn and Mirowski (2009) for a discussion pertaining to economics), the framing
of disaster management as a scientific endeavour was critical to acquiring political
legitimacy, as well as to impose the vision of an orderly and manageable world
(Hilgartner, 2007).
  However, portrayed as ‘objective’, disaster management is embedded with values
and agendas not shared by all actors involved in mitigation, response, and recovery
(Allen, 2007). Moreover, expert knowledge has proved to be insufficient and often
inaccurate with regard to complex phenomena, despite its assumed epistemic supe-
riority. As Sheila Jasanoff (2009, p. 30) suggests, ‘[a]ll our [expert] knowledge of
tsunamis and hurricanes could not prevent stupendous damage in Sumatra and
Louisiana or even ensure prompt and effective assistance to those left stranded in each
event’s wake’.
  The seclusion of expert systems from their sociopolitical environs and their inabil-
ity, and unwillingness, to integrate community, indigenous, or citizen evidence,
priorities, and sensibilities is at the crux of the failures of disaster management. The
mismatch between expert and lay knowledge, and the sociopolitical violence insti-
gated by the former against the latter, has been well studied (Brown, 1992; Fischer,
2000), and the call for more open and democratic modes of decision-making has
also been reclaimed for disaster management. Indeed, critical scholars have called for
more symmetric modes of decision-making and participation in disaster manage-
ment, demanding the inclusion of indigenous expertise (Mercer et al., 2010; Hastrup,
2011) and community (Pelling, 2007) and subaltern (Kim and Dutta, 2009; Grove,
2013) knowledge in preparedness and recovery plans. Taken together, this body of
work suggests that, in the field of disaster management, as Amina Aitsi-Selmi, Kevin
Blanchard, and Virginia Murray (2016, p. 5) put it, ‘linear and technocratic approaches
to the science-policy relationship are no longer suitable’.
  Disaster management is confronted, therefore, by a fundamental epistemological
challenge. What has been rendered problematic is not just the capacity of disaster
managers to predict the next catastrophe, but, more profoundly, what knowledge is,
by whom it is produced, and how it is validated in the field of disaster management.
Or, put differently, the crucial challenge of disaster management is to recognise, as
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

Aitsi-Selmi, Blanchard, and Murray (2016, p. 5) suggest, ‘that scientists and policy-
makers together with other stakeholders including the public need to engage on a
regular basis and through parallel processes to co-produce knowledge’. This entails
the redefinition of the field’s most elemental assumption, namely shifting the locus of
‘risk’ ‘from being principally a managerial problem to one that is seen also as deeply
political’ ( Jasanoff, 2009, p. 19).
  While the pressures put on disaster management have been well researched, little
is known about how disaster managers themselves have accommodated their narra-
tives—their epistemological frameworks for making sense of their object of inter-
vention—in this changing context. How do they cope with increasing criticism of
their knowledge practices? To what extent have their understandings and paradigms
adapted to the co-productionist call? Have they opened up spaces for epistemo-
logical flexibility? And, importantly, how do they allow for an expansion of their
knowledge ecologies without weakening their scientific identity and expertise?
  As evidenced in the case of Chile, scrutiny of disaster management has not her-
alded its dissolution. Utilising the notion of ‘lateral knowledge’, this study attempts
to conceptualise the epistemological capacity of disaster managers to attune their
knowledge and assumptions to the co-productionist demand without jeopardising
their expert practice and legitimacy. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘lateral’ as some-
thing related to the sides of an object or to sideways movement. In addition, it is a
synonym for solving problems by way of invention, newness, and non-convention-
ality (as in the expression ‘lateral thinking’).5 The double meaning of this concept
is used here to think about the epistemological challenges faced by disaster manag-
ers, at least in Chile. On the one hand, mobilised by the driver of anticipation and
control, disaster managers are summoned to innovate in the ways that they produce
knowledge in the face of increasing complexity—disaster managers and experts are
pushed, in other words, to think laterally. On the other hand, this epistemological
move cannot invalidate their field of practice or displace their expert status—and
hence needs to be oblique, flanking, or lateral. Confronted by the claims of tech-
nocratic positivism, disaster managers have to reconfigure their knowledge frame-
works, but without endangering their central technopolitical mission: the need and
the capability to manage disasters.
  The intention of the notion of ‘lateral knowledge’ is not to celebrate the strategic
adjustment abilities of disaster managers. Rather, it is coined to describe the complex
epistemological contortion rehearsed by them. As an attempt to capture the openness
and malleability of disaster management, the concept is at odds with the belligerent
critique to which it has been subjected, but also it counters triumphalist accounts
of disaster management’s prowess. While the operation involved in lateral knowledge
suggests creativity and response-ability (Haraway, 2016), it also reflects the limits of
technical positivism and the obduracy of science-based expertise in contemporary
societies. The paper turns now to Chilean disaster managers to explore how this
multivalent gesture expands.
 Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

Redefining disasters: ‘I do not know, I really do not know’

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake of 2010 not only battered Chile’s vital infrastructure,
but also it impacted the pillars of Chile’s disaster management system, which until
then was assumed to be a stable institution. The number of casualties remained low,
yet the catastrophe revealed many operational deficiencies. Most importantly, the
earthquake and the consequent tsunami highlighted two important deficits:

• aside from the resources for immediate response channelled through the ONEMI,
hazard planning in Chile was obsolete, especially in exposed coastal areas; and
• the resource-intensive network that was built for early warning proved precarious
and inefficient.

Both the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service and the National Seismological
Centre, the institutions in charge of the national network of seismic and tsunami
stations, provided inaccurate information during and after the event (Farías, 2014;
Kane, Medina, and Michler, 2015). Moreover, the national warning system, com-
prising a complex communication network involving local, regional, and national
institutions, failed to coordinate adequately. This triggered a cascading informational
collapse that concluded with the state facing several lawsuits for negligence.
  In the light of critical accounts rendering disaster management as a practice rely-
ing blindly on technoscientific capacities to know and control nature, the Chilean
disaster management community responded humbly to the destabilising effects of 2010.
Owing to the uncertainty unveiled by the earthquake and tsunami, disaster manage-
ment indeed became a problematic ideal.
  Disaster managers became increasingly aware that disasters were imminently
unpredictable. To be sure, geophysicists have always duly declared that earthquakes
cannot be anticipated in the short term, but in their quest for legitimacy (and fund-
ing) they have not always been totally clear about this fact (Hough, 2009). The
earthquake and tsunami of 2010 eliminated the epistemic ambiguity often at play
in disaster management discourse in Chile. ‘[We can] study risks and identify vulner-
abilities’, a geoscientist explained to the authors, ‘[b]ut we cannot predict a disaster.
That is impossible’ (interview 12). Such a strong recognition of the impracticability
of prediction came to the fore at a time when experts seemed confident about the
quality and quantity of seismic and geodesic knowledge in Chile. After the catas-
trophe of 2010, experts came to accept that geophysical information and disaster
prediction were different things and one did not imply the other. An official from
the ONEMI described the irreducible connection between knowledge gathering for
hazards in Chile and the prediction of disasters:

We assume that Chile is a country where disasters happen, this is the first concept that
we must consider. We are especially vulnerable in the range [pre-Cordilleran valleys],
which has plenty of volcanic activity, and on the entire coastal area, because we live in a
long and narrow strip of land by the sea. However, events are unpredictable, natural dis-
asters can strike at any time, just any time (interview 3).
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

  Interestingly, acknowledgment of disaster management’s incapacity to predict earth-

quakes and other geophysical events is not related to technological shortcomings.
Rather, there is a growing sense of ontological impossibility: that nature and the
geological are, and always will be, inevitably withdrawn from human comprehen-
sion. Confronted with questions concerning what is a disaster and how can disasters
be managed, experts are beginning to recognise explicitly that they do not know.
Even if one is aware of multiple aspects of the geological and geophysical dimen-
sions of disasters, their phenomenology remains largely inaccessible.
  A new set of concepts is mobilised to make sense of disasters’ incommensurability.
Disasters as ‘processes’ is one of them, as indicated by a disaster expert at a national-
level state agency: ‘[a]s I see it, a natural disaster is . . . I do not know, I really do not
know. It can be a process. I think that a natural disaster is a process’ (interview 8).
Another recurring theme is the invocation of ‘humanity’ to reframe the problem of
disaster knowledge in the domain of ontological intractability: ‘[w]e cannot believe,
as an institution, as humanity, that we are going to be able to predict things’ (inter-
view 16), as reflected by a military officer from the Chilean Civil Defence. The esca-
lation to the realm of humanity indicates to what extent disaster experts are beginning
to understand their professional and academic challenge not as a methodological or
even epistemological one, but as one pertaining to an ontological problem. As an
intractable problem. A geoscientist from an important national disaster management
research centre explained: ‘[a] disaster is caused by natural or other phenomena that
are not under the control of humanity’ (interview 2). This is a significant departure from
the technological determinism usually underscoring narratives within disaster man-
agement. From a discourse pivoting on authority and domination, disaster managers
are turning to out-of-control and processual images.

Citizen knowledge, local calibration

The redefinition of disasters as incommensurable, processual, and uncontrollable
events has come with, and is part of, the expansion of the knowledge repertoire with
which disaster managers have apprehended geo-climatic disruptions. In as far as the
technoscientific complex, with its apparatuses, methods, and principles, has proved
insufficient in knowing, let alone managing, catastrophic events, disaster managers
are searching outside of science for sense-making analytics.
  Yet, the need for intervention remains. Disaster managers recognise that conven-
tional sources of knowledge are increasingly being discredited, but that has not dis-
solved the expectation of disaster planning and action, particularly in a disaster-prone
country such as Chile.
  To cope with this contradictory demand, disaster managers are expanding the
sources of valid knowledge of disasters, and indeed the notion of knowledge itself.
This epistemic gesture, as noted, is termed here ‘lateral knowledge’, since while being
generative and creative, it does not jeopardise the primary objective of disaster man-
agement: the always uncanny attempt to manage risks and hazards.
 Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

  Lateral knowledge is sustained on the validation of ‘citizen knowledge’ as a rel-

evant type of hands-on and situated information for disaster management. Usually
neglected by expert systems, local knowledge is being accepted and introduced into
disaster management by Chilean experts themselves. What sort of knowledge do
local communities have regarding their exposition to socio-natural risks? How do
they sense disasters? And what decisions do they make when experiencing a disastrous
event? These are some of the questions that, if not answering, disaster managers are,
at least rendering relevant to their operations.
  PES researchers have long recognised the clashes between expert and lay knowl-
edge in technoscientific controversies, and have criticised the dismissal of non-expert
forms of evidence in the name of universality, objectivity, and method (Epstein,
1995; Wynne, 1996; Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2008). Crucially different in the case
of this study is that the epistemological questioning of expertise does not come from
concerned groups or social movements, but instead from the experts themselves.
This is what lateral knowledge aims to capture: not the struggle of communities and
collectives for epistemological recognition, but rather, the examination by experts
of their own assumptions and the emergence of new epistemological spaces within
technoscience. More precisely, disaster managers are recognising that people have
enough accurate knowledge—sometimes passed down from one generation to the
next—to identify specific hazards and to make ‘rational’ decisions in times of immi-
nent danger.
  A crucial question for disaster managers—and the one that ignited disaster man-
agement in the first place in the 1960s—is what people do when faced with an
emergency or crisis. While sociologists have demonstrated that individuals tend to
act prosocially (Tierney, Bevc, and Kuligowski, 2006; Quarantelli, 2007), a critical
issue for disaster planning is how to ensure safe mass evacuations by way of instilling
a ‘culture of disaster’, namely basic knowledge of the ‘what, when, and how’ in the
case of an emergency or crisis (Hasan et al., 2011). The conventional approach, in
Chile and elsewhere, has been top-down and pedagogical: to give instructions to
individuals and collectives on the fastest and most efficient ways of identifying a
hazard and finding refuge, assuming that they are illiterate in disaster-related mat-
ters or susceptible to irrational behaviour.
  Such an understanding is changing. Far from taking for granted that people are
ignorant of disasters, nature, and risks, disaster managers in Chile are assuming that
citizens are in fact knowledgeable. For example, a municipal disaster expert explained
how basic knowledge with which to evaluate the need for evacuation, usually assumed
absent among people’s decisional resources, is already in place within communities:
‘if we are not able to stand on our feet [during an earthquake], people know that a
tsunami may arise after 20 minutes. People know that’ (interview 9). Another disaster
manager working at the local level related such pre-existing knowledge and capaci-
ties to long-term socialisation processes and specific cultural contexts: ‘[p]eople here
belong to a fishermen culture and there are also people who are related to a moun-
tain culture and therefore they know how to react when disasters arise’ (interview 10).
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

  The observation of the link between a fishermen or mountain community and

the possession of certain ecological knowledge depicts recognition of collective
memory and traditional practices in the configuration of a culture of disaster. On the
one hand, this is related to the capacity of communities to recognise a cyclical pattern
in the occurrence of disasters based on land-specific histories and memories. As a
disaster expert from the army stated: ‘[n]owadays, villagers themselves know that, after
a certain amount of years, something may occur’ (interview 14). On the other hand,
and perhaps more importantly, disaster managers in Chile are accepting that experien-
tial knowledge allows people to make fine-grained contextual evaluations of potential
risks. A public official in charge of a municipal disaster management team described
the connection between experience, knowledge, and decision-making as follows:

People know that if it rains three or four days in a row with a certain intensity, there is
the risk that specific places previously identified may collapse. Of course, that knowledge
is associated with their practices, with things that have happened before. At least here,
people don’t use the scientific method; our people know when stuff can happen. I think so
(interview 13).

  To be sure, the expectation of managing disasters has not weakened. In the narra-
tives of disaster experts, citizen knowledge is included to enrich disaster management,
not to dissolve it. Taken together, these different modalities for incorporating com-
munity and local knowledge in disaster management are part of lateral knowledge.
Indeed, the integration of local knowledge and vernacular expertise into disaster
management enables a unique epistemological shift. By including citizens’ experi-
ences, information, and knowledge, disaster managers are defying the tenets of
objectivity and universality sustaining disaster management as a scientific field. At
the same time, though, this inclusion allows disaster managers to retain their much-
criticised expectation of anticipation, management, and, to some extent, control.
Similar to the inclusion of citizen participation to validate neoliberal or technocen-
tric post-disaster interventions (Tironi, 2015), disaster managers are opening up what
is knowledge for disaster planning, how it is produced, and by whom—but without
compromising the will of command that has fuelled disaster management since
its inception. Lateral knowledge is an epistemological arrangement by which a
community’s (indigenous, ancestral, or otherwise local) non-expert knowledge is
recognised not as deconstructing, but as adapting disaster management to a new epis-
temological context.

Politics as knowledge: the art of muddling through

Political expression is always disappointing; that is where we must start. In terms of the
transfer of exact undistorted information on the social or natural world, we could say that it
always seems to be totally inadequate: truisms, clichés, handshakes, half-truths, half-lies,
windy words, repetitions mostly, ad nauseam (Latour, 2003, p. 144).
 Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

Disaster management, as a form of scientific expertise, not only has dismissed local
knowledge, but also it has discredited political practices. Building on the ‘modern’
separation between fact and artefact (Latour, 2003), disaster management has sup-
ported its knowledge status by tracing a stark distinction between the interested
and biased domain of politics and the objective realm of science (Chipangura, Van
Niekerk, and Van Der Waldt, 2016). In Chile, a country with a long history of techno-
cratic governmentality (Centeno and Silva, 1998; Silva, 2008), disaster management
was construed as a practice that needed to be impartial, factual, and expert—depoliti-
cised in other words—in order to be legitimated (Gould, Garcia, and Remes, 2016).
The political, with its weakness for ‘truisms, clichés, handshakes, half-truths, half-
lies, windy words, repetitions’ (Latour, 2003, p. 144), is unable to convey reason and
certainty for much-needed interventions in the event of natural hazards.
  However, disaster managers in Chile, confronted with the limitations of their
knowledge and the incommensurability of their object of intervention, are making
room for politics in different forms. Here, politics does not necessarily refer to
legislative discussions or party politics, but to the more mundane practice of ‘down-
streaming’ disaster management: the epistemic and social tools required for making
expert knowledge, formal protocols, and scientific information actionable within the
intricate web of state institutions, municipal regulations, and local actors. Politics,
in other words, is the capacity of disaster managers to muddle through—and some-
times against—complex socio-institutional landscapes.
  A critical issue unveiled by the earthquake of 2010 and identified by disaster experts
is the messy implementation of disaster management, namely the transition from the
desks of the national government to in-situ deployments at the local level. Disaster
management in Chile is defined as ‘the systematic process of using administrative
guidelines, organisations, skills and operational capacities to execute policies and
strengthen coping capacities in order to reduce the adverse impacts of natural and
man-made threats and the possibility of a disaster’ (ONEMI, 2014). Disaster manage-
ment is thus imagined as an ordered and formal process aiming to execute actions in
line with sanctioned procedures. Accordingly, the ONEMI is in charge of elaborat-
ing national guidelines—and commissioning the required scientific research—that
are centrally distributed to regional authorities (intendencias) and then to the local
level (municipalities). In case of a destructive event, national, regional, and local
governments are required to establish a Comité de Operaciones de Emergencia
(Emergency Operational Committee). These bodies are in charge of organising
and managing economic, human, and material resources for emergency response.
Importantly, furthermore, they articulate the communicational and operational chain
system for coordinating state actions from the central to the local level (Ministerio
del Interior y Seguridad Pública, 2011).
  This process, though, is far from functioning as expected. To make scientific
knowledge actionable at the local level, protocols should be understandable by the
authorities in charge of applying them, and by the local community affected by the
disaster, but it has proven hard to make this political translation materialise. A disas-
ter scholar commented on this mismatch:
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

We establish something that we can call an academic scenario, where everything is pre-
sented, research is shown, there are recommendations and suggestions, as if it were a gen-
eral policy. But there is no protocol on how to socialise that information with the target
audience, that is the community. We were lacking the link to translate academic knowl-
edge and transform it into processes, so that civil servants could manage it and interact with
the community (interview 12).

  The problem seems to be rooted in the widening gap between the assumptions
made at the central level and the reality at the local level. As a municipal disaster
manager noted:

I think that the greatest complications occur when official instructions overlap. There are
situations in which regional or national instructions collide with our local reality. We do not
want to be against instructions just because; it is just that sometimes local reality is differ-
ent from what people who are in charge at a regional or central level think (interview 13).

  This disconnection is not unusual. In fact, it has proved to be a fundamental

obstacle to efficient risk governance (Birkland, 2007). While in the past it would
have been interpreted as a problem of epistemological deficit on the part of political
actors—their inability to understand science—it is understood now as a missing
element in disaster management’s knowledge architecture. Politics, or the art of con-
veying, gathering, facilitating, and allowing complex institutional and regulatory
systems, is no longer seen by disaster managers as ‘disappointing’ (Latour, 2013).
Indeed, disaster managers are beginning to recognise the relevance of politics and
political knowledge not as a necessary evil, but as a key component of disaster man-
agement that has to be admitted and recognised in its own right.
  Latour (2013) uses the curve—as the geometric line that defies straightness—to
represent the functioning and capacity of politics. Politics is not the space for the pro-
duction of facts and scientific truths or ‘to move forwards in a straight line, reason-
ably, quickly, efficiently’; rather, ‘[t]he expression “that’s political” means first and
foremost “it doesn’t move straight”, “it doesn’t move fast”; it always implies that “if
only we didn’t have this load, we’d achieve our goal more directly”’ (Latour, 2003,
p. 145). Politics, explains Latour (2003), is a composing practice: the ability to tinker,
to knit together, to reunite, to convince, to seduce, and, finally, to make things
happen in the midst of clashing interests and passions. These affordances and goals
are better represented by the curvature and the elliptical—more flexible and sinuous
than the straight, un-situated lines expected by the technosciences. And this is what
disaster experts are recognising as part of their lateral knowledge: the need not to
eliminate procedures, but to accommodate, adjust, and mend formal protocols and
scientific forms of knowledge to make them actionable in local contexts.
  Key to the recognition of political knowledge within disaster management is grow-
ing acknowledgement of inter-context dissonances. What works in one expert or
institutional milieu might be redundant, spurious, or even counterproductive in
another; in the realm of disaster management, actions and tools that might seem
 Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

rational and effective to the central government might end up being incongruent at
the local level. Trying to illustrate this political mismatch, a geoscientist described
disaster management as a process of ecological adaptation between protocols or regula-
tions and the environment in which these tools will be deployed. By way of example,
he observed that:

If I take an indigenous person from the Brazil’s Mato Grosso and transport him to New
York, there, in New York, he will be seen as illiterate. But if I take a guy from New York,
however physically fit he might be, and drop him in Mato Grosso, he dies in 24 hours,
because he’s not literate in that medium . . . [disaster management] has to do with how
can you thrive within your given environment (interview 1).

  A fundamental task of disaster management, therefore, is to make its apparatuses

and instruments appropriate for situated cultural, geographical, and institutional
conditions. As the research informants recounted, this is a material practice that
involves literally fixing what the central government delivers. Put differently, the
political knowledge needed by disaster managers is not theoretical, but hands-on and
practical, usually deployed in vivo in the midst of a disaster. As a disaster manager in
a coastal municipality noted:

The event happens, the disaster, and you have to manage it. There is a period of dealing
with the crisis, then there is a time of recovery and this is when I have to work to improve
the process. If I take care of this process I can fix the things that were not working well
(interview 10).

  Consequently, disaster experts are accepting that dealing with emergencies implies
the capacity to adapt to and act in excessive circumstances, far from the imaginary
of disaster management as an orderly, science-led, and coordinated process.
  This requires, furthermore, the ability to curve, to use Latour’s (2003) terminol-
ogy, definitions and actions to make them operational and effective. This attempt
at curving disaster management materialises in the ‘de-scientification’ of protocols
and plans, or their alignment with diverse publics and audiences. Disaster protocols
used to put a premium on factual rigour, regulatory exactitude, and robust evidence;
now they are designed to secure comprehensibility. As a disaster manager at the
municipal level stated:

There are different scientific definitions [of disasters], but our plan is not just for experts.
It is for everybody to understand. So we don’t want technical words, because you may
devise a plan but what does it mean ‘alteration of the seismic quota’ or something like that?
Nobody knows what’s a seismic quota, right? (interview 17).

  It is important to underline the timid but ongoing epistemological shift in the above
quotation. What is at play is not just a mere pedagogical adjustment to make scien-
tific information understandable by lay or otherwise illiterate people. Put differently,
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

this is not just an effort to communicate science in a more citizen-friendly fashion.

What is at stake is the opening up of new knowledge vistas in which the political—
the material practice of knitting disparate things together—emerges as a valid and
required mode of attention and thinking. What is relevant in this shift is not the trans-
lation itself—from a technical plan to a jargon-free, public-oriented plan—but the
epistemic recognition behind this translation: that it is not a second-order communi-
cational output after the fact, but a critical knowledge aperture for disaster management.
  This shift confirms lateral knowledge. Disaster managers recognise the need to
include politics in their methods, assumptions, and daily practices. Moreover, they
do so not as an attempt to disavow the professional ethos and technical aims of dis-
aster management, but as a means of reinforcing it. Put another way, the curvature
of the political is recognised as a kind of knowledge and social sensibility that is
needed to enhance the effectiveness of disaster management.

Conclusion
Disaster management constitutes a contested expert field. Deemed as technocratic
and authoritarian, it has encountered systematic criticism not only with regard to
its intervention practices, but also to the way in which knowledge is produced and
validated within the field. This paper shows, however, that the picture is fuzzier.
Disaster managers in Chile, one of the most seismic countries in the world, are mak-
ing room for new knowledge sensibilities, and thus validating modes of action and
thinking that were dismissed as irrelevant or non-objective not so long ago.
  More specifically, the paper identifies two forms of knowledge that are punctuat-
ing disaster management in Chile, as disasters are recognised as incommensurable
and uncontrollable events. First, disaster managers are acknowledging and utilising
community and local knowledge in their attempts to plan for disasters. Second, they
are validating political knowledge as a crucial element for efficient disaster management.
  The composite result of the epistemological aperture identified here is termed
‘lateral knowledge’. Lateral because it reflects a creative and innovative knowledge
shift, and because it functions as a sideways corrective that does not destabilise dis-
aster management as an expert practice; rather, it helps in renewing the social and
technical legitimation of the field. The incorporation of local and political knowl-
edge has not dismantled the community of ‘disaster management’ in Chile, but in
many ways has strengthened it. This shift has thus to be understood as a long-term
learning process among Chilean disaster managers. Indeed, the lessons learned by
the disaster management community tracked in this paper are derived from the earth-
quake of 2010 and subsequent events, such as the reported 8.3-magnitude earthquake
that struck the Chilean coast in September 2015. Using the notion of lateral knowl-
edge, the study argues that these lessons go beyond a technical adjustment, conveying
a deeper epistemological rearrangement of what disaster management is and how
disasters are known and acted upon.
 Lateral knowledge: shifting expertise for disaster management in Chile

  To be sure, lateral knowledge is an emerging process. Disaster management is

still marked by a strong top-down and science-based ethos. The interviews reflected
that enduring framing: notions of the public as irrational individuals that need to
be instructed, or of science as an epic truth-making adventure that undoubtedly will
lead to better disaster planning, are still powerfully embedded in the narratives of
disaster managers. Nonetheless, these narratives are changing, and this transforma-
tion makes an important contribution to PES scholarship.
  In her account of the complex interplay between experts, governments, and lay-
persons in disaster response, Hilhorst (2003) suggests that disaster management has
to be viewed as an entanglement of diverse social domains or forms of knowledge-
making, of which science-based expertise is but one. This characterisation resonates
with the call made by science and technology studies scholars to recognise the diversity
of knowledge forms at play in relation to any given technoscientific issue or conflict.
Not only do communities and citizens utilise their own evidence-making procedures
(Murphy, 2012), but also different professional communities (Collins and Evans, 2007;
Hecht, 1998) problematise ‘expertise’ as a generic and monolithic epistemological space.
  Scant attention has been paid, though, to how expert communities modify, extend,
or adapt their knowledge practices and assumptions to cope with increasing epis-
temic complexity, and political criticism. Put differently, it is known that science-
based experts face multiple rival forms of expertise that claim legitimacy, but little
is known about how they adjust their knowledge practices and narratives to find
validation in a context of increasing agnosticism of scientific rationality. Beyond its
application to disaster management, therefore, the notion of lateral knowledge might
lead to an empirical inquiry into the knowledge tactics and epistemological apertures
through which expertise becomes a truth-making apparatus that changes and adapts.
  Importantly, by pointing to the evolving and flexible nature of expertise, lateral
knowledge also suggests a criticism of the principles of universality and objectivity
that have obdurately sustained the epistemology of expert knowledge. The practices
labelled here as ‘lateral knowledge’ may not represent a radical emancipation from
the production of Western, modern (actionable, bold, efficient) truths about the
world. But the epistemological ductility evident in the study results indicates that it
has to be understood as a way of problematising current forms of knowledge creation
and validation: lateral knowledge signifies a hesitation with respect to the impera-
tive of action and intervention. By expanding their knowledge repertoire, Chilean
disaster experts are helping to ‘slow down’ technocratic reasoning, which many claim
is fundamental given the contemporary proliferation of intractable geo-biological
disasters (Stengers, 2015; Colebrook, 2016; Haraway, 2016).

Correspondence
Manuel Tironi, Instituto de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,
Avenida Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Casilla 306, Correo 22, Macul, Santiago, Chile.
E-mail: metironi@uc.cl
Manuel Tironi and Tania Manríquez

Endnotes
1
Hereafter the paper refers to ‘disaster managers’ to speak indifferently about the participants of this
particular community.
2
Various studies have placed it at 9.4–9.6 on the moment magnitude scale. The rupture zone stretched
almost 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) along the country’s coast.
3
A comparison between the disaster responses of Chile and Haiti, which suffered a 7.0 moment
magnitude earthquake on 12 January 2010, became recurrent. While the death toll in Chile climbed
to 500, it has been estimated that between 92,000 and 316,000 Haitians lost their lives. In an article
entitled ‘Why Chile fared better than Haiti’, Richard A. Lovett (2010) points to state-of-the-art
seismic engineering as a key factor in understanding Chile’s performance; the British Broadcasting
Corporation (Reuben, 2010) and The Guardian (Franklin, 2015) arrived at similar conclusions.
4
As of this writing ( January 2016), southcentral Chile has been devastated by the largest wildfires
ever registered in the country. The burning of more than 400,000 hectares has, again, triggered a
vociferous debate about Chile’s disaster management capacities.
5
For more information see https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/lateral (last accessed on
7 September 2018).

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