This thesis advances our understanding of what it means to create climate services for society, with a particular focus on the institutional arrangements needed to support a national-level agricultural climate service in Uruguay.
Grounded in a broad analysis of the emerging field of climate services, the thesis starts with a bird’s-eye-view approach, analyzing a global survey of more than 100 services to draw general conclusions about the current state of practice and the persistence of a number of common challenges. This activity is also used to define what might be considered a pattern of attributes that might define a “typical” climate service.
While the analysis of this dataset is useful in providing a historical overview of the field in 2012, it was not able to provide a sense of good practice in this emerging field. To advance this discussion, the analysis finds that case studies must move past a simple accounting of what took place to explore and explain strengths and weaknesses of climate services from a more theoretical perspective. To achieve this, the thesis argues that case studies should explore currently under-researched issues, explaining causal links between specific climate-service interventions and ultimate outcomes. Case studies should also play a role in climate service evaluation, complementing experimental and quasi-experimental methods, and supplementing those methods in cases in which they may be inappropriate or premature.
Building on these recommendations, the thesis develops a case study that follows an “archetypical” climate service, looking at the governance and institutional arrangements that support a national-level agricultural climate service based on seasonal-scale information and provided to the Uruguayan agricultural sector over the Internet. This work reveals six factors that created an enabling environment for investment in Uruguay’s National Agricultural Information System (SNIA). These are: institutional support for sustainable agriculture; groundwork on climate change adaptation; the modernisation of the meteorological service; an open data policy; a focus on the near-term; and the role of key individuals.
In particular, the results reveal the role that “innovation systems,” “groundwork,” and the modernisation of the meteorological service play in fostering investment in climate services. This suggests a number of avenues by which national governments can advance investment in climate services, even when political factors make the possibility of this kind of investment seem remote. Policy measures – such as Uruguay’s requirement that all public data be made available, and the SNIA’s policy of focusing on near-term climate variability rather than long-term climate change – were critically important. Key individuals, and the relationships of trust between them, were also found to be central to the decision to invest in the SNIA.
Following this analysis, a second component of the case study explored the governance arrangements that supported the development and use of SNIA. While this analysis found that the team responsible for the SNIA was relatively successful at developing ad hoc solutions to governance challenges associated with delivering the SNIA, it found as well that the team was less successful at addressing the governance challenges associated with defining the SNIA, including by selecting the information products that composed it, and ensuring the sustainable impact of the tool.
As one of the first studies focused specifically on climate service governance, this analysis relied on themes from project governance. In extending these concepts, the thesis suggests that those concerned with the governance of national climate services should be particularly concerned with issues related to (1) prioritization among climate service opportunities, and between climate services and other types of) opportunities designed to further similar goals; (2) balancing needs and opportunities at local and national scales; (3) supporting evaluation; and (4) fostering sustainable impact.
Taken together, the components of the thesis contribute to a larger discussion on the governance and institutional factors that contribute to the success of climate services, and to a better understanding of what determines “good practice” in climate services more broadly. The thesis also consolidates a range of social science literature that has expanded in the climate service field over the past decade and improves a general understanding of what climate services are, how they are funded, and how they are governed.
