Land subsidence meanings on the move: Transductive sensemaking in policy assemblages

Land subsidence policymaking in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is premised upon knowing land subsidence, where the remote sensing technique inSAR is a key source of evidence for decision-making. Yet, before inSAR data becomes relevant for policymakers, its production, interpretation and transformation into policy-relevant insights involves moving and transforming meaning about subsidence between different epistemic communities, including satellite sensors, engineers, policy advisors and politicians. How meaning actually moves and transforms between heterogeneous communities in ways that enables a shared form of coherence, such as a policy, to assemble, has not received much scholarly attention. We conceptualize this process as transductive sensemaking in a policy assemblage, whereby sensemaking at the intersections between epistemic communities enables the creation of a chain of meanings across the network of actors and practices. Based on interviews and participant observation with civil servants and analyses of artefacts of their practices, we trace the movement of meaning across three intersections: satellite-engineers, engineers-advisors and advisors-politicians. We show that transductive sensemaking involves a multitude of processes that are channelled and modulated by institutional constraints; that epistemic community formation is continuous, relational, and hinges on the simultaneous maintaining and crossing of role boundaries via transductive sensemaking; and that transductive sensemaking chains in a policy assemblage eventually couple and are subsumed by other chains and assemblages. With this analysis, and by showing how meanings about subsidence are continuously transformed in a policy process, we provide the foundation for a theory of transductive sensemaking and ethical sensibility toward how the movement of meaning shapes environmental governance.