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

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 productionwhere 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 argumentto prompt theoretical work on global governance objects to pay attention to the physicaldata that underlies the formation of epistemic objects. Moreover, the concept of gatekeepingspeaks to scholarship concerned with data sovereignty by showing how gatekeeping as amechanism of control of raw climate data is also exerted by non-sovereign actors or bymultiple 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 isfull 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 institutionscontributes to our understanding of how power, hierarchy, and political interests areimprinted on climate science from the point of extraction of its physical data. The articlefollows ice core science ethnographically and asks how and by whom data is extracted fromthe Greenland ice sheet, building on participant observation and semi-structured interviewsduring multi-sited fieldwork across Greenland, Germany, and Denmark.