It was around three in the afternoon when two geographers and a geologist, perched at three thousand meters above sea level, gazed over rock, snow, ice, wetlands, and low-brush vegetation common in Argentina’s central Andes. The sun’s radiation was intense, as was the bellowing wind. The scientists worked for the national Institute on Snow Studies, Glaciology, and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA), located in the province of Mendoza, and they were tasked with mapping glaciers for a new, nationally mandated glacier inventory. As they looked into the distance, they tried to decipher whether the satellite image they had seen—now a printout in their hands—was indeed a rock glacier, that is, a geological formation made up of an accumulated mixture of debris and ice that creeps downslope. As the most identifiable parts of periglacial environments—areas with frozen ground that undergo cyclical freeze and thaw cycles—and with the highest hydrological value, rock glaciers would be added to the National Glacier Inventory. But mere rocks would not be.
It takes training and experience to see rock glaciers. In an otherwise astoundingly large pile of rocks, an attuned eye would spot spouts of water emerging from beneath the mound, feeding nearby waterways, or the surface distribution of rocks, which provides information on whether the glacier is active (moving), inactive, or a fossil rock glacier with no ice content. Still, what appears to be a rock glacier may in fact be a debris-covered glacier, which is not a component of periglacial environments (Taillant Reference Taillant2015, 110). The three scientists debated these and other identification issues into the night, huddled in their warm tents as temperatures dropped to below freezing, and then for weeks afterward, after they had returned to their offices in the provincial capital, also called Mendoza. Scientific discussions on rock glaciers could be endless. As scientists, the team would have preferred to have the time and space for scientific debate. But they had a legal responsibility to the national government, which required definition and clarity on a calendar. They had to decide. However technical their task might have seemed, it would also be politically and socially consequential.
This was one of the first field campaigns after Argentina adopted in 2010 the Glacier Protection Law (No. 26639), the world’s first. It was, and still is, a contentious law because it protects these icy bodies as strategic hydrological reserves from industrial activities, like mining, which are increasingly encroaching into glacial areas. To identify what to protect, the government legally appointed IANIGLA to create an inventory of the nation’s glaciers and periglacial environments. This resulted in a map of 16,078 bodies of ice located across 5,769 square kilometers between 200 and 6,900 meters above sea level (IANIGLA-CONICET 2018). IANIGLA is a public scientific research institute, one of the few in the Southern Cone region dedicated to the study of snow and ice. These attributes made IANIGLA an obvious choice for the inventory: Politicians and policymakers thought so, as did IANIGLA’s scientists, who shared a long-standing belief in science as providing objective, ideologically neutral representations of nature that, as in situations like this, could advance agreed-on regulatory goals. Soon enough, however, this consensus broke down: IANIGLA suffered a devastating fall from grace. Its director, Ricardo Villalba, was indicted for decisions made in the inventory, and scientists and legislators alike were exposed for exhibiting a general naïveté regarding the role of science in governance. IANIGLA’s reputation aside, at stake in this case are questions about the promises of science for environmental management, specifically for democratic values like policy effectiveness, when those promises fail. Above all, this case sheds light on the stakes for global climate science in a world where global climate change increasingly demands diverse local climate policies: Such failures can stem, as in this case, from often unrecognized tensions in upscaling and downscaling science, understood as contradictory practices used to transform global elements of nature into what Hellgren calls locally “governable objects” (Hellgren Reference Hellgren, Dodds and Sörlin2022).
This article examines the contests involved in defining and identifying periglacial environments, elements of nature that are largely unknown by society and that require ample time, resources, and in-house discussions for scientists to inventory. Periglacial environments are made of rocks and water constantly moving through freeze-thaw cycles. They spread out over thousands of kilometers, many of which are inaccessible at specific latitudes, altitudes, and temperatures. Scientists simply did not have the resources and time to carry out such a feat, least of all in the five-year period set by the law. In this article, we argue that, by choosing IANIGLA as the sole institution in charge of the inventory, the state delimited the area of protection to the objects IANIGLA could and would inventory, bounded by its own methods, modes of expertise, and goals. Moreover, the state wrote into law an object that it could neither define nor identify and that, as an environment, resisted being made into an object.
These mismatched understandings explain why periglacial environments became the subject of intense political debate, causing IANIGLA’s inventory to meet high levels of public scrutiny even as it delivered what many considered an impossibly difficult task. All scientific terms proposed by IANIGLA scientists entered the public debate, including glaciers, rock glaciers, and periglacial environments. However, only some successfully turned into “governable objects,” what Hellgren defines as sociopolitically configured parts of “natural” environments made into discrete objects to be managed and administered by the state as national resources (Hellgren Reference Hellgren, Dodds and Sörlin2022). As opposed to glaciers, periglacial environments (of which rock glaciers are a part of) did not become governable objects in large part because they could not be fully captured as scientific objects of study. We identify the tensions raised by the failure to make periglacial environments governable objects through an analysis of the accumulated misunderstandings over the goals of the inventory, definitions of specific terms, and recommended methods between scientists, policymakers, and socioenvironmental activists.
The article is divided as follows: The first section analyzes glaciology as a field practice and introduces the terms upscaling and downscaling, used to describe some inherent tensions in glaciologists’ work. The second section outlines the qualitative methodological tools used. The third section summarizes events leading up to the adoption of the 2010 Glacier Protection Law and its consequences for IANIGLA, especially for its director, Ricardo Villalba, who was indicted for decisions made in the inventory, which are crucial to understanding this case. A final empirical section is organized into three parts—expectations, design, and implementation—documenting scientists’ intimate experiences navigating various levels of uncertainty as they created the inventory.
Scalar tensions in science and governance
IANIGLA scientists believed they had been hired to produce “objective” knowledge, and to do so, they sought to liken the Andes to global, standardized figures of glaciers. Following their scientific training, their goal was to make knowledge commensurable with and comparable to global climate change research. We call these globalizing aspirations upscaling. Yet the particularities of each place across the Andes could not be so easily rendered global. On the one hand, the possibility of verifying satellite data in the field made scientists’ results credible to colleagues (Kohler Reference Kohler2002a, 190). On the other hand, the particularities of place constantly tested the categories of nature they had available to them and that they needed to scale their data globally.
The upscaling sought by the inventory’s agenda, which obscures or even erases place-based dynamics and particularities, had to grapple with pulls toward downscaling presented by local realities, scientists’ intimate field encounters, and activists’ expectations of locally specific data. Yet achieving uniformity across the nation and in compliance with global standards was a driving interest of IANIGLA scientists, who hoped the inventory would be more than a simple map. They wanted it to be a long-term project contributing data on glacier retreat, for instance, to global databases and climate change research. Glaciology, perhaps even more so than other fields of research, exists in conversation with global climate research. Glaciology as a field grew dramatically with climate change and over the past four decades has built a global infrastructure of data banks, scientific models, methods like remote sensing, and research networks, to produce what is considered in the scientific method as objective, global knowledge about glaciers. For IANIGLA scientists, the inventory had to meet these criteria to count as good science.
This global outlook exists in tension with the practice of glaciology, which has a long tradition of embodied and experiential data collection (Gagné Reference Gagné2024). IANIGLA scientists encountered this with every field campaign they undertook for the inventory as they encountered melting glaciers and myriad, unforeseen conditions created by nonhumans and humans alike. These conditions often presented obstacles to and nuanced their work. Scientists’ intimate and sensorial encounters with the field have often been fundamental to their research, including to the results of their work (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank2005; Carey Reference Carey2010; O’Reilly Reference O’Reilly2017; Simonetti Reference Simonetti2019, Reference Simonetti2021; Gagné Reference Gagné2024). Glacier research is embodied in a double sense. It requires physical ability to walk and work on ice, usually at high altitudes and below-freezing temperatures, and it employs the senses to perceive and make sense of ice. Sensorial knowledge of ice is like what Evelyn Fox Keller (Reference Keller1983) famously described as a “feeling for the organism” (see also Myers Reference Myers2008, 165). That training involves allowing one’s sense to be affected by the very vitality of ice (Gagné Reference Gagné2024), for instance, recognizing it as viscous, simultaneously solid and fluid (Simonetti Reference Simonetti2021).
Additionally, glaciology fieldwork requires its own “practices of place” to guarantee the production of sound science (Kohler Reference Kohler2002a, Reference Kohler2002b). By contrast to lab practice, field data reflects a location’s qualities and its dynamism, variety, and active participation. Field data also adds credibility. IANIGLA scientists understood this and embarked on an ambitious campaign to verify data with fieldwork, which constantly defied any false stability periglacial environments achieved as governable objects. This reflects what scholar Robert Kohler (Reference Kohler2002a, 190) describes as the agency of nature, which manifests as “just too big, varied, and uncontrollable to be so drastically confined and manipulated” as in standardized global models of glacier retreat, for example. For IANIGLA scientists, and as the opening vignette showed, classifying periglacial environments required sensorial acuity. Yet at this same time, these particularities constantly challenged comparability with global data (Gagné Reference Gagné2024; Hellgren Reference Hellgren, Dodds and Sörlin2022). In this sense, global science risks making the local qualities of places “inconsequential” (Gagné Reference Gagné2024). Ultimately, this points to Argentine glacier experts’ fears of producing unscalable research, which can have consequences for scientific work. If not sufficiently global, Argentine scientists may not be invited to participate in global research networks, harming their learning (and potentially their careers). The IANIGLA glacier scientists were in constant negotiation with the field, which both resisted the application of their protocol and adapted to it. Periglacial environments, with all their complexity, particularly challenged IANIGLA scientists’ abilities to standardize the Andes within the legal and financial constraints laid down by the new law.
Auto-ethnography as method: Introducing IANIGLA, the authors, and research methods
Since its creation in 1972, IANIGLA has been one of the nation’s premier centers for geology, dendrochronology, glaciology, geocryology, and meteorology. The initial interest lay in the prediction and control of glacial meltwater (Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020). By the 1990s, IANIGLA grew to include astronomy, mineralogy, geophysics, geochemistry, and environmental history, and it sought to reposition itself as a hub of scientific research on the arid Central-Western Andean region. In 1994, the name changed to IANIGLA, and in 2007, the provincial government of Mendoza and the local university joined CONICET in providing financial and administrative support. Though always publicly funded, IANIGLA enjoyed autonomy as a “scientific institution” (Beigel et al. Reference Beigel, Gallardo and Bekerman2018; Chinchilla-Rodríguez et al. Reference Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Sandra, Perianes-Rodríguez and Sugimoto2018).
IANIGLA’s history shows how the discipline of glaciology is informed by multiple other disciplines (Rojas and Wagner Reference Rojas, Wagner, França and Miraglia2021). Argentinean universities do not offer bachelor’s or graduate degrees in glaciology. Rather, aspiring glaciologists study geology, geography, a variety of earth sciences, and even engineering or something else, and gain specialized training through seeking out research opportunities—like those afforded by the inventory itself. In this context, IANIGLA’s growth reflects three conditions present after the 1990s: the emergence of more sophisticated instruments and monitoring models; the boom in climate change research, when glacial retreat in particular became an indicator of climate change; and the mining boom, which increased the resources available for research as mining companies sought detailed information regarding the physical and climatic conditions of potential ore deposits (Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020).
These factors posed challenges when it came to forming the inventory team, which changed in composition over time and at any one moment included only around five people. IANIGLA employs researchers with PhDs, as well as master’s students and assistants, not all of whom have doctoral training. Some assistants are professionals with advanced degrees and years of experience, even as much as senior academic personnel. As with any scientific institute, senior investigators with tenure have the most authority and responsibility, including for supervising graduate students and professional assistants. Inventory team members came from all these personnel categories, with assistants often hired on annual contracts (with fewer benefits and protections than tenured personnel) to work on the inventory. Because not all team members had a background in glaciology (it included geographers, geologists, engineers in forestry, agronomy, and more), they received training in theory and methods of glaciological research. The inventory thus expanded opportunities for aspiring glaciologists, and in turn attracted students to the field.
This context is fundamental for understanding our chosen research methods. The authors of this article enjoy a close relationship with IANIGLA and the inventory team, which complicates our positionality and explains our commitment to learning from these events. One of us, a PhD geographer, joined the inventory team in 2011 and was central to the inventory’s production, publication, and renewal. In 2017, she was summoned to testify at the Federal Court in Buenos Aires regarding the judicial case against IANIGLA’s director Ricardo Villalba (described in detail in the next section). As of writing, she is the inventory’s lead coordinator and continues to reflect on those events: Could the prosecution of Villalba have been prevented, and if so, how? Another coauthor is also a geographer and adjunct researcher specialized in environmental history who participated in the inventory’s early stages and published on associated social and political conflicts. The other two coauthors are anthropologists. One is an adjunct researcher at IANIGLA, specializing in issues related to water, politics, and identity. The other is a PhD candidate in the United States and affiliated with IANIGLA. As part of her ethnographic research, she has accompanied IANIGLA scientists to monitor glaciers in southern Mendoza and has conducted in-depth interviews and participant observation with them at IANIGLA.
The authors of this article are therefore not indifferent observers of the inventory’s making or of IANIGLA’s fall from grace. We have read analyses of these events with interest (e.g., Layna Reference Layna2022) and felt a need to examine the inventory team’s intimate experiences and emotional responses to these events for two main reasons. First, the inventory’s results and numbers do not capture the complex emotional, physical, and mental labor that production demanded, which, if better understood, might have helped anticipate or mitigate some of the sociopolitical conflict that resulted from IANIGLA’s work. Second, as political and economic pressure to expand mining intensifies across the Andes, increasingly encroaching on glaciers and periglacial environments, these legal tools and the difficult issues about the role of science in democratic governance that this case sheds light on will continue to be important in Argentina and in other democratic states. Against these pressures, many of the issues that caused so much harm remain unresolved.
As such, our article combines auto-ethnographic and other qualitative methods. First, we conducted a focus group in June 2022 with the IANIGLA scientists most involved in the various stages of the Glacier Protection Law and the inventory’s development. This was important because of the hierarchical differences among scientists, and it enabled us to include perspectives often excluded from this kind of research. The focus group of five people included geographers, geologists, and engineers hired as assistants to work on the inventory. Only one focus group was feasible because, as noted earlier, the inventory team was small and drew from a small national pool of professionals. Second, and in parallel, we held monthly meetings to practice self-reflexive exercises while digesting new data collected through interviews. These meetings were held as intentionally “auto-ethnographic” to situate ourselves, as researchers, within our social context and enable reiterative reflection on past experiences (Spry Reference Spry2001). At these meetings, we conducted exercises designed to gather experiences retroactively from the two authors most directly involved and foster a process of collective remembering while noting the enduring personal, emotional, and professional impacts that Villalba’s legal case in particular had on the group. During these meetings, one of the anthropologists on the team would take field notes, which became part of an evolving data set.
To access a range of perspectives, we conducted six semistructured interviews with CONICET geographers and geologists, most of whom are glacier experts. Interviewees included both salaried scientists (e.g., CONICET investigators who participated in the inventory but were not hired specifically for that purpose) and assistants who were initially hired for the inventory and then moved within CONICET. Finally, we conducted three semistructured interviews with high-level state employees who played strategic roles in the design, execution, and publication of the inventory, given their positions in the Ministry of the Environment or the National Audit Office, and two socio-environmental activists who participated in the events surrounding the drafting and approval of the second glacier law. Interviews were conducted between July 2022 and December 2024.Footnote 1
Context: Periglacial environments as failed governable objects
As in other Latin American countries, in the neoliberal era of the early 1990s, Argentina’s 1994 Constitutional Reform restructured the “natural environment” both as a national resource with commercial value, and therefore afforded minimum protection rights, and as a federal resource to be defined and administered by each Province. At the same time, Argentina opened its doors to foreign investment in mining megaprojects (Wagner Reference Wagner2014; Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020; Hellgren Reference Hellgren, Dodds and Sörlin2022). The assemblage of laws, norms, and institutions, often existing in tension with one another, produced new environmental governance frameworks that created new legal categories of the environment and have produced environmental winners and losers (Perrault Reference Perrault2006). As scholars have argued, these reforms increased national economic activity through mining while burdening fence-line communities with toxic pollution and ecological harms that endanger local economies that are based on agriculture or tourism.
Science was central to environmental governance frameworks of the 1990s, which gave science authority to shape how the “natural” environment is governed, despite some well-known shortcomings: Science does not always provide clear answers for policymakers and can even “make environmental controversies worse by obscuring values, interests, and demands that different groups bring to the negotiating table” (Barandiarán Reference Barandiarán2018, 31). Across time and countries, many different institutions and procedures have been used to mediate the relationship between science and politics, with varying degrees of effectiveness (Guston Reference Guston2000; Bijker et al. Reference Bijker, Bal and Hendriks2009; Jasanoff Reference Jasanoff2005; Callon et al. Reference Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe2012; Barandiarán Reference Barandiarán2018; Salazar et al. Reference Salazar, Valenzuela, Tironi and Gutiérrez2019). Sometimes, as in the case of Argentina, when the Glacier Protection Law delegated to IANIGLA the task of inventorying all of Argentina’s glaciers, these institutions and procedures do not exist: No regulatory science playbook existed for this case. This helps explain why IANIGLA scientists accepted the invitation to participate in environmental governance without conceiving of their decisions and actions as political. Absent established institutional mechanisms or political supervision, they shaped nature according to their own methods and expertise, without understanding the sociopolitical implications of their internal processes.
Given the volatile context that IANIGLA faced, it is useful to focus on its inventory practices, which, when analyzed as in this article, reveal the ways one particularly important element of nature defied various actors’ and institutions’ attempts to be bounded into an effectively governed object. The inventory’s goal was, first and foremost, to “individualize all glaciers and periglacial geoforms that act as existing hydrological reserves” (art. 3, National Glacier Law). As such, IANIGLA had to identify and delimit the parts of the “natural” environment meant to become new governable objects. Within this particular configuration of environmental governance, reconfiguring and rescaling glaciers as protected resources and objects of national governance was largely accepted by all stakeholders. Glaciers already existed as objects in the public imagination, and transitioned with relative ease from objects of scientific study for climate change models (matters of fact) to becoming matters of concern among environmentalists, state officials, and the broader public (Latour and Weibel Reference Latour and Weibel2005).
Unlike glaciers, periglacial environments were not well understood by most actors involved in drafting the law, and therefore poorly defined. They do not (yet) exist in the public imagination and, located far from where most people live and hard to distinguish from iceless rocks, are quite difficult to even imagine. When Congresswoman Marta Maffei included periglacial environments in her proposed law, she envisioned a conservationist law like that used in Colombia to prohibit economic activities in páramos, mountain moorlands that capture water. In contrast, though, IANIGLA scientists thought it was impossible to define and delimit periglacial environments in the inventory, even though they first suggested including them in the Glacier Protection Law. In their minds, scientists always understood that “individualizing” periglacial environments would mean counting them as rock glaciers. But Maffei, other policymakers, and environmental activists had their own ideas of what this looked like.
The opening anecdote—focused on rock glaciers—showed how difficult it is to identify the contours and elements of a periglacial environment. Whereas permafrost refers to permanently frozen ground, periglacial environments undergo freeze-thaw cycles that move rocks and water constantly. They exist at specific altitudes (around three thousand to five thousand meters above sea level), at particular temperatures, and may cover a fifth of Earth’s land surface (Gutiérrez Elorza Reference Gutiérrez Elorza and Gutiérrez Elorza2005). Identifying and inventorying the entire environment would require taking ample temperature readings of thousands of kilometers of largely inaccessible terrain (Taillant Reference Taillant2015). Moreover, it would require identifying rock glaciers from other large and unstable mounds of rock rather than relying on a gleaming white glacier to orient oneself.
The inclusion of periglacial environments in Argentina’s glacier protection law was a bold move, extending protections to a potentially much larger part of the ecosystem, and serendipitous. It was also a matter of intense political debate over a two-year period, in which IANIGLA scientists sometimes participated and sometimes did not. The mismatch in expectations and understandings between the actors involved, coupled with the political stakes, created conditions for legal ambiguity. This ambiguity is what IANIGLA scientists had to resolve as they designed and implemented the inventory, after the law’s approval, as analyzed in the next section. The legal ambiguity resulted from the process of crafting the law. Controversies surrounding the law and the inventory have been widely analyzed. Scholars have shown how misunderstandings regarding what was being protected and how were at the crux of these controversies (Taillant Reference Taillant2015; Isla Raffaele Reference Isla and María2016; Christel and Torunczyk Shein Reference Christel and Roy Torunczyk Schein2017; Bottaro and Sola Álvarez Reference Bottaro, Sola Álvarez, Bottaro and Álvarez2018; Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020; Straccia and Isla Raffaele Reference Straccia and Isla Raffaele2020; Rojas and Wagner Reference Rojas, Wagner, França and Miraglia2021; Layna Reference Layna2022; Hellgren Reference Hellgren, Dodds and Sörlin2022). Rather than reexamining these controversies, this article complements these works by showing how scalar tensions at the heart of the inventory raise difficult questions about science and environmental governance. To understand the stakes, some context about the Glacier Protection Law and the judicial case against Villalba is needed.
From the start, Congresswoman Maffei asked IANIGLA scientists for their input, and at that time, an IANIGLA geologist suggested including periglacial environments. This first version of the law was passed in 2008 by Congress without much debate, but the president vetoed it. A period of intense debate and negotiation followed. Whereas in the first period (2005–2008), the issue of mining and glaciers was circumscribed to just one mega-mine, called Pascua Lama/Veladero, in the second period (2008–2010), this became a national issue. Across Argentina, socio-environmental assemblies and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) organized discussions about the law. Politicians of all parties spoke for or against using technical terms introduced by IANIGLA experts. President Fernández de Kirchner warned the mining industry that she would not take another political hit for them, as she had done with the first veto.
Between 2008 and 2010, two versions of the glacier law emerged, and they differed with regard to the periglacial environment: the “Bonasso” or the “conservationist” version was a replica of the vetoed law that Maffei had first proposed. It protected entire periglacial environments, and in public debates, this was the antigovernment and antimining option. The alternative “Filmus” version or “service-oriented version,” championed by the president’s party, protected only rock glaciers in periglacial environments. While the protection of glaciers from mineral and hydrocarbon exploration and extraction was not contentious, extending protections to periglacial environments was a direct threat to the mining industry, which was increasingly moving into such areas. As the political stakes rose, IANIGLA scientists took on different roles—during some periods they participated actively in news media explaining concepts and issues, and other times they did not participate at all. By 2010, many of them supported the Filmus version because they thought it was feasible: To inventory all periglacial environments every five years, as the law called for, seemed physically impossible to them (Taillant Reference Taillant2015). To IANIGLA experts, “The periglacial environment is not quantifiable, [and] only the geoforms that make it or that it contains” can be mapped, so they objected when nonscientists equated geoform with environment (Rojas y Wagner Reference Rojas, Wagner, França and Miraglia2021, 202). As the scientifically unstable term of periglacial environments became a central issue in a highly charged political field, scientists were often (and understandably) misunderstood by nonscientists (Taillant Reference Taillant2015; Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020).
Slowly, a mismatch in expectations emerged between scientists and nonscientists regarding what scientific knowledge production could contribute with certainty, accuracy, and objectivity to the design and implementation of the law. Under the direction and financing of the federal environmental authority (the Secretary of the Environment and Sustainable Development, or SAyDS), IANIGLA was charged with “inventorying and monitoring the state of glaciers and periglacial environments” (art. 5). However, SAyDS’s supervision was “deficient and erratic,” and it approved a proposal that IANIGLA had submitted to it without much scrutiny (Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020, 176). Questions like what exactly should be included in the inventory, which could have been discussed at this point and even been subject to public hearings, were instead left solely to IANIGLA scientists to decide. By contrast, a 2007 forest law that required an inventory of native forests assigned this task to each provincial government, which then organized public hearings to validate the native forest inventory (Figueroa and Mohle Reference Figueroa and Mohle2020; Langbehn and Schmidt Reference Langbehn and Schmidt2024).
By 2016–2017, work on the inventory became highly contentious and, for scientists, even dangerous. IANIGLA’s director, Ricardo Villalba, highly respected among the scientific community, took the fall: He was accused by environmental organizations in federal courts for “abuse of authority” after IANIGLA adopted a glacier size threshold of 0.01 square kilometer. Environmental organizations claimed that this excluded small glaciers from the inventory, and thus from legal protection, and violated the spirit of the law. They pointed to a specific event to prove their case. At the Pascua Lama/Veladero mine, Barrick Gold was responsible for a cyanide spill that contaminated downstream waters. If every glacier had been inventoried, no matter how small, the spill might have been avoided, claimed the environmental groups (Rojas and Wagner Reference Rojas, Wagner, França and Miraglia2021; Layna Reference Layna2022). The verdict against Villalba was shocking and painful to IANIGLA scientists. While activists suspected the scientists of colluding with mining companies for choosing this threshold, Villalba and other scientists involved argued they were simply following internationally approved scientific guidelines. Moreover, they insisted that the inventory was an instrument of the law, a law that protected all bodies of ice, regardless of their size.
Neither the politicians nor the policymakers, environmental advocates, and scientists involved in this case understood what it meant to create an inventory that was both scientifically sound and publicly legible. The minimum size of geoforms, which geoforms of periglacial environments to map, and other such details could have been vetted through institutionalized processes, and maybe then, the criticisms lobbed at IANIGLA by socioenvironmental assemblies, NGOs, lawyers, and even by the federal judge who indicted Ricardo Villalba might have been avoided (Rojas and Wagner Reference Rojas, Wagner, França and Miraglia2021, 204; Martín and Healey Reference Martín, Healey and Merlinsky2020; Taillant Reference Taillant2015, 178). Terms with uncertain degrees of operationalizability but that had nevertheless entered the public debate, like rock glaciers and periglacial environments, might have been delimited for use in public policy. Instead, the law’s passage was misread as bounding periglacial environments into governable objects; this was, however, an illusion.
Getting the inventory done: Expectations, design, and execution
Expectations
No one—not state officials, members of the public, or IANIGLA scientists—foresaw the immense physical, emotional, legal, political, and social difficulties involved in getting the inventory done. The Andes consist of an impressive variety of ice masses, including rock glaciers, permanent snowfields, mountain, and valley glaciers with varying amounts of debris-cover, and large outlet glaciers (Zalazar et al. Reference Zalazar, Ferri, Castro, Gargantini, Gimenez, Pitte, Ruiz, Masiokas, Costa and Villalba2020). Accessing glaciers in the Argentine Andes can take days of walking through remote, freezing, high-elevation environments, with few, if any, inhabitants. Other times, indigenous communities living in the Andean foothills banned the scientists’ passage, fearing they were employed by mining companies. The confusion was easy to have—scientists used the same trucks, with similar logos, as miners. At other times, the scientists had to negotiate with park rangers and private landowners for access to the mountains.
Ricardo Villalba, then director of IANIGLA, believed that, as an institution that studied snow and ice, IANIGLA should be tasked with the scientific aspects of the law. In practice, however, its participation was “fundamentally reduced to the development of the inventory.”Footnote 2 For the scientists, “glaciers and periglacial environments [sat at] the top of the water chain, [and they valued] them for their hydrological function as part of a greater ecosystem” (Taillant Reference Taillant2015, 70). Throughout the long years of negotiating the law and then designing and implementing it, the IANIGLA experts saw themselves as “just scientists,” as expressed by this inventory member:
We [the inventory team] went from being Argentina’s glacier heroes, participating in talks and documentaries where we shared the tremendously difficult labor of inventorying the Argentine Andes with barely any resources, to being suspected of plotting with mining companies because of the minimum mapping threshold we had chosen. What had happened in between? What had we missed? Eventually, we realized that the matter in dispute—what characteristics a glacier had to have to be considered a glacier worthy of being mapped—was not really just about science. Although we are public researchers employed by the State, we hadn’t realized that inventorying the Andes had been a political, social, and even legal task. Nothing could have prepared us for this. After all, we are just scientists.Footnote 3
Although this sounds naive, and in hindsight it certainly was, other team members shared the following perspective:
The reality is that I never anticipated any of it [the legal case against Villalba] … especially in those first years, when we did most of the work, it wasn’t even on my radar. And well, seeing it retrospectively, without a doubt, it was there [the social and political reality] … so, when the case against Ricardo [Villalba] emerged, there was this whole part, a whole new level of complexity that totally caught us off guard.Footnote 4
Even more problematically, the interviews suggest that embedded within their perspectives was the belief that practicing science is ultimately benign and, as such, offers its protection to those who practice it. As one of the glacier experts described of field trips, he never considered the possibility of running into legal or administrative issues, because they were always “invested by the institution’s attributes and the institution was scientific, and belonged to CONICET.” One way to explain scientists’ ignorance of the political fray they were entering lies in the fact that they were not alone—nonscientists shared this view of them as “just scientists.” For instance, when reflecting on these experiences, an environmental activist shared that he had come to realize that, “while [scientists] generate a lot of valuable information … they cannot work outside of their schemas, like respecting the scientific canon and other established standards to certify their work as scientific.”Footnote 5 By sticking to the science, he felt that the scientists had failed to include important details in the inventory. This view was also held by those in government, as in this quote from a government official in the SAyDS:
We had to defend IANIGLA, and IANIGLA would show those moments of weakness sometimes, of internal communication, let’s say, and it was outrageous that they would sit at a table [with nonscientific actors] and have these [technical] debates amongst themselves.Footnote 6
This shows the expectation government officials had of IANIGLA experts—to provide clear, incontrovertible data and information—otherwise their trust in science was quickly shaken. And it shows scientists’ total lack of awareness: They did not participate with a view to preserving their credibility, for example, by arriving with unified criteria; rather, they entered state offices seemingly unaware of how their work would be received. Despite being involved with the law from the get-go, the political implications of their participation in the law and subsequent decisions made in the creation of the inventory never really landed for the IANIGLA scientists.
Instead, they saw in the inventory a means to monitor and research melting glaciers in the context of a changing global climate and to position the glaciology department and its researchers as national and global references in the field. In this sense, the activist quoted is correct that these scientists could not work “outside their schemas,” which privileged creating an upscaled inventory that would connect them to global networks and infrastructures for glaciology research. By contrast, socioenvironmental organizations expected scientists to make a downscalable instrument of environmental protection that could provide details about each glacial basin to foreclose mining. In this way, the local was in tension with the demands of upscaling, because for IANIGLA scientists, upscaling was the only purpose: Global research was what their scientific methods, tools, and resources enabled them to do, and what they had always been rewarded for doing. The inventory challenged this to some extent, through the demands of field work campaigns, but not enough to fundamentally alter scientists’ self-understanding. In short, the simple, static shapes and forms of the inventory were produced in tension with the global nature that the scientists were accustomed to producing.
Design
Following the Glacier Protection Law, IANIGLA’s first task was to prepare an agenda with the theoretical foundations and practical steps needed to execute the inventory. No further guidelines existed beyond the text of the law (e.g., inclusion of all glaciers and periglacial environments), and as noted earlier, SAyDS provided poor supervision. In practice, the IANIGLA glacier experts resolved “in house” many technical details that later came to have great political consequences, including things like exactly what kind of inventory to create, by which standards, and for which concrete purposes. These matters were addressed through endless conversations among scientists from IANIGLA and peer institutions worldwide. There was no model to build on: Nothing on the scale of this inventory, or of this regulatory importance, existed anywhere in the world. An analysis of this process of trial and error shows that, among many ambiguously defined terms, that of the inventory itself was not crystal clear. What should it look like? What information should it provide?
During a long drive across the Andes to a conference in Valdivia, Chile, three glacier experts from IANIGLA made many important decisions: “We wanted the inventory to be more than the simple mapping of satellite images, taking advantage of the opportunity to create a program of glaciological research, installing stations to study glacial fluctuations … thinking about the Chileans [who had a draft glacier law], with much less financial resources than them, we decided to propose a three-tiered agenda. In the first tier, you have the inventory, in the second, fluctuations, and the third, weather and hydrology.”Footnote 7 As this quote shows, the scientists agreed that the inventory should be more than a “simple map or a census” of glaciers and that it should include the collection of other forms of data. Over time, as another glacier expert described it, these decisions would set IANIGLA up as a top-of-the-line research institute: “IANIGLA has another status thanks to the inventory.”Footnote 8
This privileging of scientific prestige is evident also in this quote by another glacier expert, which is worth reproducing at length:
The agenda has several things; on the one hand, there is the theoretical section that we wanted it to include, which the law didn’t. Things that weren’t very clear, that weren’t exactly how we wanted them. We always thought there’d be an instance where we could add the technical part, principles we needed in order to be able to do the work of mapping, fundamentally, but also other things … [like] monitoring … The idea was to complete a uniform map, of certain quality, of the entire country—we didn’t really know how much work all that would take—so to me, the first expectation was to maintain that criteria, to be able to generate that quality of work at a national scale, and when we discussed the principles of the law, particularly the renewal of the inventory every five years … we were discussing whether it was a job that would be done once, like just making a map and being done with it … or if the idea was to have a more macro-level research program that included various research activities … international standards required updating data every ten years. But we wanted to ensure that the inventory team could sustain itself over time, so we thought every five years. Our two aspirations were, on the one hand, to complete the mapping, to have a clear baseline, where the law could be applied, at least from the technical side, showing what was fundamental to protect, and on the other, to create a permanent team.Footnote 9
In this telling, IANIGLA glacier experts made the inventory their own project through these kinds of decisions. The needs or hopes of nonscientific actors were not considered in internal conversations. Rather, they thought of the inventory as an opportunity to create an upscaled “more macro-level research project” that would do more than provide baseline data to satisfy regulatory requirements that might be met with a simple map.
Next, IANIGLA scientists had to make decisions regarding what to inventory, leading straight to the contentious issue of periglacial environments. The scientists navigated these contests by simply applying scientific and technical standards, which they assumed would legitimize their decisions. Concretely, this meant that the team’s agenda, the methods used, and their results all aimed to meet global scientific standards, so as to produce science that would be rigorous, commensurable, and comparable. The text of the law provided a starting point. Article 2 defines glaciers as “all slow-flowing, perennial or stable masses of ice with or without interstitial water, formed through the recrystallization of snow, found in different ecosystems, and in whichever form, dimension and state of conservation.” It defines periglacial environments as “areas with frozen ground that act as hydrological regulators” in high mountain areas and “areas with grounds saturated in ice that act as hydrological regulators” in low and mid-mountain zones. Yet operationalizing these two definitions required different scientific methodological approaches. While glaciers are defined as objects that can be located and discerned within their environments, periglacial environments are “areas” made up of interacting parts that, by definition, cannot be mapped as discrete objects. Article 3 tries to specify what to map, stating that “all glaciers and periglacial geoforms acting as hydrological reserves will be individualized” and included in the inventory. But it does not specifically mention what makes up periglacial environments or how to inventory them.
The inventory team decided on what they considered representative of the periglacial environments. Between 2009 and 2011, IANIGLA applied for funding and invited Japanese, French, and Swiss glaciologists to learn how to methodologically put together an inventory and to acquire expensive, high-resolution satellite images. They then spent long hours discussing and debating among themselves. International manuals and databases also used rock glaciers to represent periglacial environments, setting a precedent and a scientific foundation for their decision. The team proceeded to inventory rock glaciers in representation of periglacial environments because they contain the highest mass of ice and can be identified via satellite images across all of Argentina. No discussions arose regarding what making this ultimately highly contentious decision might mean in the long term.
The agenda also envisioned that each basin would have its own external director who would supervise, much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They soon realized this was too expensive and difficult to carry out. Instead, they relied on foreign colleagues for help—they provided feedback, much like scientific peer review. But they also relied on fieldwork, and this proved very onerous: “The idea of field campaigns or that maps should have field control emerged in parallel to the idea that they would have some form of external revision, to try to make the best possible maps, as precise as possible, avoiding mapping errors because, for instance you weren’t able to ‘go and see.’ Today, as the inventory is being updated, we realize that idea implied a monstrous job … They may have done over 60 field campaigns for the inventory … we thought it up quite naively, that each basin had to include a field campaign.”Footnote 10
In sum, when designing the inventory, IANIGLA had too much autonomy (or insufficient direction). The scientists seized the opportunity to create a globally scaled project that would bring scientific prestige. The inventory would still comply with what they saw as the national, legal requirements—a baseline map of all bodies of ice—as well as a “macro-level” scientific program. Here is where the mismatch between scientists’ and nonscientists’ expectations emerges more clearly. IANIGLA’s legal designation reinforced scientists’ own imaginaries regarding science writ large: that of science as a global and neutral endeavor with the authority to produce objective representations of the world (Oreskes Reference Oreskes2020).
Execution
When the inventory was done, IANIGLA was roundly criticized for leaving out important details, particularly of periglacial environments. This section examines how and why some of these details were left out, in part due to the choice of scientific models used to upscale the data. This matter was extremely frustrating for scientists. As a geographer on the inventory team explained:
It’s difficult when it all ends in a simple report. Critiques and simplistic comments such as “And why did you not include this mountain” or “This is its name, I saw it,” frustrated me. “If you knew what’s behind it all,” you’d need two hours at a café to explain why it’s named that way.Footnote 11
While not included in the inventory, particularities of place like these confronted the team and routinely informed their decisions. In some ways, it was a constant negotiation with the field, and a resistance from the field to having a strict protocol applied to it. All IANIGLA scientists did was try to apply these standards, but the local—represented by the socio-environment that composes it and that extends beyond the physical locality—always spoke back.
Using a global, scientifically approved reference system, designed in Switzerland, to choose which geoforms to include in the agenda was meant to facilitate the scientists’ work while allowing them to “say something” that made their data comparable (O’Reilly Reference O’Reilly2017, 5). The reference system provided standardized information about how to identify, measure, and create databases of glaciers. According to a glacier expert, these international guidelines easily fit the local context and resolved questions about how to standardize over sixteen thousand ice bodies.Footnote 12 Yet one of the inventory members described how “the difference between the [standard geoform] manual and the Andean reality is not available in books … the Andes are a mosaic, a spectrum of forms.”Footnote 13 Another member explained: “We were forced to make decisions and train our eyes to things that the Swiss have no clue about. The US classification manual we were using only helped us classify ten glaciers.” Inventorying the Andes, then, “opened a new world of forms,” as this member stated.Footnote 14
The disparate experiences of fitting international manuals to the Andes point to central tensions between an upscaled and downscaled project. Categorizing glaciers into distinct boxes through globally approved manuals seemed like an easy task. But glaciers come in all kinds of forms, not only white masses of ice. As a team member described, in hindsight, “the manual-based techniques are not dynamic enough to capture moving glaciers, while, at the same time, they need more pragmatic tools to define glaciers to renew the inventory more quickly. The inventory criteria are too ambiguous, and further visualization techniques are required to capture a moving environment.”Footnote 15 One of the technical and operational issues, then, lay in the act of translating scientifically agreed-on international standards based on US or European geoforms to a South American context. The other lay in the mutability of nature itself, impacting the visual identification of glaciers in the field, which may look different than those captured by satellite images. Yet scientists were also constrained by the “orthodoxy” of science.Footnote 16 Once they decided which criteria they would use to identify and measure ice bodies, they would not be able to change them, regardless of new techniques, greater expertise, or changed circumstances, because their data would not be comparable across time, preventing the scientists from contributing it to global databases.
Another difficulty in fitting global manuals onto the Argentine Andes was coming to an agreement about unifying concepts to support decisions regarding how to operationalize the law.Footnote 17 Inventory team members, glacier experts, and other scientists would meet before going to the field to discuss how to practically apply what they had theoretically proposed in the program. One of the inventory team members, an engineer, described how many experts who were initially part of these long discussions before going into the field eventually stopped participating:
We’d sit at a table and they would say no, you can’t do it that way, but they wouldn’t provide an alternative. We couldn’t even define simple things like what digital model we want to use to standardize the country … and it’s hard for researchers to apply their work in practice, that is, to apply specificity rather than leaving everything in a veil of permanent or constant doubt.Footnote 18
Glacier experts’ unwillingness to make definitive decisions extended to post-fieldwork discussions about uncertain geoforms. The stakes for glacier experts in making affirmative decisions on uncertain and potentially disputable data were too high. At this point, they were more concerned about their careers than the legal consequences of making political decisions. The inventory team soon realized that, despite the endless discussions, when a line had to be traced, it was up to the team: “Maybe you had a doubt and you approached a glacier expert and … they’d start with ‘I don’t know, it could be that there is, but I am not sure, I’d have to see, who knows.’ But ultimately, the person making the map had to trace the line somewhere, and that responsibility was ours.”Footnote 19
To navigate this technical, theoretical, and practical ambiguity, what mattered most was how to “train one’s eye to see new forms—grays and not black and whites.”Footnote 20 Another team member summarized it this way: “Nature isn’t like that, but sort of [like that]. It is maybe a rock glacier.”Footnote 21 A rock glacier is perhaps one of the most difficult ice bodies to identify. It frequently required a physical encounter with the field, where all senses are used to feel, listen to, and observe sometimes seemingly inert masses of rocks. Even then, it may not be enough. As O’Reilly (Reference O’Reilly2017, 83) wrote, “Sensing the ice is not only an explicitly cultured and disciplined endeavor but also a site where knowledge is formed through embodied experience.” Although sight has been the hegemonic sense for eliciting information about nature, “training one’s eye” in the case of the inventory team meant using the polyphony of senses, including hearing (Simonetti Reference Simonetti2019). The experiential dimensions of science may be looked down upon by science because it is an intimate way of producing knowledge that brings up the tensions Kohler (Reference Kohler2002a, Reference Kohler2002b) references regarding scaling particularities of place. Yet at the end of the day, this is what allowed scientists to make decisions about ambiguous objects as they tried to turn them into governable objects.
Scalar tensions thus played out within IANIGLA between the upscaling needed for global scientific knowledge production to contribute to global climate databases and the downscaling demanded by socioenvironmental organizations and some politicians. That said, fieldwork also demanded attunement to downscaling dynamics, as the inventory team members experienced, but their struggles and concerns were not always accounted for back in the IANIGLA offices when decisions had to be made. Although the agenda clearly delineated the theoretical foundations on which operative decisions had been made, like which geoforms to map and how, applying it proved difficult, causing much debate and uncertainty. Even representing periglacial environments through rock glaciers proved difficult. This was unforeseen even by scientists who proposed to include rock glaciers in the first place.
Conclusion
The Argentine National Glacier Inventory’s creation and publication were an astounding and celebrated feat. Yet we have shown how the inventory, which exceeded its numbers and geoforms, created a particular form of nature that did not satisfy any of the parties involved in its production. As climate change tests the inventory team’s capacity to monitor rapidly melting glaciers, now fixed by law as stable objects and closely watched by miners and environmentalist organizations alike, the involvement of nonscientific actors would be warranted. Removing a glacier from the inventory because it is too small or no longer identifiable via satellite images, or because it has fractured and broken up, is evidently a political matter with tremendous legal consequences. Any change of this type would expose an area to extractive activities and possibly reignite accusations against the IANIGLA team. And despite what happened to Ricardo Villalba, IANIGLA continues to lack legal support and politically institutionalized guidelines, being left to its own devices as its scientists continue navigating the inventory’s continued and unfinished development.
Today, mining megaprojects in the Andes and the fate of the Glacier Protection Law are again center stage. While IANIGLA continues to affirm that inventoried rock glaciers are parts of larger periglacial environments and are protected by the law, a recent state decision to authorize the Cerro Amarillo mine in Malargüe, Mendoza, ignores this aspect of the law. Arguing that periglacial environments failed to become governable objects is not meant as a critique of IANIGLA’s choice to inventory rock glaciers. Rather, it is a critique in a double sense: of the process and of the nature of global climate science. Regarding the process, policymakers and state institutions failed to properly train and designate state authorities charged with translating scientific knowledge into public policy. Even within Argentina, alternative models existed, like the Forest Law, which might have led to different outcomes. But policymakers, politicians, and scientists were also at fault for naively assuming that science seamlessly leads to good governance. Here, a critical reflection of global climate science reveals the full importance of this case: The pull to create good global climate science, through upscaling practices, undermined the push for good local regulatory knowledge, which required more downscaling. Even well-intentioned scientists committed to public service stumbled when caught between conflicting upscaled and downscaled goals, pointing to the limits of global climate science to inform local climate policies.
For better and for worse, the inventory had a profound impact on team members who can no longer not see the inventory and science as simultaneously social and political. This has prompted some members to seek out collaborations with social science research teams (of which this article is also a result) and to think about how to include social dimensions more explicitly in the inventory. A major obstacle to these efforts is IANIGLA’s lack of legal authority to change the inventory or to propose an alternative institutional framework rooted in a different sociopolitical consciousness. This case study could animate further research on how science should contribute to contentions and uncertain environmental governance efforts.
Acknowledgments
We especially thank Javiera Barandiarán and Cristián Simonetti for their close readings of our drafts and extremely valuable insights, and our research participants for entrusting us with their life stories. We also wanted to thank the LARR reviewers and Nancy Postero and Cathy Gere for their important feedback. Sofía Lana thanks the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BCS-2116197), the Fulbright Student Program, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for funding her work.
Open access
