When Anthropocene shocks contest conventional mentalities: a case study from Cape Town
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under conditions of protracted reduction in supply and heightened uncertainty, one of the notable responses to the Cape Town drought (2016–2018), was the proliferation of ‘water resilience’ in public and private discourses. Resilience was employed as an explanatory concept and governing tool, signalling a professed transition in the municipality’s understandings to an altered climate episteme – or what they have called, a ‘New Normal’. This article focuses on how public framings of resilience were used by the City of Cape Town to signal divorce from conventional approaches to climate and water. It contrasts conventional framings of a Holocene world, with those of a posited ‘mentality of the Anthropocene’ in order to elaborate this ostensible shift in mentality. Although this case study illustrates how public governors are finding utility in resilience as a term to facilitate explanation of their operating context, decisions and responses, contested and transitional mentalities elaborate why the municipality initially failed to anticipate, perceive and respond the drought. This article thereby highlights the cognitive tensions and practical challenges of transition for professionals patterned by conventional techno-managerial approaches, to a way of thinking more in line with reflexive and adaptive approaches anticipated to be necessary in an Anthropocene world.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it