In this paper, we describe an experiment in which the position of
scientists with respect to flood risk management is fundamentally
changed. Building on a review of three very different approaches to
engaging the public in science, we contrast the normal way in which
science is used in flood risk management in England and Wales with an
experiment in which knowledge regarding flooding was co-produced. This
illustrates a way of working with experts, both certified (academic
natural and social scientists) and non-certified (local people affected
by flooding), for whom flooding is a matter of concern, and where the
event, flooding, is given agency in the experiment. We reveal a deep
and distributed understanding of flood hydrology across all experts,
certified and uncertified, involved in the experiment. This did not map
onto the conventional dichotomy between `universal' scientific
expertise and `local' lay expertise. By working with the event we
harnessed, produced and negotiated a new and collective sense of
knowledge, sufficient in our experiment to make a public intervention
in flood risk management in our case-study location. The manner in
which the academic scientists involved in the practice of their science
were repositioned was radical as compared with normal scientific
method. It was also radical for a more fundamental reason: the purpose
of our experiment became as much about creating a new public capable of
making a political intervention in a situation of impasse, as it was
about producing the solution itself. The practice of knowledge
generation, the science undertaken, worked with the hybridisation of
science and politics rather than trying to extract science from it.