Democracy in a deluge: Epistemic agency of marginalized voices in Oaxaca's storm governance.

This article examines how the epistemic agency—the capacity to influence knowledge production—of marginalized fishers in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, is shaped by civic epistemologies (CEs), defined as the sociocultural norms through which societies authorize knowledge claims. It argues that understanding CEs as "expectations of democracy"—mutually constitutive anticipations between citizens and government—reveals how both fishers’ distrust of government corruption and government perceptions of fishers as economically irrational reinforce a dominant biophysical framing of hurricane risk that excludes socioeconomic vulnerabilities. Through ethnographic research, the study shows that these democratic expectations mediate which forms of climate risk knowledge gain authority, limiting the audibility of marginalized voices despite participatory efforts. The findings suggest that addressing such noncognitive political-epistemic structures is crucial for more inclusive climate governance and for enabling alternative political-epistemic orders in contested democratic contexts.