Civic Epistemologies

Civic Epistemologies 1, 2023

Civic Epistemologies jean carlos hochsprung miguel, renzo taddei and marko monteiro Overview This chapter discusses the concept of 'civic epistemology' in relation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the governance of climate change. Civic epistemology refers to 'the institutionalised practices by which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as a basis for making collective choices' (Jasanoff, 2005: 255). Differences in civic epistemologies seem to be directly related to how scientific climate knowledge, presented in IPCC assessment reports, relates to political decision-making at different scalesnational, regional, global. The concept is especially rich because it enables a nuanced understanding of the role of IPCC assessments in national climate governance and in meeting the challenges of building more cosmopolitan climate expertise. Both of these aspects are important if emerging institutional arrangements that seek to govern global environmental change are to be understood. Through a critical review of the civic epistemology literature related to the IPCC, this chapter investigates how the cultural dimensions of the sciencepolicy nexus, in different national and geopolitical contexts, conditions the legitimation and uptake of IPCC knowledge.

2018

The rise of climate change as an issue of global concern has rested on scientific representation and understanding of the causes and impacts of, and responses to climatic change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in particular, has been central to how climate change has become known as a global political problem. This thesis aims to critically examine the production, negotiation, and stabilisation of policy-relevant knowledge in international climate politics. It takes the IPCC as a global stage on which the knowledge politics of climate change plays out, drawing attention to the performative interactions which shape the relationship between knowledge production processes and policy making at the global level. Informed by social constructivist accounts, particularly from within the social studies of science, this thesis builds on the notion that science and politics can never be truly separated from each other, rather, they are co-produced. In turn politics is no...

International Affairs, 2001

Innovation, 2024

The gap between what is known about climate change and the action taken to prevent it has instigated debates around how to reconfigure global environmental assessment organizations to better inform and foster transformative change. One recurring request involves the need for a broader and better inclusion of social scientific knowledge. However, despite such intentions, the inclusion of social scientific research remains limited. How can this be explained? Through a detailed analysis of the IPCC special report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, this article reveals how the institutional conditions of global environmental assessments condition and shape what knowledge is included in these assessments, as well as how this knowledge is represented. It discusses how and why the understanding of social processes and structures remains underdeveloped, despite such knowledge being critical for transformative change. To integrate such knowledge into environmental assessments would require substantial changes to the current epistemic infrastructure used by global environmental assessments. It is therefore time to think beyond global environmental assessments and consider complementary institutional science–policy relations through which social scientific research can assist policy actions to promote deep transformative change.

2005

The proliferation of scientific information in the international policy sphere has increased with the proliferation of global environmental problems. The conventional transfer of scientific information becomes increasingly complex in the international sphere where the implications of global environmental problems are severe and where divergent values around the type of information considered sufficient and adequate for policy action lead to differentiated governmental responses. Constructivist science-policy scholarship has challenged the unidirectional transfer of science into policy suggesting that the sociopolitical sphere plays a significant role in determining the value, legitimacy and relevance of science. Scholarship in the social studies of science goes further to argue that scientific knowledge itself is influenced by social and cultural factors, bringing the status of scientific knowledge as objective and neutral into question. This dissertation utilizes these two literatu...

Current opinion in …, 2010

In this chapter I reflect on the aspiration for climate governance from the perspective of knowledge and its relationship with different understandings of agency and democracy. I first offer a short historical perspective on the changing relationship between knowledge and culture in the context of enduring human attempts to bring order to the disorderliness of climate. I next consider the implications for climate governance of the dominant contemporary understanding of climate, namely as a physically interconnected global system. This form of knowledge elevates atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and global surface air temperature as primary objects of political control and claims to render climate governable. I then reflect on forms of democracy that are either assumed or erased through these dominant processes of knowledge-making, arguing that institutionalised programmes of global change research pay insufficient attention to the difficulties of resolving enduring differences in citizen beliefs and values. Finally, I consider alternative frames of thought and action which do not place knowledge, least of all integrated knowledge, as the driver of climate governance and which suggest that global climate might not be a governable object.

This is a pre-proof version of a paper due to appear in a (long-awaited!) special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy on "applied social epistemology". Please consult the published version for page references, etc In this paper I ask two questions prompted by the phenomenon of " politically patterned " climate change denial. First, can an individual's political commitments provide her with good reasons not to defer to cognitive experts' testimony? Building on work in philosophy of science on inductive risk, I argue they can. Second, can an individual's political commitments provide her with good reasons not to defer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's testimony? I argue that they cannot (at least, in the way identified in the first part of the paper), because of the high epistemic standards which govern that body's assertions. The conclusion discusses the theoretical and practical implications of my arguments.

Critical Policy Studies

Scholarly literature on science-policy interaction is typically divided between advocating that science and policy need to be brought closer together or separated. In a recent article in this journal, Sundqvist and colleagues [Sundqvist et al. (2018) Oneworld or two? Science-policy interactions in the climate field, Critical Policy Studies, 12:4, 448-468] proposed a typology that structures this debate. We use their typology to conduct a text analysis on empirical material from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) internal consultation on its future. We find that science-policy practitioners are not as divided as the scholarly debate. Moreover, while the typology is a powerful tool in unearthing differences in opinion regarding science-policy interaction, it comes at the price of reductionism. We suggest that a continuum, instead of separate boxes, helps visualize the large spectrum of ideas. However, regardless of type of typology, it is important that the discussion goes beyond the relationship between science and policy, and beyond an unconstructive battle between extremes. It is neither possible nor normatively desirable to demarcate 'science', 'policy' and other actors. Whilst this discussion is of central importance to the IPCC, greater focus should be put on its relationship with society.