IPCC: a site for innovation in its own right?
Reimagining the relationship between knowledge production and meaningful action for a 1.5°C world
Last week’s IPCC Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C has made the rounds — from headline coverage, haiku interpretations, to what individuals can do, and all the way to spelling out corporate liability for climate change. However, the traditional model of lots of experts getting together to produce a report and then cross our global fingers that the political decision makers will listen follows an impact model from a by-gone era.
Fittingly, the opening haiku politely asks the political apparatus which commissioned the report to listen — ask which in itself implies a passive process of knowledge transfer. However, if we’ve learnt anything from the past few years is that our current context is far from ‘normal’; if anything the baseline has shifted so far, that what is ‘normal’ needs to be redefined altogether. So what could the IPPC’s role and agency be in the current context?
Changing institutional assumptions
Set up in 1988 by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the IPCC responded to the need to influence the climate regime discourse and decision making directly rather than through two organisations.
As stated in the Principles Governing IPCC Work, its role is to:
‘Assess […] information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.’ (IPCC, 1998:p.1)
So far, the IPCC has operated on a series of implicit assumptions, as follows:
- That nation-states are the locus of decision-making (Dryzek, 2014; Victor, 2015);
- That informed governments will make rational political decisions (Dryzek, 2014);
- That managing scientific research and political judgements in later (post-assessment) negotiations is possible and manageable (Bolin, 2009);
- That civil society, media and the wider public can and are willing to understand subtle differences between terminologies such as climate scenarios and predictions (Bolin, 2009);
- That the notion of institution in itself assumes its continuity over time and thus it seeks resilience through a patterned nature of institutional behaviour (Dryzek, 2014; Goodin, 1996).
Although these assumptions might have been true in the early days
of the IPCC, they would need to be revised and updated to reflect the current field conditions. For example, in recent years cities, networks of cities (such as C40 and 100 Resilient Cities) and regional alliances (such as the Alliance of Small Island States) have experimented with new forms of multi-level governance and decision- making with effectiveness comparative to that of nation-states.
At the same time, a growing body of research is depicting the extent
to which cognitive processes such as constructed preferences, biases and heuristics are short-circuiting our capacity for rational decision- making (Zaval & Cornwell, 2016). This poses implications for scientists, decision-makers, journalists and citizens alike.
Changing role of knowledge production
So far, institutionalised knowledge production has been carried out in disciplines that have established their own methodologies, worldviews and epistemologies, while the organisational and governance structures evolved following a path-dependant trajectory.
Social scientists such as Guattari (2005) and Latour (2005, 2014, 2017) have argued that the notion of objectivity is a false construct which does not take into account the active subject of history; therefore, we no longer know objects or subjects, but actors - where everything is linked to everything else.
These changing modes of knowledge and knowing also require new ways of learning. In the field of organisational learning, the notion of triple loop learning, conceptualised by Wierdsma and Swieringa (1992), asserts that in order to adapt to change organisational forms need to be capable not only of learning, but unlearning and learning how to learn.
However, the Anthropocene paradigm and its implications for knowledge production and learning have not percolated the mainstream discourse of the role and purpose of the IPCC, despite a growing awareness of the need to do so. Following criticism of the Fourth Assessment Report, these calls were initiated by five scientists involved in the process and proposed a wide array of options to overhaul the IPCC process, with options as radical as a moderated Wikipedia-style platform to replace the process altogether.
Following on, Victor (2015) argues that the different paradigms and worldviews of the social sciences can be seen as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive; thus adding layers of definition to fuzzy and complex issues such as the roles of values and norms in accepting mitigation and adaptation measures (Nilsson, von Borgstede & Biel, 2004).
Some of the questions that arise are:
- What might be the role of tentative knowledge and how might it find its legitimate place within an institution which is expected to determine (relative) absolute truth?
- How might the process of knowledge production (and its assessment) benefit from ways of knowing, worldviews, and best practice developed in other fields?
- How might individuals and collectives part of the IPCC process be equipped with the necessary skills for triple-loop learning?
What might the implications be for the IPCC?
Different critical voices have depicted a range of proposed changes to the IPCC. However, by analysing the proposals against Donella Meadows’ (1977) Leverage Points (the scale of places to intervene in a system according to their effectiveness) one can observe that most of the proposed changes tackle patterns of flows (of information, finance), rather than the underlying structures influencing these patterns and the underpinning mental models (such as assumptions, beliefs and values that keep the system in place).
Where next?
The changes in field conditions explored here are deeply challenging everything we thought we knew about how the world works and how change happens. To rise to magnitude of the challenges we face, we need to take a systemic approach; in this case, redesigning the IPCC to be fit for purpose requires a fundamental redefinition of the overall goal and underpinning beliefs of the climate regime governance itself.
The IPCC can perform a crucial function for the overall system by providing the space for reflection at a global scale. The need for intergovernmental institutions has not diminished, nor disappeared, but in postnormal times they need to reframe their purpose in collaboration and not antagonism to non-state actors to achieve the much needed systemic impact towards sustainability transitions.
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