The IPCC has been successful at building its scientific authority, but it will require institutional reform for staying relevant to new and changing political contexts. Exploring a range of alternative future pathways for the IPCC can help guide crucial decisions about redefining its purpose.
Crisis, by its very nature, requires decisive intervention. However, important questions can be obscured by the very immediacy of the crisis condition. What is the nature of the crisis? How it is defined (and by whom)? And, subsequently, what forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate and authoritative for informing interventions? As we see in the current pandemic, there is a desire for immediate answers and solutions during periods of uncertainty. Policymakers and publics grasp for techno-scientific solutions, as though the technical nature of the crisis is self-evident. What is often obscured by this impulse is the contingent, conjunctural and ultimately social nature of these crises. The danger here is that by focussing on immediate technical goals, unanticipated secondary effects are produced. These either exacerbate the existing crisis or else produce subsequent further crises. Equally, these technical goals can conceal the varied, and often unjust, distribution of risk exposure and resources and capacities for mitigation present within and between societies. These socio-political factors all have important functions in determining the effectiveness of interventions. As with climate change, the unfolding response to the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of broadening the knowledge base beyond technical considerations. Only by including social scientific knowledge is it possible to understand the social nature of the crises we face. Only then is it possible to develop effective, just and legitimate responses.
Despite forces struggling to reduce global warming growing stronger, there has been mixed success in generating substantive policy implementation, while the global spread of the coronavirus has prompted strong and far-reaching governmental responses around the world. This paper addresses the complex and partly contradictory responses to these two crises, investigating their social anatomies. Using temporality, spatiality, and epistemic authority as the main conceptual vehicles, the two crises are systematically compared. Despite sharing a number of similarities, the most striking difference between the two crises is the urgency of action to counter the rapid spread of the pandemic as compared to the slow and meager action to mitigate longstanding, well-documented, and accelerating climate change. Although the tide now seems to have turned towards a quick and massive effort to restore the status quo—including attempts to restart the existing economic growth models, which imply an obvious risk for substantially increasing CO2 emissions—the article finally points at some signs of an opening window of opportunity for green growth and degrowth initiatives. However, these signs have to be realistically interpreted in relation to the broader context of power relations in terms of governance configurations and regulatory strategies worldwide at different levels of society.
The global environmental crisis is the result of a complex web of causation and distributed agency, where not even the most powerful individual actors can be considered responsible nor remedy the situation alone. This has prompted multiple calls across societies for transformative social change. What role can accountability play in this context? Starting in the theoretical traditions of microsociology and pragmatic sociology, this article elaborates the role of accountability in social interactions. To provide an account that justifies an action or inaction is here understood as a process of social ordering, where accounts are assessed as acceptable only after they have been tested against higher normative principles. Microsocial practices are, in this way, linked to macrosocial order. The following section turns to the global environmental crisis, showing that the crisis raises normative as well as epistemic challenges. The complexity of the socio-environmental situation makes it hard to know what should be done and opens normative orders and epistemic claims to contestation. This situation provides increased opportunities for strategic maneuvering to justify actions as well as opportunities to question social practices and social order. The article concludes by discussing the role of accountability in climate change. Accountability can serve as a mechanism to attach issues to the current environmental crisis and re-embed decisions and practice in an environmental moral order. As part of a broader palette of instruments, rules and norms, accountability has an important function to play in transforming society towards sustainability.
In this chapter, we critically analyse how the pandemic caused prior assumptions across both spatial and temporal boundaries to become questioned and reflect on important similarities, differences and relationships with more long-standing environmental concerns. Among the many, deep, social effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had around the world, one that holds perhaps the greatest promise for lasting positive change—but which might also prove the most ephemeral—is that it has forced humans to re-evaluate their relationship to the environment and reconsider some deeply institutionalized social practices. The temporal character of the risk posed by both the pandemic and environmental crises, as well as the ways in which global and national risks are framed and perceived, has had an important impact on the nature and range of solutions offered. While the emphasis within the pandemic has been to ‘return to normal’ through a series of technical fixes—lockdowns, social measures, vaccines—these options are insufficient for the threats posed by environmental breakdown. In both cases, however, there has been a tendency among experts and policymakers to focus on the symptoms of the crises rather than their underlying causes. Transformative change necessitates a process of learning from crises; it entails a better understanding of what is knowable and unknowable and an appreciation of how crises are increasingly interrelated.
This article discusses “academic housekeeping” undertaken within IPCC, understood as the work that is rarely made visible or rewarded, but is nevertheless essential to the success of the organization. It explores the conditions, motivations, and implications for individual researchers involved in the IPCC, with particular emphasis on the invisible, un(der)recognised and unrewarded work they engage in. The empirical material consists of aninterview study of researchers involved in the IPCC assessment work. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of unrewarded work for individual experts,expert organisations, and academic institutions.
This paper examines the sociological importance of expert knowledge in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this expertise, it is possible to follow patterns of infections, fatalities and recoveries almost in real time, and this knowledge is crucial for countries when deciding on relevant governmental strategies to control the spread. The paper stresses that there was a strong institutional machinery of expertise for data production and dissemination, and despite rather different national ambitions in detection strategies (both concerning infections and mortalities), this machinery produced facts and figures as though they were measured uniformly.
What role should social science play in the work for transforming society towards sustainability? The background for this question is that despite massive investments in environmental research and the accumulation of data on the human impact on the environment, action remains insufficient. The severity of the current situation has led to the conclusion that moderate change is not enough; there is a need for a fundamental transformative change of society. How social science expertise should contribute to this is a fundamental epistemic and normative question and is the point of departure for this paper. This paper aims to develop a theory of social scientific environmental expertise. It first gives a broad account of expertise and its current landscape. It then develops a pluralistic approach, where expertise can take many forms, but should be reflexive, critical, and constructive. Finally, it stresses the crucial role that social science expertise has to play in the work for transformative change, not least to broaden environmental problems and their complexities, so that society is better equipped to undergo sustainable transformation.
This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010-2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face-to-face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers Jose Socrates and Pedro Passos-Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail-out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for credibility' in order to avoid a negative' reaction from the markets - later associated with the conditions of the bail-out - concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors' bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.
Purpose: A response to Chatwin’s article (2010), which argues that European harmonisation of illicit drug policies remains far from realisation, this paper seeks to recommend developing a more specific conceptualisation of European integration in the area of illicit drugs and argues that harmonisation was not a realistic aim of the European Union (EU).
Design/methodology/approach: This is a review paper which seeks to advocate the application of a more rigid analytical framework in drug policy analysis that takes into account the ‘‘soft’’ methods of governance used by the EU. The paper also uses secondary data sources to emphasise the argument.
Findings: Domestic convergence has been observed across a number of policy areas.
Research limitations/implications: The nature and level of convergence remains contested and more data are needed to clarify any trends. Future research would be necessary to demonstrate that convergence occurs as a result of EU action rather than other factors.
Originality/value: There remains little in the way of research on the processes of European integration and their specific impact on drug policy at the European and domestic level. This paper will be of value to scholars in the field of European integration who are seeking to expand their research into a new policy sector, as well as researchers in the drug field who are looking for a more formal analytical framework.
The relationship between the Euro crisis and austerity policies is often understood in terms of broadly deterministic explanations centred around economic imperatives and, in the case of bailed out countries, the conditionality of international lenders. Applying a multi-lens framework of depoliticisation to the case of Portugal between 2011 and 2015, this article instead refocuses analysis on the discourse employed by national politicians, in their construction of crisis narratives, to build the political authority to pass reforms. The Portuguese case is particularly effective at demonstrating how depoliticisation, 'relocates politics and the political rather than annihilating it'.
In his recent article, Newman argues that the different perspectives within the literature on evidence-based policymaking, broadly distinguished between rationalists and constructivists, have failed to produce a productive scholarly debate. A solution to overcome this often vitriolic impasse is for scholars to be more accepting of the different goals of each approach. This response challenges Newman's argument on the basis of three weaknesses: a failure to properly understand the incommensurability of different ontological and epistemological positions; a narrow conceptualization of 'evidence'; and the absence of a historical context for his argument.
While undoubtedly well intentioned, in practice, the article serves to blunt the critical tools necessary to constructivist approaches, perhaps at a time when they are needed most - when we are observing the growth in what is termed 'post-truth politics'.
What is the role of expertise in reproducing austerity and how might this be challenged by the left? The implementation of austerity policies, the widespread public backlash to these policies and the role that expertise has played in their implementation have contributed to highlighting many of the pathologies of neoliberalism, particularly widening geographical and intergenerational divisions. This article adopts the sociological approach to expertise developed by Harry Collins and colleagues in the 'Studies of Expertise and Experience' field. Here expertise is understood as relational in the sense that expertise is not recognized by the extent to which it can be said to be right but rather experts are recognized by their own social group. It argues that this relational approach to expertise is explicitly political in nature, involving inclusions and exclusions based on pre-existing power relations and can be further extended to incorporate the relational nature in which various forms of expertise or knowledge are accepted as being authoritative by the broader public. Using examples from the UK, Portugal and Spain, principally in the area of housing and urban politics, this article explores how expertise under neoliberalism can be understood spatially. Local expertise under austerity is focused on either minimizing social harms which may arise - food banks, housing shelters, community social care - or else is directed towards competing for external investment, promoting policies of regeneration and gentrification for the benefit of foreign capital rather than existing populations. A progressive, relational and political expertise should, however, not merely point to the failures of the current system but shape events. The recent growth in social movements has made some progress in challenging austerity, in practice and discourse, and points towards a more joined-up thinking in which knowledge production is clearly and unambiguously linked to action.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global event, but what became apparent almost immediately was that while the virus seems indiscriminate, vulnerability and the capacity to mitigate its impact are not spread equally, either between or within countries. Years of austere neoliberalism in Europe have exacerbated inequality and precarity, acting as a 'pre-existing condition' onto which the virus has now landed. The question we ask is: when the pandemic subsides, can the underlying conditions of contemporary neoliberalism remain? And what may replace it?
To what extent has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) succeeded in its ambition to shape a more diverse environmental expertise? In what ways are diversity important to the IPCC? What purposes does diversity serve in the IPCC’s production of global environmental assessments and thus environmental knowledge in general? These questions are explored by analyzing quantitative demographic data of the latest two assessment cycles (AR5 and AR6) and qualitative data from a semi-structured interview study with IPCC experts. The analysis shows that there have been improvements in diversity in recent years across measures of gender (women comprising 34% of authors in AR6 compared to 21% in AR5), regional representation and the proportion of authors from developing countries (35% in AR6 compared to 31% in AR5). These improvements have not, however, been distributed evenly when looking at the seniority of authors, nor when comparing across working groups, with WGI (the physical science) remaining much less diverse (28% female authors) than WGII (impacts) (41% female authors) and WGIII (mitigation) (32% female authors). The interviews suggest that rather than viewing diversity as a challenge it should be viewed as an opportunity to build capacity. Distinctions between scientific expertise and ‘diversity of voice’ need to be reconsidered in terms of both the substantive and instrumental value that a diverse range of knowledge, experience and skills add to the process of the scientific assessment of climate knowledge. In the concluding discussion, three points are raised: (i) the issue of diversity will probably grow in importance due to the fact that the complex task of transforming society has increasingly come into focus; (ii) the issue of diversity will be crucial for IPCC to maintain and develop its capacity to make assessments; (iii) the issue of diversity should not be reduced to simply a means for improving the process of making assessments, but should also improve the outcomes of the assessments.