To Örebro University

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.