Description
The IPCC started out as an epistemic community, at least in practice and has become increasingly known as a central site of negotiation in climate agreement-making. In this paper I explore how conceptions of science-policy interactions and relations have co-evolved with the IPCC as a global assessment body designed to inform the collective response to climate change. I take the reader on a journey through the concepts that have been central to developing understanding of what this body is and does, which include the epistemic community model, notions of a boundary, the metaphor of co-production and more recently, as a central site of agreement-making. Agreement-making recognises sites of knowledge production as critical to how global environmental issues are collectively known and addressed and makes order – the distribution of economic, scientific, social, and political resources – central to analyses of science-policy relations. This approach highlights, that the negotiation of collective action begins with global scientific assessment as a process for determining the meaning of the issue for order and order-making.
