Overview

This chapter discusses the precursors and origin of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with a particular focus on the developments that led to the panel’s intergovernmental design. When the IPCC was established in 1988 as an intergovernmental body, the design choice was both novel and risky and came to have significant consequences for the panel’s subsequent operation and impact. The chapter summarises some prominent events from the early scientific discovery of a possible human influence on global climate to the various international science–policy initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s that preceded the IPCC’s establishment. It then draws attention to a set of factors that can explain the decision to deliberately establish the IPCC as an intergovernmental body.

2.1 Introduction

When the IPCC was established in 1988 as an intergovernmental body, this design choice had significant consequences for the panel’s operation and impact (see, for instance Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a,Reference Agrawalab). On the one hand, the IPCC’s intergovernmental status gave policymakers a direct channel of influence on its work, thus potentially undermining the panel’s scientific authority (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a; Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007). On the other hand, this design also provided a direct and powerful channel of communication between governments and the scientific community. In a conversation with Agrawala, Jean Ripert, chairman of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), stated that ‘the intergovernmental nature of the IPCC was in large part responsible for educating many government bureaucrats about the problem which made them more willing to come to the negotiating table’ (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a: 611). In 2022, moreover, it is possible to speculate that this design feature has also been a contributing factor to the IPCC’s subsequent success in keeping the climate issue on the international political agenda and in maintaining its relevance in the climate policy debate.

It was not obvious that an intergovernmental design would be appropriate for a scientific assessment body such as the IPCC. First, there was no precedence for this level of policy involvement in the large-scale scientific assessment processes that preceded the IPCC. Second, while controversial (then and now), it is a commonly held belief that science and politics are and should be separated (see, inter alia, Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff1987; Skodvin, Reference Skodvin2000b; Oppenheimer et al., Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019; also see Chapter 22). Thus, for example, Haas and Stevens (Reference Haas, Stevens, Lidskog and Sundqvist2011: 131) have argued that ‘the more autonomous and independent science is from policy, the greater its potential influence’. So why was an intergovernmental design chosen for the IPCC?

This chapter discusses the origin of the IPCC with a particular focus on the developments that led to the panel’s intergovernmental design. After a very brief history of scientific assessments presented in Section 2.2, Section 2.3 explores pathways to the IPCC’s establishment. Focusing on the nature of science–policy interactions, the section summarises some of the prominent events from the early discovery of a possible human-induced climate change to the various climate initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s that preceded the IPCC’s establishment. Section 2.4 then directs attention more specifically to a set of key factors that can contribute to explaining the decision to establish the IPCC as an intergovernmental body.

2.2 A Very Brief History of Scientific Assessments

Scientific assessments are not a new phenomenon. With the growth of science as a professional activity, Oppenheimer et al. (Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019: 3) trace ‘early forms of the modern scientific assessment’ to the nineteenth century. Interestingly, vaccination was ‘a major domain of expert assessment’ during this period (Oppenheimer et al., Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019:4). In the United States, scientific assessments were particularly associated with an ‘increased alignment of the focus of scientific investigations with the goals of the national security state’ after 1945 (Oppenheimer et al., Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019: 9). The aim of early scientific assessments, however, was not very different from modern assessments. This is understood by Oppenheimer et al. (Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019: 3) to be ‘any attempt to review the state of expert knowledge in relation to a specific question or problem, judge the quality of the available evidence, and offer findings relevant to the solution of the problem’. As assessments became increasingly institutionalised, they also grew in size. Thus by the late twentieth century, when environmental assessments became increasingly common, ‘large-scale, organised, and formalised assessments of the state of scientific knowledge had become a feature of the scientific landscape’ (Oppenheimer et al., Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019: 9).

Environmental assessments were closely associated with the emergence of environmental multilateralism in the early 1970s (Jabbour & Flachsland, Reference Jabbour and Flachsland2017). Jabbour and Flachsland note that an increasing awareness of large-scale environmental phenomena and ‘the imperative to comprehend the potential consequences and threats to human well-being’ contributed to increased recognition of international scientific cooperation (Jabbour & Flachsland, Reference Jabbour and Flachsland2017: 195). Another contributing factor to this development was the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1972, which was given the explicit mandate ‘to facilitate the monitoring, reporting and ongoing assessment of the state of the global environment’ (Jabbour & Flachsland, Reference Jabbour and Flachsland2017: 195).

International assessments – often referred to as Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) – became dominant during the late twentieth century. GEAs are ‘global’ in the sense of possessing at least one, and often all, of three key features: ‘they may address environmental problems caused by actors in more than one country; they may address problems that have implications for decision makers in more than one country; or they may simply involve participants from more than one country’ (Clark et al., Reference Borie, Mahony, Obermeister and Hulme2006: 4). GEAs include ‘iconic examples’ such as climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and biodiversity loss (Jabbour & Flachsland, Reference Jabbour and Flachsland2017: 193).

The institutionalisation of scientific assessments from the 1970s and onwards was accompanied by an increasing focus on scientific consensus, which ‘appears to provide a way of signalling the agreement of experts about what knowledge is important enough and sufficiently settled to inform policy-making’ (Oppenheimer et al., Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019: 11). The notion of consensus as a demarcation criterion between established knowledge and contested knowledge claims is subject to a continuing discussion among science philosophers and students of science and technology studies.¹ One incentive for adopting a consensus approach in environmental assessments is suggested to be that ‘expert disagreement, or even the appearance of it, can undermine public confidence in those experts and the science they are trying to communicate’ (Oppenheimer et al., Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019: 17). An equally important motivation may be that policymakers and other actors called upon to abate environmental degradation may see lack of consensus as a warrant for delaying action (see Chapter 19).

Sometimes the IPCC is erroneously referred to as the International Panel on Climate Change (see, for instance, Boehmer-Christiansen, Reference Boehmer-Christiansen1995), but the distinction between ‘international’ and ‘intergovernmental’ is important. Whereas an international (or ‘global’) scientific assessment usually refers to a process that includes an international group of scientists, an intergovernmental design indicates that the members are states, not individual scientists. While scientific participation in an intergovernmental assessment process is often based on scientists’ individual scientific merit, this choice is left to the discretion of the states that nominate them and implies that scientific merit is not necessarily the key selection criterion used (see Chapter 7).

2.3 Pathways to the IPCC Establishment

The discovery of a potential human-induced greenhouse effect is often attributed to the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896 (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a; Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007). Arrhenius’ discovery ‘was discussed for a few years, but there was not enough data to tell whether he was right or wrong’ (Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007: 7; Weart, Reference Weart2008). Even though climate-related research during the next 50 years consisted of curiosity-driven side projects, important scientific discoveries were made in this period, including Charles Keeling’s method and measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1957 and Roger Revelle’s and Hans Suess’ conclusion the same year that ‘human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment’ (cited in Weart, Reference Weart2008: 29).

Within the nascent field of post-World War II climate science,² two important modes of science–policy interaction should be mentioned. First, with military funding and support, meteorology was transformed from a subjective undertaking, where forecast weather maps were ‘created completely by hand based on the forecaster’s best judgement’, to ‘[mathematically computed] prognostic weather maps which predicted large-scale atmospheric motion’ (Harper, Reference Harper2003: 667). Numerical weather prediction techniques are precursors of the more advanced Global Climate Models (GCMs) that have played a key role for our understanding of the climate system since the 1960s (Harper, Reference Harper2003; Weart, Reference Weart2008).

Second, an important framework for science–policy interaction in the immediate post-war era was science’s role as a vehicle for ‘peaceful internationalism’, when ‘fostering transnational scientific links became an explicit policy of the world’s leading democracies’ (Weart, Reference Weart2008: 30–31). In the United States, policymakers reportedly used ‘the political neutrality of science and technology as an instrument in the construction of liberal international organizations’ (Miller, Reference Miller, Miller and Edwards2001a: 170). Intergovernmental harmonisation and international cooperation in scientific research were two key modes of interaction that were pursued (Miller, Reference Miller, Miller and Edwards2001a). The latter was particularly important within geophysics, which is interdisciplinary and international by nature, and which by the early 1950s had become ‘intolerably fragmented’ (paraphrasing Weart, Reference Weart2008: 33). As a result of coordinated efforts by a group of prominent scholars, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958 was launched. Miller describes the IGY 1957–1958 as ‘the first large-scale example of intergovernmental cooperation in scientific research and a model for numerous subsequent efforts to address global issues’ (Miller, Reference Miller, Miller and Edwards2001a: 199).

During the 1950s and 1960s there was an increasing awareness that scientific discoveries could be associated with a risk to public health³ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff1987; Weart, Reference Weart2008). The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm seems to have been particularly instrumental in bringing about a shift in perceptions of what was at stake with regard to climate change. Bolin notes that the authors of that conference report ‘felt that human global interdependence was beginning to require a new capacity for global decisions and attention and that coordinated efforts for overview and research were required’ (Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007: 28).

In this period, science–policy interactions on climate change were intensified and developed within a context with a distinct intergovernmental component (see, for instance, Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a; Hulme & Mahony, Reference Hulme and Mahony2010). In 1961 and 1962, the UN General Assembly agreed to use satellites for weather observations and called on the intergovernmental World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the non-governmental International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU)⁴ to collaborate in the further development of the scientific opportunities that had emerged (Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007; Zillman, Reference Zillman2009). In November 1967 the Global Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP) was launched with a Joint Organising Committee (JOC) whose members were appointed by the two parent organisations, WMO and ICSU. In 1974, the UN General Assembly called on the WMO ‘to undertake a study of climate change’, resulting in an expert report issued in 1977 where the ‘general scientific expectation of greenhouse warming’ was reaffirmed, ‘trigger[ing] the WMO decision to convene a World Climate Conference in 1979’ (Zillman, Reference Zillman2009: 143). This was swiftly followed by the establishment of the World Climate Programme.

The 1985 Villach conference convened by UNEP, WMO and ICSU has been referred to as a ‘historic turning point’ (Weart, Reference Weart2021) in which the forthcoming ICSU assessment by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE 29), edited by Bert Bolin, served as a ‘basis for the much-quoted conclusions regarding the prospects of climate change reached by scientists and politicians’ in Villach in 1985 (Rodhe, Reference Rodhe2013: 3). Following the Villach meeting, UNEP, WMO and the ICSU decided to set up the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases (AGGG) in 1986, to which each organisation nominated two experts (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a; Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007). While the AGGG did important work during the 1980s, key actors such as UNEP, WMO and the United States did not consider the AGGG ‘to have the status and composition that would be required in view of the major issues that were emerging’ (Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007: 47). With the strong support and influence of the United States, the IPCC was established by a resolution of the WMO Executive Council in May 1987, which ‘requested the Secretary General of the WMO, “in coordination with the Executive Director of UNEP to establish an intergovernmental mechanism to carry out internationally coordinated scientific assessment of the magnitude, impact and potential timing of climate change”’ (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a: 611, emphasis in original).⁵

2.4 Factors Contributing to the IPCC’s Intergovernmental Design

In a conversation with Bert Bolin in the mid-1980s, Stephen Schneider expressed scepticism that (yet another) scientific assessment would be worth the toll it would take on the scientists providing it. Bolin reportedly responded that ‘right now, many countries, especially developing countries, simply don’t trust assessments in which their scientists and policymakers have not participated … Don’t you think global credibility demands global representation?’ (Schneider, Reference Schneider1991: 25). Agrawala makes a similar observation with regard to the legitimacy of the AGGG, whose six members reportedly were compared by a close observer, unfavourably, to ‘a group of private consultants to the heads of WMO, UNEP and ICSU’ (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a: 613, emphasis in original).

An important motivation for establishing an international scientific assessment process on climate change in the late 1980s was thus to ensure the credibility of the conclusions and the legitimacy of the process. However, to fully understand the choice of an intergovernmental design for the IPCC we need to take into account the role of the United States (Hecht & Tirpak, Reference Hecht and Tirpak1995; Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a).

Numerous national scientific assessments had been undertaken by several US governmental bodies and agencies since the mid-1970s (for an overview, see Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a). As the country with most ‘cumulative expertise both in climate change research and in assessments’, the United States played an important role in the establishment and design of the IPCC (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a: 608). However, the positions on climate change among US agencies and assessment bodies varied significantly with regard to the emphasis given to scientific uncertainty and the need for regulatory policies to respond to the climate threat (Hecht & Tirpak, Reference Hecht and Tirpak1995). There were a number of factors influencing the US position – internal disagreement among US agencies, UNEP activism urging the US to take policy action to address climate change, lack of trust in the AGGG’s ability to provide adequate and balanced scientific assessments, and the US Department of Energy’s rejection of the Villach report because ‘it was not prepared by government officials’ (Hecht & Tirpak, Reference Hecht and Tirpak1995: 381). The compromise solution to these tensions was for the US to recommend that ‘an “intergovernmental mechanism” be set up to conduct scientific assessment of climate change’ (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a: 611, emphasis in original).

One likely motivation for the United States’ promotion of an intergovernmental design for the IPCC was to acquire a stronger degree of control of the process, specifically with regard to potential decisions on governmental action to abate climate change (Haas & McCabe, Reference Haas and McCabe2001). In 1988, there was no strictly political body to which negotiations on this question could be channelled. The United States’ involvement in the IPCC’s establishment and design ensured it retained a firm grip on this discussion within the IPCC framework (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998a; Haas & McCabe, Reference Haas and McCabe2001). During the first two years of its operation, the IPCC’s WGIII was set up to assess ‘Response Strategies’ under US chairmanship and ‘was charged with considering “legal” issues as part of its broader agenda’ (Haas & McCabe, Reference Haas and McCabe2001: 332). The United States reportedly used this position ‘to demonstrate the efficacy of US domestic efforts and the absence of any urgency for further action’ (Haas & McCabe, Reference Haas and McCabe2001: 332–323). WGI and WGII were in charge of providing the scientific and impacts assessments, respectively.

While the United States contributed to bringing the deeply political issue of climate policy action to the IPCC, this feature may not have been altogether negative for the scientific integrity of the assessment. The old (AR1) WGIII served as an arena for pre-negotiations for the 1991 INC and thus ensured important political deliberations during a period when no such arena existed elsewhere. In this sense, the old WGIII may have served a ‘buffer function’ during a time when the IPCC process was particularly vulnerable to undue political influence (see Skodvin, Reference Skodvin2000b).

2.5 Achievements and Challenges

Scientific assessments have been traced back to the nineteenth century, but international environmental assessments emerged with increasing multilateralism in the 1970s. The intergovernmental design was both novel and risky when it was adopted for the IPCC in 1988. There was no precedent for this design choice in large-scale environmental assessments that preceded the IPCC and it also ran counter to the controversial, but common view (then and now) that science and politics are and should be separate. Politics in the United States seem to have been a decisive factor in the intergovernmental design choice for the IPCC.

With the increasing politicisation of the climate issue during the 1980s, as governmental and economic actors increasingly started to comprehend the potential costs associated with major policy measures to abate climate change, it could be argued that the establishment of the IPCC can be seen as a major achievement in itself. The panel’s intergovernmental status provided a direct and powerful channel of communication between governments and the scientific community. This has been important for the panel’s work and its continued relevance for international climate policies. The panel’s intergovernmental status, however, has also been associated with increased vulnerability to undue political influence – or at least vulnerable to charges of such influence. An important tool for meeting this challenge has been to introduce increasingly specific and detailed rules of procedure (see Chapter 3), which have in turn led to the development of an increasingly complicated and time-consuming assessment process. Nevertheless, the IPCC has succeeded in providing six full Assessment Reports and numerous Special Reports on specific topics. It has contributed to keeping the climate change issue on the international political agenda throughout its 34-year existence.

Overview

Since its creation in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has taken increasing care to formalise its procedures. IPCC procedures define the creation and role of the IPCC Bureau, Task Forces and Working Groups (WGs), as well as the steps that must be taken by experts when preparing reports, and by administrators for overseeing the institution’s funding. Increasingly detailed over time and now running over several dozen pages, the IPCC procedures are not a boring part of IPCC studies. They are key observation points of the main issues that the IPCC has had to address over time. They reflect the compromises it has made in its efforts to give the greatest political efficiency to its reports, while ensuring that their scientific robustness remains irreproachable. The procedures therefore constitute a site from which many of the issues addressed in this book can be read. However, they should not be taken as descriptions of actual practices: their implementation is open to interpretation and thereby to debate. The drafting and amendment of procedures therefore remains an open process.

3.1 Introduction

At the first session of the IPCC, held at the joint initiative of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Vienna in November 1988, the participants agreed on the tasks entrusted to the newly formed body – the constitution of three WGs, the governance of the Panel and its WGs, and the importance of letting experts from other international organisations attend as observers. These issues were addressed without much detail in the minutes of the session or in the ‘Terms of reference for the working groups’ annexed to it. In 1991, the Panel adopted the Principles governing IPCC work, a relatively brief text composed of 12 points, to be reviewed annually. The Principles governing IPCC work are still the main procedural framework for the work of the IPCC. Over the years, they have been continuously developed and refined (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998b; Siebenhüner, Reference Siebenhüner2002; Bolin, Reference Begum, Lempert, Ali and Pörtner2007; Provost, Reference Provost2019). The current version of the Principles governing IPCC work was adopted in 1998 and it has been amended several times since then. They now include three appendices, which may themselves include annexes, devoted respectively to Procedures for the preparation, review, acceptance, adoption, approval and publication of IPCC reports (Appendix A), Financial procedures for the IPCC (Appendix B) and Procedures for the Election of the IPCC Bureau and any Task Force Bureau (Appendix C). In addition, the Panel adopted an IPCC policy and process for admitting observer organisations (2006), an IPCC Conflict of interest policy (2011), an IPCC Communication strategy (2011), and an IPCC Gender Policy and Implementation Plan (2020). Occasionally, IPCC procedures also refer to UNEP and WMO procedures (e.g. the participation in the IPCC is determined with reference to WMO and UN membership).

The IPCC is not an international organisation with legal personality and so the formal procedures do not legally constitute international treaties (Ghaleigh, Reference Ghaleigh, Gray, Tarasofsky and Carlarne2016: 59). Moreover, they coexist with a multitude of informal and unwritten procedures and ‘ways of doing things’ (Farrell et al., Reference Farrell, VanDeveer and Jäger2001) which often differ from one WG to another according to the disciplinary cultures of their members. These ‘ways of doing things’ have sometimes been incorporated in the formal procedures and at other times have been resisted. The decision to formalise a procedure has strategic implications. Although it reduces the authors’ room for manoeuvre, the formalisation of procedures is a central lever for the IPCC to ensure its legitimacy and the credibility of its reports (Sundqvist et al., Reference Sundqvist, Bohlin, Hermansen and Yearley2015). Procedures are one of the main ways by which the IPCC has been institutionalised and has established itself as a central player in global climate governance. All IPCC procedures are available on its website. The IPCC gradually recognised that it is not only important to follow procedures, but also to publicise them. IPCC procedures have served two main functions over time, which this chapter describes successively. On the one hand, they have been a crucial channel through which the IPCC has sought to establish a balance, always subject to discussion, between science and politics (see Chapter 21). On the other hand, the procedures have been pivotal in strengthening the IPCC’s legitimacy and credibility when both are challenged.

3.2 Balancing Science and Politics in the IPCC

IPCC procedures reveal which matters and methods the Panel and governments have found necessary to establish and formalise. First of all, the procedures state the mandate of the IPCC: ‘the role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation’ (Principles governing IPCC work, §2). Sometimes referred to as a ‘boundary organisation’ (Agrawala et al., Reference Agrawala, Broad and Guston2001; Miller, Reference Miller2001b; Sundqvist et al., Reference Sundqvist, Bohlin, Hermansen and Yearley2015), the IPCC is always seeking a balance between the scientific robustness of the assessments carried out under its aegis and the relevance of its reports for governments policies, the international negotiations on climate change, and the wider public. As the Principles governing IPCC work state, ‘IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they may need to deal objectively with scientific, technical and socio-economic factors relevant to the application of particular policies’.

The balance between science and politics that is inherent to the IPCC’s mandate has been intensely debated (Skodvin, Reference Skodvin2000b; Siebenhüner, Reference Siebenhüner2003; Miller, Reference Miller and Jasanoff2004; Beck, Reference Beck2011b; De Pryck, Reference De Pryck2018). The procedures are indicative of where the Panel places the cursor, both in establishing the IPCC organs and in determining their prerogatives and working methods. Members involved in its governance (Bureau, WGs Bureaux, Bureau of the Task Force), and the experts involved in the preparation of its reports (Lead Authors, Coordinating Lead Authors, Review Editors, Contributing Authors), are in general chosen for their scientific competence. The Principles governing IPCC work nevertheless reconcile this imperative with maintaining a role for states: while the appointment of experts is decided by the Bureaux of the WGs, states are responsible for proposing the names of competent persons through their Government Focal Point. Similarly, the Principles governing IPCC work specify that the experts must reflect a range of scientific, technical and socio-economic views and expertise; geographical representation (ensuring appropriate representation of experts from developing and developed countries and countries with economies in transition); a mixture of experts with and without previous experience in IPCC; and gender balance (see Chapter 7). With regard to the elaboration of IPCC assessment reports, the Principles governing IPCC work establish a complex procedure involving experts as authors in the crafting of draft reports, followed by a first external review by experts and a second review by both governments and experts (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 A schematic illustration of the preparation of IPCC reports.

Source: IPCC 2021 [www.ipcc.ch/about/preparingreports/]

Eventually, the report must be endorsed by the countries represented in the Panel. Depending on the nature of the report in hand (see Chapter 5), this entails a more or less thorough examination ranging from ‘acceptance’ (the material as a whole presents a comprehensive, objective and balanced view of the subject matter), ‘adoption’ (the material is discussed and endorsed section by section by the Panel) to ‘approval’ (the material is discussed and agreed to line by line).

By specifying the role of the different actors involved in the IPCC’s work – scientists, states, non-governmental actors – and by organising its working methods, the procedures have served as a constitution for the IPCC. They have established the identity of the IPCC and have made it a unique body of expertise at the interface of science and politics. The working procedures established by the Panel depart from the classical representation of a ‘linear model of expertise’ (Leclerc, Reference Leclerc and Encinas de Muñagorri2009; Beck, Reference Beck2011a) in which a knowledge phase precedes a decision phase. Instead, the procedures organise an iterative process linking scientific assessment to political questions and international negotiations on climate change.

3.3 Strengthening the Legitimacy of the IPCC

IPCC procedures have been the target of constant discussion, criticism and suggestions for change (Farrell et al., Reference Farrell, VanDeveer and Jäger2001; Boehmer-Christianson & Kellow, Reference Boehmer-Christiansen and Kellow2002; Hulme et al., Reference Hulme2010). Few plenary sessions of the Panel do not include a review of its formal procedures. The criticism to which the IPCC is regularly subjected has been a powerful driving force for the development or modification of its procedures. Very early in the IPCC’s existence, its legitimacy and credibility were contested by some economic and governmental actors concerned with limiting international climate action. The institutional response of the Panel to these concerns was not only to demonstrate the accuracy of the information contained in its reports, but rather also to strengthen its procedures. The increasing proceduralisation of the assessment process therefore appears to be a prime means of responding to the criticisms levelled at the IPCC.

This procedural rather than substantive response by the IPCC to criticisms has not always been easily adopted however. The scientific background of the Panel’s Bureau officers and experts meant that their training and instincts would have led them to engage in discussion and argumentation about scientific substance, not about procedures. This is all the more true because a number of criticisms of the IPCC were made by actors who were clearly interested in manufacturing doubt and countering the adoption by states of measures limiting greenhouse gas emissions (Dunlap & McCright, Reference Dunlap, McCright, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011). Nevertheless, the Panel could not afford to ignore criticisms widely reported in the media; otherwise they would risk being accused of ‘tribalism’ (Beck, Reference Beck2011b). Agreeing to undergo procedural strengthening, rather than defending the institution solely on the basis of science, therefore reflects a cultural shift for many IPCC officers (see Chapter 6). On a subject as politically important as climate change, expert assessment of knowledge could not remain governed by the informal rules of the scientific community.

Criticism of the IPCC has led to a significant proceduralisation of new areas of IPCC work. The areas in which the Panel has formalised or strengthened the procedures are indicative of the fundamental difficulties it has encountered. These difficulties are undoubtedly familiar to most expert bodies working in areas of public controversy (Social Learning Group, 2001; Oppenheimer et al., Reference Livingston, Lövbrand and Alkan Olsson2019), but because of the high political stakes involved in international climate negotiations they have been acute in the case of the IPCC. Two episodes had a particularly significant impact on the IPCC’s procedures (see Chapters 11 and 16). The first occurred in 1996 during the adoption of the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (AR2). Strong criticism was raised by several American scientists, and relayed by pressure groups such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), claiming that some IPCC Lead Authors had not respected the Panel’s procedures and had deliberately undermined sceptical views on the anthropogenic origin of climate change (Skodvin, Reference Skodvin2000b: 215; Miller & Edwards, Reference Miller and Edwards2001; Oreskes & Conway, Reference Oreskes and Conway2010: 201). In response, the IPCC created the new function of ‘Review Editors’ charged, for each chapter, to ‘assist the WG/Task Force Bureaux in identifying reviewers for the expert review process, ensure that all substantive expert and government review comments are afforded appropriate consideration, advise lead authors on how to handle contentious/controversial issues, and ensure genuine controversies are reflected adequately in the text of the Report’ (Principles governing IPCC work, Appendix A, Annex 1, §5).

The second and more significant episode was triggered late in 2009. Emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia were made public which critics believed revealed a willingness by some of them – who were also IPCC Lead Authors – to ‘hide’ data or to present it in a way that would support the view that global warming is primarily caused by human activities. Around the same time, the Chair of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, was accused of a conflict of interest, since he was the director of a research centre – The Energy and Resource Institute in India – which provided consultancy to companies interested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And finally early in 2010, a gross error in AR4, published more than two years earlier, was made public. This concerned the melting rate of Himalayan glaciers. Some of these criticisms were found, after investigation, to be unsubstantiated (House of Commons, 2010; PBL, 2010). Nevertheless, after a delay in responding to the critique (Beck, Reference Beck2011b), the IPCC commissioned the InterAcademy Council (IAC) to evaluate its procedures and make recommendations (Paglia & Parker, Reference Paglia, Parker, Boin, Fahy and ’t Hart2021).

In its report, released in October 2010, the IAC first encouraged the IPCC to make better use of the procedures already adopted at its Panel sessions or in its WGs. For example, with regard to the review of draft reports, ‘the IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors’ (IAC, 2010: 3). The IAC also reaffirmed the need to unify the wording used by IPCC WGs to describe the levels of uncertainty affecting the statements, in accordance with the guidelines already adopted in 2005 (IPCC, Guidance Notes for Lead Authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Addressing Uncertainties, 2005; see Chapter 17). The IAC report also suggested that the Panel strengthen the procedures it had previously designed for using ‘grey-literature’ (Principles governing IPCC work, Appendix A, Annex 2, Procedure for using unpublished/non-peer-reviewed sources in IPCC, 2003). Other IAC recommendations called on the Panel to adopt new procedures – the creation of an executive committee to take decisions between Panel sessions; the election of an executive director to head the secretariat; improved communication; and the adoption of ‘a rigorous conflict of interest policy that applies to all persons directly involved in the preparation of IPCC reports’ (IAC, 2010: 46).

The assessment made by the IAC was welcomed and acknowledged by the Panel. Many of its recommendations were immediately implemented at the 32nd Session of the IPCC in 2010, or else at subsequent plenary sessions of the Panel following the publication of the reports of the IPCC Task Groups on Procedures, Governance and Management, Conflict of Interest Policy and Communication Strategy – task groups set up by the Panel to further implement the IAC’s recommendations (see also Chapter 6).

3.4 Achievements and Challenges

The IPCC’s procedures describe in detail the different functions of the IPCC and the work processes to be followed. Whether to learn from difficulties in its operation or to respond to criticism, the Panel has refined and expanded the IPCC’s procedures considerably, covering an ever-widening range of issues. The procedures have thus played a key role in making the IPCC a major player in global environmental governance. IPCC procedures also emerge as a model for ‘governance by scientific assessment’ (Biermann, Reference Biermann, Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg2011). They served as a reference for the drafting of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Rules of procedure for the plenary of the platform (2012) (Futhazar, Reference Futhazar, Hrabanski and Pesche2016). The procedural convergence between the IPCC and the IPBES has greatly facilitated their joint assessment on the relationship between climate change and biodiversity loss (Pörtner et al., Reference Pörtner, Scholes and Agard2021).

However, IPCC procedures are not immune from criticism. It is interesting that the procedures established for the IPBES – although clearly modelled on those of the IPCC – have departed from them on certain points. For example, the IPBES allows for the possibility of using a fast-track procedure for carrying out expert assessments, which gives it a responsiveness that the IPCC lacks. The strengthening of IPCC procedures has sometimes resulted in extremely complex decision schemes, as illustrated by the IPCC Protocol for Addressing Possible Errors in IPCC Assessment Reports, Synthesis Reports, Special Reports or Methodology Reports (Principles governing IPCC work, Appendix A, Annex 3). To help users navigate the many steps in the process, the IPCC had to prepare explanatory diagrams in decision-tree form. The necessary caution with regard to claims that authors have made a mistake, and the no less legitimate concern to involve them in the implementation of the error protocol, may ultimately be detrimental to the effectiveness of the process.

Similarly, the IPCC deviates from most expert bodies in deciding that the Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form filled in by experts remains confidential. They limit the form to three broadly formulated questions relating to professional activities, significant and relevant financial interests, and ‘anything else that could affect [the] objectivity or independence [of the experts]’ (IPCC Conflict of interest policy). Greater transparency would have demanded that the forms be more detailed and accessible. Nevertheless, the Panel must take into account that experts involved in the IPCC’s assessments volunteer their time without financial compensation. Procedural requirements that are considered too stringent could discourage participation. This concern is explicit in the Conflict of interest policy: ‘The Panel recognizes the commitment and dedication of those who participate in IPCC activities. The policy should maintain the balance between the need to minimise the reporting burden, and to ensure the integrity of the IPCC process’.

The IPCC’s procedures are constantly being re-assessed in the academic literature, by the IPCC and in the media. The underlying idea is that the right procedural configuration must be found to ensure the IPCC’s continuing legitimacy. In addition to the fact that opinions differ on what the ideal procedural configuration should be, it is questionable whether the procedures can fully meet the expectations placed on them. Indeed, procedures are references and do not describe actual social practices. Moreover, they need to be implemented to produce an effect. It is notable that the IAC review in 2010 emphasised the need for the IPCC to better implement the procedures that already exist. However, the implementation of the procedures leaves some room for interpretation by the actors, and can be challenged by others. The balance achieved by the procedures at any given time can therefore only be temporary and fragile. The drafting of the IPCC procedures is bound to remain an open-ended process.

Overview

By highlighting the importance of venues and meetings for the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this chapter offers a novel angle from which to study the institution. Thinking of the IPCC as a ‘travelling village’ and a ‘system of meetings’, we discuss the various functions of venues and meetings in organising and maintaining the IPCC’s assessment process. We argue that because of the global and networked nature of its activities and institutional arrangements, participating in the IPCC means making the world one’s workplace. The chapter also shows how established IPCC meeting practices have been tested by the COVID-19 pandemic and sheds light on some of the implications of the shift from in-person to virtual meetings.

4.1 Introduction

The IPCC describes itself as a ‘huge and yet very small organization’ (IPCC, n.d. (a)). The dozen staff members of its Secretariat are hosted by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in Geneva, but most of the scientists and government representatives who carry out the bulk of its activities are scattered worldwide across many institutions. In order to function as a network organisation (Venturini et al., Reference Venturini, De Pryck and Ackland2022) and carry out its work, the IPCC relies on a complex ‘system of meetings’ (Brown & Green, Reference Brown and Green2017: 46) organised in various places around the world. Unlike other practices, actors, institutions and objects that make up the IPCC, the Panel’s venues and meetings have so far received little attention. This is somewhat surprising since these venues and meetings play a key role in the coordination of the assessment work and contribute to building consensus in the IPCC. They also serve as a ‘visible stage’ (Craggs & Mahony, Reference Craggs and Mahony2014: 415; see also Death, Reference Death2011) from which the authority of the organisation is projected.

This chapter is based on ethnographic experience with IPCC meetings since 2014. Studying the IPCC means travelling to many countries, and going into different venues and meeting rooms to observe global climate assessments in the making – although, amid the global pandemic, meetings have been held virtually since spring 2020. The chapter is structured as follows. Sections 4.2 and 4.3 explore the spatial and material nature of IPCC venues. Section 4.4 explores the orchestration of meetings and their various functions in the work of the IPCC. It also discusses some of the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on its meeting practices (see Box 4.1).

4.2 All Over the Place? Locating the IPCC Assessment Process

In science and technology studies (STS), the role of places and venues in knowledge production has been acknowledged since the 1970s (Shapin, Reference Shapin1998; Livingstone, Reference Lahn2003). Against the commonplace assumption that scientific knowledge is universal, scholars have shown that places shape the production of knowledge (Latour & Woolgar, Reference Latour and Woolgar1979; Knorr Cetina, Reference Pörtner1999). All forms of knowledge are situated and reflect the particular conditions of their production (Haraway, Reference Haraway1988). Places are ‘a way of understanding’ (Cresswell, Reference Cresswell2004: 11) because they make it possible to ‘see attachments and connections between people and place [… and] see worlds of meaning and experience’. STS scholars have also shown that the aesthetic features of the environment in which scientific knowledge is produced and presented are crucial for underpinning the authority of science. Some places can even act as ‘truth-spots’ (Gieryn, Reference Gieryn2018: 172) that provide ‘believability and authority to claims or assertions associated with that spot’.

The assessment work of the IPCC is bound to multiple and specific locations. For example, the location of the Secretariat at the WMO in Geneva – ‘a United Nations city’ – provides the IPCC with solid institutional and scientific credibility and contributes to its authoritative status. As the Panel describes it, ‘Geneva is a perfect example of an international and multicultural city’ (IPCC, 2019a), which succeeded in attracting numerous international and non-profit organisations and turned into a UN ecosystem (Dairon & Badache, Reference Dairon and Badache2021).

The other ‘parts’ of the organisation are spread across the globe. IPCC authors who write the reports are based in their home institutions, as are the representatives of the member states who review and accept them. Authors meet at least three to four times at so-called Lead Author Meetings (LAMs), to coordinate and write their collective report. IPCC member states meet at least once a year in Panel/Plenary sessions and take major decisions regarding the mandate of the three Working Groups (WGs), the budget of the organisation and outreach activities. These plenaries are also attended by observer organisations (see Chapter 10). LAMs and Panel sessions take place worldwide and the organisation relies on the willingness and resources of its member states to offer venues. The IPCC may thus be characterised as a ‘travelling village’ (to take a metaphor used by one participant) whose thousands of scientific experts and delegates regularly leave their home institutions to meet in various locations.

Since 1988, the IPCC has organised hundreds of gatherings in over 57 countries (see Figure 4.1). Such widespread spatial organisation projects the image of a truly global endeavour. It also reflects the way in which the IPCC derives its authority from its ‘convening power’, much like its parent organisation, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which seeks to bring ‘the world together to protect the environment, support sustainable development and ensure the health of the planet for future generations’ (UNEP, 2021).

Figure 4.1 The global distribution of IPCC gatherings (1988–2020).

The top panel displays the distribution of the plenary sessions of the Panel. The middle panel shows where LAMs took place. The bottom panel presents the locations of the TSUs of the WGs and of the TFI. The locations were found in meeting documents available on the IPCC website. A few locations, from the early days of the IPCC, could not be found in the available documentation.

Figure 4.1 shows that, overall, IPCC activities have taken place in some regions more than in others. As the top panel illustrates, Switzerland (Geneva, 11 sessions), Kenya (Nairobi, 6), Canada (Montreal, 5) and France (Paris, 4) have hosted the most IPCC Panel sessions. This is not surprising since these four cities host UN institutions that offer adequate plenary venues. Interestingly, the United States only hosted one session in 1990 in Washington (IPCC-3). No Panel session so far has been held in Oceania. The middle panel shows that countries that hosted the most LAMs for regular assessment as well as special reports are Switzerland (16), the USA (12), Australia (12), the UK (9) and Norway (9). It is worth highlighting that only a few LAMs were held in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. These numbers illustrate the centrality of the Global North, in particular Switzerland, in hosting both Panel sessions and WG meetings.

Finally, a less visible component of the IPCC, the Technical Support Units (TSUs), deserve attention, as depicted in the bottom panel of Figure 4.1. TSUs, generally a dozen people, support the work of the WGs and the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (TFI) and play a key role in the coordination of the assessment activities. Each TSU is jointly chaired by two co-chairs, one from a ‘developed country’ and one from a ‘developing country’, but is generally hosted and funded by the developed country. The co-chair whose country funds a TSU thus has a particularly strong voice in running the WG (IAC, 2010). As the map shows, only a handful of countries have supported the establishment of TSUs: the UK and USA have together financed 8 out of 18 of the WG TSUs, while Japan has been in charge of the TFI since 1999.

4.3 IPCC Venues, Enclosing Climate?

Examining the venues, and more specifically the buildings and rooms that have hosted IPCC meetings, draws attention to the materiality of the spaces that underpins the Panel’s work. Venues and their distinct spatial features, including their locality and architecture, have an impact on how science and policy are (co-)produced. As McConnell (Reference McConnell2019: 47) has argued, places can carry with them distinct ‘affective atmospheres’, relating, inter alia, to the way in which official buildings convey a sense of neutrality and universality through their function and design. The WMO building (Figure 4.2), for example, carries a clear symbolic meaning. According to WMO (2021), its main building is ‘at once pragmatic and emblematic – a hi-tech response to geography from the creativity of science and a symbol of the commitment of WMO to the protection of the environment and the rational and economical use of energy’. Originally, the ‘Chic Planète project’, submitted by the architects Rino Brodbeck and Jacques Roulet in 1993, sought to accommodate budget constraints, the geography of the site (a narrow strip bound by roads, a railway and existing buildings) and care for the environment. Its interior design is a perfect illustration of the desire of humans to control their climate, as the ‘natural process of heat transfer [put in place by the architects] maintains the building at a constant optimal temperature, between 20 and 26°C’ (WMO, 2021).

Figure 4.2 The WMO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

Source: WMO (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)

The buildings that accommodate IPCC Panel sessions and LAMs also have distinctive features from which the organisation can draw credibility and legitimacy. These meetings usually take place in universities, resort hotels, conference centres or UN buildings – places that, for different reasons, strive for neutrality, conventionality and universality (cf. Augé, Reference Augé1995). These buildings are meant not only to ‘keep the weather out’ (Gieryn, Reference Gieryn2002: 35) but also to accommodate the daily flow and gathering of hundreds of people, thereby ensuring the smooth and efficient proceedings of meetings and events. IPCC venues have a particular ordering function in which they ‘arrange in space things and people, building-in strict patterns of movement and interpersonal contacts that are sequenced by entrances, passages, barriers, and exits’ (Gieryn, Reference Gieryn2018: 174). Over the years, the layout of the rooms for LAMs and Panel sessions has come to look alike and the steady flow of movement in and between plenary and adjacent rooms, interrupted by regular breaks, has become routinised. As Figure 4.3 shows, IPCC venues generally consist of one main conference room, where the plenary meetings take place, and several smaller breakout rooms to host contact groups and chapter meetings. Corridors also play a key role in facilitating informal gatherings of participants.

Source: IPCC, 2019a

Figure 4.3 Example of the layout of a Lead Author Meeting.

As for most UN bodies, such venue configurations are also meant to create a strict separation between participants and the rest of society. Such separation becomes visible through the badges worn by participants and observers – the fruits of a long process of accreditation and registration started several months before the meetings – which allow them to enter rooms that are often guarded and not open to other users of the building and the public.

4.4 Meetings within Meetings

Places and venues can also shape the practices that prevail at a science–policy interface (Mahony, Reference Mahony2013; see also Palmer et al., Reference Palmer, Owens and Doubleday2019). When the IPCC meets in a certain place (e.g. a conference centre, university or hotel), it temporarily creates an ‘IPCC space’. Such ‘boundary spaces’ (Mahony, Reference Mahony2013: 31) can be instrumental in bringing science and politics into closer relation (Mahony, Reference Mahony2013: 37). They support and constrain ‘individual performances and in doing so shap[e] the narratives and knowledges produced’ (Craggs & Mahony, Reference Craggs and Mahony2014: 415).

The activities of the IPCC are organised through a complex system of large-scale and small-scale meetings, in constant dialogue with one another. Each of these gatherings has specific functions aimed at ensuring that the assessment reports will be published according to the approved timeline and based on the latest published literature. Meetings are also a vehicle to order the process and make sure that the otherwise geographically and institutionally scattered assessment cycles follow the rules of procedures that underpin the credibility and legitimacy of the IPCC (see Chapter 3). Each meeting is therefore bound to a strict agenda and to the achievement of predefined tasks and milestones within the assessment process – agreeing on the outline of a report, answering reviewers’ comments, approving the Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs) and so forth.

Each meeting is also bound to specific norms and codes. WG LAMs closely resemble large academic gatherings and abide by largely informal deliberative practices. Discussions are mainly held in English, making it more challenging for non-native speakers. The domination of certain individuals is also sometimes difficult to avoid. In contrast, IPCC Panel sessions are more akin to UN meetings (with a ceremonial opening session, the presence of interpreters, the names of countries displayed on tables, the use of diplomatic courtesy and formalities, etc.). At the same time, because of the scientific aura of the IPCC, government representatives need to adapt their interventions to the register of science (e.g. political interventions can be dismissed on the grounds of being ‘too political’).

Brown et al. (Reference Brown and Green2017: 14) define meetings as ‘spaces for the alignment and negotiation of distinct perspectives […] constituted through the contextual interplay of similarity and difference’. As an essential tool of collective deliberation, meetings – and meetings within meetings (chapter meetings, Bureau meetings, Breakout Groups (BOGs), SPM meetings, contract groups, huddles and so on; see Figure 4.4) – lie at the heart of the IPCC consensus-building strategy (see Chapter 19). Meetings allow participants to deliberate on specific issues, to identify agreements and disagreements, and to formulate informed assessments and decisions. Meetings are considered the ‘locus and embodiment of ideas of appropriate, transparent decision-making’ (Brown et al., Reference Brown and Green2017: 11), and the numerous guiding documents that are issued by the IPCC are expected to support and legitimise such processes.

Figure 4.4 Types of meetings scheduled during a Lead Author Meeting.

Source: IPCC, 2019a

Meetings also have an important socialising function as they offer moments of interaction and opportunities for relationship building. As ‘a series of situated relationships between people, places, tools, and documents’ (Yarrow, Reference Yarrow2017: 97), meetings bring together IPCC participants and familiarise them with the norms and practices of the organisation. They help develop connections with other participants by creating a sense of community, shared identity and trust in the ‘IPCC family’.

The Panel’s system of meetings is also in constant dialogue with events happening outside the IPCC context. Smaller-scale in-person or virtual meetings between distinct expert communities aim to organise, orchestrate and align the activities of these communities with IPCC assessment cycles to ensure that their outputs are published in time to be included in IPCC reports (see Chapter 18). IPCC meetings are also part of even larger orchestration efforts that take place in other international institutions and fora (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), UNEP, WMO, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), etc.) (Campbell et al., Reference Campbell, Corson, Gray, MacDonald and Brosius2014: 3). These events are connected by the individuals who circulate between them and who weave together ideas, practices and objects to build the global governance of the environment.

4.5 Achievements and Challenges

This chapter has shown why the IPCC is both large – in relation to the number of contributors who participate in its activities and the assessment function it provides – and small – in relation to its material reality and physical footprint. It functions through a carefully orchestrated and structurally embedded system of meetings spread throughout the world (although more occur in the Global North than in the Global South). Through this system of meetings, the IPCC has succeeded in bringing together scientific experts from all over the world to produce probably the most sophisticated global environmental assessment. It has also managed to socialise policymakers from all countries to the issue of climate change. However, building and maintaining such spaces in which researchers and government representatives can deliberate undisturbed comes at the cost of separating the organisation from the rest of society and organising its meetings behind closed doors.

As a result of the pandemic, and its subsequent restrictions on international travel and gatherings, in 2020 all IPCC meetings were moved online. The IPCC became a laboratory in which to experiment with new forms of participation and deliberation (Box 4.1). Notwithstanding the challenges of the global pandemic, the perceived success of eLAMs and virtual WG approval sessions proved the adaptive capacity of the IPCC’s system of meetings. It also provided important lessons to be learned for the future of the organisation, notably suggesting the possibility of organising hybrid events, or alternating virtual and in-person meetings, to retain some of the advantages of eLAMs in terms of inclusivity and a lower carbon footprint.

Overview

This chapter outlines the process of the report writing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and discusses, through specific examples, how these reports are produced within, and shaped by, political and scientific contexts. The IPCC produces Assessment Reports, Special Reports, and Methodological Reports, which are central to the institution’s operations and perceived impact. There are also sub-elements of these reports – Summary for Policymakers and Technical Summary – which fulfil important stand-alone roles. The process of writing these reports is well-institutionalised and involves maintaining a balance between scientific credibility and policy relevance. The reports produced are therefore accountable to, and co-produced with, scientific and policy communities. The chapter shows how the framing of IPCC reports has changed over time and continues to evolve. This also raises questions about the future of IPCC reports in relation to IPCC processes and in response to diversifying audiences and new media.

5.1 Introduction

At its inception in 1988, the IPCC was tasked with providing regular, comprehensive scientific assessments on climate change. The production of these reports is the central purpose and mandate of the IPCC (Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998b). Since then, the IPCC has produced 6 full Assessment Reports, as well as 14 Special Reports, and 6 Methodology Reports (see Table 5.1 for a list of all reports produced to date).¹

IPCC reports are produced within a well-institutionalised architecture and through processes that aim to maintain scientific integrity and policy relevance. The effort to be ‘neutral, policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive’ (IPCC, 2021b) guides their production, organisation and reception. In other words, through their connection to scientific and policy worlds, IPCC reports are accountable to both. This chapter outlines the processes of commissioning and designing different IPCC report styles, and their roles and functions. It expands on how the IPCC’s unique situation between science and policy has led to its reports evolving in line with changing policy expectations and developments in scientific knowledge. It shows that IPCC reports have a broad audience and that the challenges to keeping them relevant comes from both political and scientific arenas.

5.2 Types and Styles of Reports

The periodic IPCC assessments are made up of four reports: individual reports for Working Group (WG) I – The Physical Science Basis; WGII – Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; and WGIII – Mitigation of Climate Change; and a Synthesis Report. With an increasing body of published literature to draw upon, the size of Assessment Reports has grown. Thus the WGI report in the First Assessment Report (AR1) in 1990 was around 400 pages in length compared to over 1500 pages for WGI in AR6 in 2021. Since AR2, the three WGs are brought together in a shorter Synthesis Report, which aims to highlight the most important cross-cutting aspects (IPCC, 2013a). These reports are comprehensive updates of knowledge on climate change, each with a different set of authors and a different literature base.

The IPCC has also produced 14 Special Reports to date. Special Reports are led by either one WG or else by a combination of WGs. Although the context for these Special Reports differs, their collective role is to provide more detailed information, in between the Assessment Reports, on specific topics deemed particularly relevant by its member governments (Fogel, Reference Fogel2005, and see Chapter 20). All IPCC reports include a Summary for Policymakers (SPM) – a shorter summary of the main policy-relevant findings (around 30 pages), and a Technical Summary (TS) – a longer and more detailed summary with technical detail that cannot be included in the SPM. The IPCC also produces Methodological Reports in the form of practical guidelines. Most recently in this category has been the Methodology Report on Short-lived Climate Forcers, and updated IPCC Guidelines on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

The production of IPCC reports is a well-documented process (see Hughes, Reference Hughes2012; IPCC, 2013a; Livingston et al., Reference Livingstone2018; De Pryck, Reference De Pryck2021a). The process of report preparation is generally the same for all Assessment, Special, and Methodological Reports (see Figure 3.1 in Chapter 3). Reports are scoped and their draft outline determined. The outline is approved by the Panel in Plenary, a process that is important because agreement on the outline is considered to increase the likelihood that the final report will be accepted (Hughes, Reference Hughes2012). Following approval of the outline by the Panel, Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, and Review Editors are nominated and selected. Authors then start to prepare the report based on the scoping outline and an assessment of the relevant underlying literature. The draft report undergoes two external review rounds following the First Order Draft (FOD) by experts and following the Second Order Draft (SOD) by both governments and experts. At the time of the SOD, the summary sections of the report (the SPM for Assessment and Special Reports, or the Overview Section of Methodology Reports) are prepared and circulated for review (see Chapter 11). Based on these expert and government reviews the Final Draft is prepared. The summary sections of the report are sent out for one final government review (the Final Government Distribution) in advance of the final Approval/Acceptance Plenary (see Chapter 20).

Reports are presented at the final plenary for approval by governments. In the case of the WG and Synthesis reports this takes place at the WG and Panel Plenary Sessions, respectively (see IPCC, 2013a). The SPM undergoes line-by-line ‘approval’ – meaning that it is subject to in-depth discussion, and agreed upon between the Panel and the report’s authors. The underlying report is ‘accepted’ – which means it has not been subject to as detailed scrutiny as the SPM, but still presents what is deemed to be ‘a comprehensive, objective and balanced view of the subject matter’ (IPCC, 2013a). The longer Synthesis Report has the special status of being ‘adopted’ section by section. The TS is prepared by the authors alone, but is an integrated part of the full report, and thus accepted alongside the full report. The different methods of approval may also have an effect on how a report is read, as well as who the audience is deemed to be. For example, policymakers may refer mainly to the SPM for top level messaging, the language of which has been agreed upon in plenary. However, more technical information on specific topics may be found in the TS or in the underlying chapters.

A core aspect of IPCC reports is that they are co-produced between governments, IPCC authors and other experts partaking in the review process. In doing this, the IPCC both entrenches and performs its mandate to be ‘policy relevant, but never policy prescriptive’ and produces a report which is accountable to, and yet also an outcome of, scientific and policy worlds. The next section outlines and provides some examples of how the IPCC’s connections to both science and policy have also had tangible impacts on the framing and outcome of products.

5.3 Framing Products in Changing Contexts

The climate change policy landscape has changed considerably since the IPCC was founded in 1988. The exact nature of the connection between the IPCC and its policy context is much commented on and debated both within critical social science circles and the IPCC itself (e.g. Haas & Stevens, Reference Haas, Stevens, Lidskog and Sundqvist2011; Lidskog & Sundqvist, Reference Lidskog and Sundqvist2015). Yet the products of the IPCC have undoubtedly been shaped by this context. An example of this would be the early reorganisation of the WG structure (see Agrawala, Reference Agrawala1998b; Skodvin, Reference Skodvin2000b). In AR1, published in 1990, the job of assessing possible Response Strategies lay with WGIII. But with the establishment in 1991 of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) – the precursor to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – the task of dealing with policy responses was passed to this new political body. As Skodvin (Reference Skodvin2000b: 121) notes, ‘the establishment of a negotiating committee enabled the IPCC to reorganise itself, withdraw from the (explicit) advisory function and reformulate its task to a provision of assessments for all WGs’.

Following the Paris Agreement in 2015 and the end of the 5th Assessment Cycle (AR5), the IPCC was again subject to discussion over its future and the structure of its products. The bottom-up nature of the Paris Agreement based on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), in comparison to the top-down nature of the Kyoto Protocol, was identified as a reason for the need to reassess the nature of the IPCC’s products to better suit this new climate politics (Provost, Reference Provost2019). Many critical scholars argue that broad global assessments of climate are no longer politically relevant, and provide suggestions about how IPCC reports might evolve. These suggestions include dividing reports up into several diverse assessments (e.g. Beck et al., Reference Beck, Borie and Chilvers2014), producing shorter, more focused reports on specific topics and geographical contexts (Devès et al., Reference Devès, Lang, Bourrelier and Valérian2017), or engaging in more ex-post assessment of policies (Carraro et al., Reference Carraro, Edenhofer, Flachsland, Kolstad, Stavins and Stowe2015). Related to this, calls have been made for a ‘solutions turn’ in environmental assessments – assessments which, through collaborative processes, can evaluate the potential associated with different policy alternatives and their consequences (Kowarsch et al., Reference Kowarsch, Jabbour and Flaschland2017; see Chapter 21). This sentiment has also been recognised by the current IPCC Chairman, Hoesung Lee (see De Pryck & Wanneau, Reference De Pryck and Wanneau2017).

It is not always easy to assess the ways in which changes in policy expectations and in broader policy context shape the framing of IPCC reports. The periodic Assessment Reports provide comprehensive updates on the state of the science of climate change and of knowledge about socio-economic impacts, adaptation processes and mitigation options. Other reports, for example Methodological and Special Reports, are more closely connected to the policy discourse and focus on specific topics identified by the countries in Plenary.

Fogel (Reference Fogel2005) outlines how the commissioning by the Subsidiary Body for Science and Technology Advice (SBSTA) and preparation of the Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry in 2000 were directly linked to political debates on the provisions of biotic carbon sequestration in the Kyoto Protocol. This was a highly policy-relevant and politically sensitive report because its approval was in some ways used to help resolve a political debate over what different countries wanted to include in the Kyoto Protocol (see Box 16.2 in Chapter 16). Another more recent example is that of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15), requested in conjunction with the approval of the Paris Agreement in 2015 and published in 2018. The framing of SR15 around a specific temperature target, itself the result of protracted political discussions, revealed the complicated science–policy dynamics surrounding the preparation of IPCC reports, and Special Reports in particular (see Box 5.1 for more details). Methodology Reports are also key to the development and framing of NDCs, and are central to debates in current climate politics surrounding emissions inventories (see Dahan-Dalmedico, Reference Dahan-Dalmedico2008; Yona et al., Reference Yona, Cashore and Bradford2022).

These examples illustrate the tight connections IPCC reports maintain with the political realm and, in particular, with the UNFCCC. In addition, the IPCC also maintains its position as an authoritative body of climate change expertise through its connection to the scientific evidence base (van der Hel & Biermann, Reference van der Hel and Biermann2017). As debates surrounding the preparation of the Special Reports discussed previously show, this is not always a straightforward task. Fogel (Reference Fogel2005) outlines how discussions over the need to focus on ‘scientific and technical’ data over more cultural and socio-economic concerns in the Land Use Report from 2000 also influenced the types of literature assessed and the authors involved in the report preparation. Ultimately, this meant that the focus of the report was more on the technical definition of carbon sinks and involved experts with primarily physical science backgrounds. The SR15 report however is in line with calls for the IPCC to adopt a more solutions-orientated approach (Hulme, Reference Hulme2016). This has led to a reordering of the types of questions and framings within the IPCC itself (for example connecting the work of all three WGs), and the types of knowledge on which the assessment was based (see also Chapter 18).

The type of literature assessed for different IPCC reports to a large degree determines their nature. This is a question that has increasingly occupied IPCC discussions in more recent years in debates about representation between scientific disciplines. The IPCC bases its assessment on syntheses primarily of peer-reviewed literature published in academic journals (although it has in more recent years attempted to open up to a broader evidence base – see Chapter 13). Reliance on the underlying literature means that the IPCC is shaped by what literature is available at the time of writing, and by its framing and language. The structuring and sequencing of IPCC Assessment Reports – moving from WGI to WGIII – reflects a particular problem-solution framing which is largely based on the logic of natural science and a linear model of science to policy (see Beck, Reference Beck2011a).

In a study of AR3, Bjurström and Polk (Reference Bjurström and Polk2011) found a strong bias towards natural scientific and economic literature. This had implications for how the IPCC frames climate change, for example by placing humans outside nature. In a more recent study undertaken on AR5, Fløttum et al. (Reference Fløttum, Gasper and St. Clair2016) suggested that the language of the IPCC reports, while often chosen to ensure policy neutrality, did not successfully communicate the meaning of climate change to people and communities. One way to deal with these issues related to framing, suggested by many commentators, is for the IPCC to draw from a broader range of expertise and, in particular, to pay attention to the interpretative social sciences and humanities disciplines that have historically been absent from IPCC assessments (Carey et al., Reference Carey, James and Fuller2014). The reordering of expertise and of the kinds of questions being asked within research communities following the Paris Agreement may indeed herald a change in the way the IPCC assesses knowledge in the coming years.

5.4 Achievements and Challenges

The IPCC has been a highly productive institution during its 34-year history, and its reports are referenced in contexts as broad as the Fridays for Future movement, and in recent cases of climate litigation. This suggests that the ‘relevance’ of its reports extends far beyond the audiences envisaged by the IPCC itself. In addition, considerable media coverage surrounds their publication (O’Neill et al., Reference O’Neill, Williams and Kurz2015; see Chapter 26). The sheer number and reach of its publications can therefore be seen as a fundamental achievement. The so-called IPCC style of scientific assessment and process, which is tightly tied up with the production of reports, has been used as a model for other kinds of global environmental assessment, such as Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

However, the IPCC faces new challenges alongside the changing policy and scientific contexts within which it operates. Diversifying audiences and new social media suggest that new products, alongside the traditional IPCC report, may assume larger significance. These currently include IPCC FAQs and its Interactive Atlas (Lynn & Peeva, Reference Lynn and Peeva2021). This chapter has illustrated how the IPCC’s aim of producing reports that are policy relevant but never policy prescriptive forms a key part of both the preparation of reports, and their positioning in relation to broader political and scientific practice. Within the current political climate, continued strict adherence to the value-free ideal of science could limit the IPCC’s reach because growing numbers of voices call for more direct policy recommendations and messaging (Lynn & Peeva, Reference Lynn and Peeva2021). The IPCC’s reports have forged an authoritative role in today’s society, but to maintain this authority will require diversification and flexibility in the design of future IPCC reports and products.

Overview

This chapter discusses the performance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a ‘learning’ organisation. The Panel has responded to novel challenges by adjusting its governance structure and its underlying objectives and principles. Building on a heuristic of organisational learning, we reconstruct and map these past learning processes. We find that most of these challenges resulted in the IPCC adopting an adaptive mode of learning by incrementally adjusting procedures. There were only a few moments of reflexive learning. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses future challenges for the IPCC emerging from the Paris Agreement and the call for a ‘solution-oriented assessment’. The IPCC has faced demands in the past for greater political relevance, geopolitical representation, scientific integrity, transparency and accountability. In the post-Paris world, the Panel has to cope with its role in the polycentric architecture of the climate regime and its role as ‘mapmaker’ in the assessment of pathways to achieve the Paris ambition. We conclude by discussing how the IPCC can best use its learning capacities in responding to these challenges.

6.1 Introduction

Since the IPCC’s inception in 1988, the magnitude, scale and complexity of climate change research have grown significantly. This is true also of the IPCC’s assessment tasks and the public expectations of these assessments. In this chapter, we explore how the IPCC as an organisation learned to tackle the challenges of accommodating advances in scientific understanding and meeting the evolving needs of policymakers. We argue that the performance of the IPCC stands and falls according to its learning capacity. By this we mean its ability to evaluate its governance structures, to apply lessons learned from one assessment to the next, and to adjust its processes to address new needs (IAC, 2010). In order to reconstruct forms of organisational learning, we focus on the Panel’s governance and institutional arrangements which consist of its decision-making structures, principles, procedures and work programme. The chapter applies the concept of organisational learning in order to analyse past learning processes within the organisation. We assess whether the IPCC is fit to address novel challenges and to perform new assessment tasks. Against this historical backdrop, the chapter then discusses the challenges for the IPCC arising after the Paris Agreement, which prompts the question of whether the IPCC is still fit for function.

6.2 Forms of Organisational Learning

In this section we develop a heuristic for reconstructing different forms of organisational learning (Siebenhüner, Reference Siebenhüner2002) in order to distinguish between two forms of learning (see also Table 6.1):

• Adaptive learning responds to changes in the environment of an organisation and its externally determined functions. This form of learning leads to incremental adjustments and partial improvements, but it does not transform the organisation’s objectives, its conceptual frames and values, or its main practices. It allows for the optimisation and promotion of performance in a given target structure (Fiol & Lyles, Reference Fiol and Lyles1985; Schön & Argyris, Reference Schön and Argyris1996).

• Reflexive learning, by contrast, fundamentally changes the objectives, conceptual frames and value systems of an organisation. Wynne (Reference Wynne1993) and Beck et al. (Reference Beck, Giddens and Lash1994) draw upon the notion of ‘institutional reflexivity’, which they define as the organisation’s capacities and processes to continually evaluate the impacts of its objectives and actions in relation to their changing contexts, to critically examine (and thus render open to change) their own basic assumptions, and then to adjust them in the light of this newly acquired knowledge. In these so-called ‘constitutional moments’ (Jasanoff, Reference Jasanoff2011a), key design choices of how to govern an assessment are revisited and institutional arrangements reconfigured. These choices refer to questions such as who counts as a credible expert, what counts as relevant expertise and on what ground, and who is entitled to speak for the organisation (Beck, Reference Beck2012; Pallett & Chilvers, Reference Pallett and Chilvers2013; Borie et al., Reference Borie, Gustrafsson, Obermeister, Turnhour and Bridgewater2020). Reflexive learning includes responses to both internal and external developments in the socio-political context, reflecting the institution’s own role in the wider politics of global environmental change (Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a).

In order to evaluate the IPCC’s learning processes, we need to consider its nature as a hybrid organisation. The Panel performs both scientific and political tasks, includes rather different communities in science, politics and civil society, and needs to maintain credibility, trust and legitimacy to all. Situated at the interface between international science and politics, the IPCC has to maintain political relevance as well as scientific integrity in the face of intense political pressures (internal and external), tight deadlines and a continually evolving, multi-disciplinary scientific landscape. It has to reconcile political demands – salience, legitimacy, geopolitical representation – with the need for expert decision-making, such as integrity and the relative autonomy of scientific self-organisation. The hybrid nature of the Panel suggests that there is neither a single, exclusive criterion – such as political relevance – nor a single, linear path to evaluate its performance and learning capacity. Different forms of learning serve different functions/purposes and may have trade-offs and unintended consequences. Adaptive learning serves to maintain its political salience and robustness, while reflexive learning can be considered as a means to enact the organisation’s responsiveness, openness, innovation, transparency and accountability.

6.3 A Track Record of Adaptive Learning

A prominent site to observe organisational learning in action is the Plenary of the Panel, where governance structures and rules of procedures are adopted by the member states of the IPCC (see Chapter 3). There are plenary sessions that take place at the beginning and end of an assessment cycle in order to draw lessons from existing processes and incorporate these lessons into the new phase of assessment (Beck, Reference Beck2012; see Chapter 2). Figure 6.1 depicts the major events and significant changes in the history of the IPCC.

Figure 6.1 Major events and changes in the IPCC structure and processes.

Source: Authors

As several case studies indicate (Siebenhüner, Reference Siebenhüner2002, Reference Siebenhüner, Hey, Raulus, Arts and Ambrus2014; Beck, Reference Beck2012), the IPCC effectively improved its procedures to enhance its political salience and legitimacy, while maintaining its scientific standards. Over the period of its existence, the Panel has substantially revised procedures at least three times – in 1993, 1999 and 2010. Almost all the changes shown in Figure 6.1 qualify as adaptive learning, resulting in incremental changes, adjustments of the conceptual frames, and stepwise improvements of procedures. Examples include the establishment of an iterative review process for the draft assessment reports, embracing uncertainties by a system of levels of confidence, and the inclusion of cross-cutting themes such as costing methodologies and equity.

In response to the so-called ‘Chapter-8 debate’ in 1995 (see also Chapter 11), the Panel introduced radically new ways of addressing external criticisms, which differed remarkably from former forms of adaptive learning. The Chapter-8 debate indicated ‘a constitutional moment’, which resulted in a form of reflexive learning. In this debate, the IPCC faced a massive attack launched by some U.S. scientists alongside antagonistic media coverage. IPCC authors were accused of deliberately circumventing scientific review procedures and falsifying scientific results for political reasons. In contrast to former criticism, the charges focused on procedural aspects rather than on scientific findings themselves, questioning the legitimacy of the processes by which the report – and in particular the WGI Chapter 8 – had been produced.

In response to such attacks, in 1999 the IPCC began to revise and formalise its scientific quality-control procedures. These revisions indicated a constitutional moment because the IPCC turned, by itself, from a scientific to a legal mode of governance standardising its rules and procedures (Lahsen, Reference Lahsen and Marcus1999; Edwards & Schneider, Reference Clark, Mitchell, Cash, Mitchell, Clark, Cash and Dickson2001). Henceforth, the IPCC faced the challenge of reconciling forms of scientific self-organisation with these newly formalised legal modes of coordination. Although the formalising of procedures contributed towards greater coherence of governance structures – and therefore increased the political robustness of the organisation – these efforts constrained the flexibility of scientific processes, which form the backbone of the IPCC (Edwards & Schneider, Reference Clark, Mitchell, Cash, Mitchell, Clark, Cash and Dickson2001).

6.4 The Review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC)

The Panel’s public recognition increased significantly after it released its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007 and in the same it year received a share of the Nobel Peace Prize. But early in 2010, errors were discovered in the AR4 Report. Media coverage focused on the WGII analysis of the potential impacts of global warming, including a controversial statement that Himalayan glaciers might disappear by 2035. The revelation of these errors came shortly after another highly publicised controversy involving the unauthorised release of email exchanges between prominent climate scientists, many of whom had contributed to IPCC assessments (IAC, 2010: 59; Beck, Reference Beck2012).

Since its inception, the IPCC has evaluated its own management structure, scope, and the mandate of its Working Groups (WGs). This internal evaluation, conducted during the Panel’s plenary sessions, is a key part of its scoping process at the beginning of a new assessment cycle. In response to this vociferous public criticism in the early months of 2010, IPCC procedures were reviewed externally, however, by national and international agencies. In particular, the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an alliance of national scientific academies, published a prominent review in August 2010 focusing on the IPCC’s procedures and management structure (IAC, 2010). It identified shortcomings in terms of transparency surrounding the selection of authors, reviewers, and scientific and technical information for assessment reports, a general reluctance to make data publicly available, and the absence of a comprehensive communication strategy. The IAC final report rejected the accusation of deliberate manipulation by authors and highlighted that all of the most prominent statements contained in the IPCC reports were correct. It also noted that there was a mismatch between the growing complexity of the tasks facing the IPCC and its available capacities and management structures. The IAC concluded that the Panel was no longer able to cope adequately with the challenges it faced (IAC, 2010: 6), and fundamental changes to the process and management structure were essential to ensure its continued success (IAC, 2010: 63; Tollefson, Reference Tollefson2010).

In October 2010, the IPCC initiated steps to implement the IAC recommendations; however, the organisation remained in an adaptive-learning mode. The negotiations over IPCC reform focused on adjusting specific procedures, from the selection of authors and review procedures to the way errors were dealt with in published assessment reports. The resulting revisions of rules of procedures were adopted by the Plenary of the Panel in 2011 (IPCC, 2011). The IPCC’s responses showed that the same mechanisms that served to maintain its political authority (such as its intergovernmental status, the governmental approval mechanism and consensus-based procedures) contributed to closing down the range of reform options. This finally resulted in a ‘lowest common denominator’ acceptable to all parties involved. This incremental reform solely targeted scientific quality by rendering procedures more transparent for the scientists and nation state representatives already involved (IPCC, 2011). At the same time, the IPCC did not address demands for public transparency and accountability (IAC, 2010), for example by opening up the assessment processes in its WGs to broader audiences, such as the UN, IPCC observer organisations, non-governmental organisations or the wider public, and it did not introduce a public disclosure mechanism. The reform efforts thus merely focused on incremental revisions and contributed to stabilising its core principles and arrangements and consolidated its fit within the wider climate regime. Even invited by the IAC to rethink its process and management structure and fundamentally change them, the IPCC adapted in an incremental way and missed this opportunity for catalysing reflexive learning.

6.5 The Demand for Solutions: Calls for Reflexive Learning

The Paris Agreement in 2015 represented a major change in the climate regime. Climate politics were no longer about raising awareness about global warming, but about shaping the solutions to achieve politically adopted temperature targets. National governments in countries such as Germany and Sweden were additionally held accountable by social movements such as the Fridays for Future, which drew substantial strength from its reading of IPCC reports. More recently, government initiatives have been launched, such as the European Union Green New Deal and the Biden administration’s climate plan. This changing political context raises novel challenges for the IPCC.

First, the IPCC has to adapt to the polycentric political architecture of the Paris Agreement and become more responsive to the needs of state and non-state actors at different levels of decision-making (Beck & Mahony, Reference Beck and Mahony2018a). There are broader questions to be asked: Should the ‘audience’ and ‘owners’ of IPCC assessments continue to just be nation-state parties? Should the IPCC be more directly accountable to a broader set of actors, such as local and regional authorities, civil-society groups and private companies? It also raises questions about the spatial scale at which a solution-oriented global assessment fits local decision-makers’ needs on the ground.

Second, there is a growing political demand for the IPCC to assess solutions for meeting the ambition of the Paris Agreement. The IPCC WGIII responded by developing a ‘mapmaker strategy’ (Edenhofer & Kowarsch, Reference Edenhofer and Kowarsch2015; IPCC, Reference Edenhofer, Pichs-Madrugada and Sokona2015a). Following the mapmaker metaphor, the WG provided a comprehensive assessment of pathways to achieve politically adopted temperature goals. It is an open and contested question whether a solution-oriented assessment is consistent with the IPCC’s mandate to be policy neutral, or whether this mandate needs updating (see Chapter 21).

Third, for achieving politically adopted temperature targets the Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM) community, which provides input to the IPCC, introduced ‘negative emissions technologies’ (NETs) as a backstop strategy to meet temperature targets. IPCC reports have presented large-scale use of NETs as necessary or inevitable for reaching the goals formulated in the Paris Agreement (IPCC, Reference Masson-Delmotte, Zhai and Pörtner2018a). Policy options based on behavioural change and societal transformations, rather than on technologies, are left out of IPCC assessments because they cannot be easily scaled up and aggregated into the IAMs to the level required to meet the temperature targets (see Chapter 15). As a consequence, the IPCC tends to narrow the climate solution space to technological pathways that are deemed feasible by economic models designed to optimise global economic growth. The large-scale deployment of NETs has become a fully-fledged policy option under consideration by powerful actors, even if these technologies are not available in the real world at the scale or scope projected by the IAMs.

The influential role of IAMs with respect to IPCC assessment and policy processes has drawn attention and scrutiny to the practices of this modelling community (Pielke, Reference Pielke2018). As a response to this scrutiny, the modelling community and the IPCC have taken steps to open up the black box of IAMs (Skea et al., Reference Skea, Shukla, Al Khourdajie and McCollum2021), but only in an incremental way. Critics, however, point to the lack of public transparency and accountability, from early energy models in the 1990s through to the most recent generation of IAMs and the pathways assessed by the IPCC (Wynne, Reference Wynne1984; Anderson, Reference Anderson2015). As a consequence, key methodological decisions – addressing issues such as emission pathway characteristics, temperature overshoot, the balance of mitigation action in the near-and long-term, remaining carbon budgets, the role of carbon dioxide removal, and the choice of discount rates applied to future technologies – have not been treated as legitimate objects of political debate or public scrutiny despite having major governance implications (Robertson, Reference Robertson2021).

These novel challenges emerging in the post-Paris context indicate that the relationship between climate science and policy can be seen as undergoing a fundamental transformation (see Chapter 21). The challenges call for reflecting on and rethinking the Panel’s mandate and its embeddedness in the climate regime if future expectations for the IPCC are to be met. This constitutes an opportunity – and, we would state, a necessity – for reflexive learning leading to substantial changes in the IPCC’s governance and procedures.

6.6 Achievements and Challenges

One of the major achievements of the IPCC is that it has already made significant progress in organisational learning. To its credit, the IPCC has shown that it is a flexible and adaptive organisation. Our reconstruction presented in this chapter indicates that the IPCC has mainly learned in an adaptive mode; there are only a few moments where it has chosen reflexive forms of learning. In the past, the Panel responded to novel challenges by incrementally adjusting its internal management structure, as well as its assessment and review processes. Since the IPCC’s inception, however, its governance structure has remained remarkably stable. The IPCC’s incremental learning efforts contributed to maintaining and stabilising its institutional arrangements, rather than making it open to change.

External evaluations – such as the IAC report in 2010 – encouraged the IPCC to explore structural transformations in order to address the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of climate change research and new demands for increased transparency and accountability. The external evaluation by the IAC, for example, can be seen as a constitutional moment where the assessment frameworks, the Panel’s mandate, as well as its internal institutional arrangements, were critically evaluated and opened to the possibility of change. The IPCC, however, missed this opportunity. It decided in favour of forms of adaptive learning in order to maintain its political authority. These forms have been, in several cases, counterproductive to other goals of the organisation, by making it more legalistic in its processes. This has made it harder for the IPCC to manoeuvre and be as innovative and responsive as some other large-scale international science assessments.

The NETs example, illustrates one of the consequences of pursuing only adaptive learning, namely the IPCC’s lack of public transparency and accountability. The IPCC assessed a set of unproven carbon dioxide removal technologies as technically feasible, based on a narrow set of criteria and linear, techno-optimistic assumptions about technological change and economic growth. Even though these technologies deployed at a large-scale, as recommended by the IPCC, would have major governance implications, they have not been treated as a matter of political choice and public scrutiny.

Our findings give reason to question whether the path of adaptive learning taken in the past will be adequate to cope with future challenges. It is fair to assume that the IPCC’s future performance will depend on how the Panel adjusts its management structure to meet demands for relevance, transparency and accountability regarding those peoples most affected by climate policies. This would require forms of reflexive learning. However, reflexive forms of learning challenge – and potentially change – core elements of the Panel’s governance, which partly explains why they face resistance and are hard to implement. The response to the IAC review in 2010 illustrates that the decision-making authority of nation states in the Plenary – along with consensus-based procedures – contributed to closing down the range of reform options. It excluded consideration of alternatives to the IPCC’s institutionalised governance structure and procedures, alternatives that could have enabled greater public transparency and accountability (IAC, 2010; Robertson, Reference Robertson2021).

The turn towards assessing solutions comes with challenges to cope with a diversity of problem and solution frames and the involvement of a broader range of experts and forms of knowledge (Castree et al., Reference Castree, Bellamy and Osaka2021). These novel challenges require rethinking the mandate of the IPCC. But they also call for rethinking the Panel’s role and responsibility in the climate regime and respective broader questions of scale, representation and subsidiarity. This novel situation into which the IPCC is moving represents a stress test for the IPCC’s capacities to learn. In order to address these challenges – and to seize new opportunities – modes of reflexive learning will be even more necessary. Yet in the current structure they will be harder to implement.