The Politics of Institutionalizing International Science-Policy Interfaces. The Case of Climate Change

The international science-policy interface on climate change is often presented as a success story. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces regular assessments of the knowledge on climate change, its impacts and solutions, is seen as a key knowledge provider to the UN Framework-Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The IPCC in particular provides guidance on the definition of the Convention’s Long-Term Global Goal (LTGG), agreed by all the Parties at COP16 in Cancun in 2010. The IPCC, however, despite its close connection to the UNFCCC, formally remains an independent institution and lacks any ‘official channel’ to provide inputs into the negotiations. IPCC reports are discussed on an ad hoc basis by the UNFCCC’s Subsidiary Body of Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and conflicts often arose about the role that they should have in the UNFCCC decision-making processes – in 2018, several countries opposed ‘welcoming’ the IPCC Special Report of Global Warming of 1.5° C (SR15), instead arguing that SBSTA should only ‘take note’ of it. To strengthen its science-policy interface, the UNFCCC established a Structured Expert Dialogue (SED) to ensure the ‘scientific integrity’ of the UNFCCC periodic review – a mechanism seeking to periodically review the adequacy of the LTGG. While a UNFCCC mechanism, the SED faces similar challenges than the IPCC in communicating the latest scientific information to UNFCCC diplomats. This paper reviews both the formal and informal processes through which scientific information is presented in the UNFCCC. First, it provides a historical perspective on more than 30 years of collaboration and competition between the IPCC and the UNFCCC. Second, it analyzes the opportunities and challenges that the establishment of the SED represents for a renewed science-policy dialogue. In particular, we compare the two SEDs which ran respectively from 2013 to 2015 and from 2020 to 2022 under the 1st and 2nd periodic review processes of the LTGG of the UNFCCC and will open on the ongoing discussion on the new Technical Dialogue set for the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement. The objective of the paper is to theorize on the multiple and messy ways in which science-policy interfaces are intertwined and institutionalized in global governance, and their limits. It is based on UNFCCC and IPCC online archives, online session analyses, participant observations in both institutions and Conferences of the Parties (COPs), as well as semi-structured interviews.