Intergovernmental Expert Organizations as pre-negotiation sites. The case of the IPCC

The literature on intergovernmental expert organizations (IPCC, IPBES, etc.) have shown that they often serve as sites of negotiations (Hughes and Vadrot (2019). There is now growing evidence that the most controversial objects in the IPCC approval process are those that relate to or have the potential to relate to negotiations within the UNFCCC, or that are simply (geo)politically ‘unacceptable’. As a result, tables, boxes and new scientific terms are often removed, made ambiguous or tightly defined in the text, which makes it increasingly difficult to introduce new scientific elements or challenge existing approaches that could contribute to the negotiations of climate change. Examples include emission reduction targets or budgets (Lahn and Sundqvist 2017; Lahn 2020), categorization of countries (Victor et al. 2014), ex post assessment of climate policies (Carraro et al. 2017) and legal terms bound to other international regimes (e.g. global commons). All of these triggered significant controversies in the IPCC, to the point of leading to self-censorship by authors in following assessment cycles. In this paper, we look at the social construction of controversial concepts, tables and boxes, at the (geo)political and legal interpretations that are derived from them, as well as at the governments/coalition of governments that condemn them to draw patterns of divisiveness. In this paper, we review the existing literature that examined the IPCC as a pre-negotiation site and offer an in-depth empirically analysis of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) process and its implications for the UNFCCC process. It is based on document analysis, observation of IPCC and UNFCCC meetings and interviews. We offer a typology of ‘weighted concepts’ according to their potential to modify the balance of power in the UNFCCC – through incremental or structural ruptures.