Patterns of authorship in the Global Environmental Outlook

Global environmental assessments, like the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) or the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO), seek to provide governments with a sound knowledge base they can use to develop policies that tackle environmental problems. However, recent studies have identified discriminatory practices regarding the participation of diverse authors and knowledge types in the IPCC and in the IPES. So far, empirical evidence on the GEO, that is published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and which seeks to provide an “independent assessment of the state of the environment” is still missing. While the 2022 resolution on the GEO emphasizes that the nomination and selection of experts as well as the assessments of the state of knowledge are based on gender, disciplinary and geographically balanced processes, we know very little about actual knowledge practices in the GEO. This paper therefore responds to calls for a more nuanced approach to the study of practices in global environmental assessments. We explore the expert network informing the GEO reports over the last two decades, i.e., since the GEO-3 report, that informed the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. Identifying authors’ institutional affiliation and gender, we study the extent of inequalities in the authorship and dominating perspectives of the reports, and how it has changed over time. Drawing on recent findings from the IPCC and IPBES, we hypothesize that expert networks follow regional and gender patterns forming different and oftentimes overlapping - intersectional - minority groups. Based on our findings, we discuss the changing nature of UNEP with greater inclusion of scientific expertise and reflect on selection processes in global sustainability knowledge networks in general.