The global market of ideas: Which climate knowledge do IFIs disseminate?

Environmental policymaking is a highly complex field with actors operating at multiple levels of analysis and with ideas presenting different trade-offs for communities and individuals. As the window of opportunity to stop, mitigate, and/or adapt to climate change is closing down, scientists and climate activists are struggling to understand why their message fails to get through to policymakers. There are three possible reasons: 1) climate information is too complex for policymakers to implement; 2) the wrong kind of information is conveyed to policymakers; or 3) policymakers have all the information they need, but they are short sided. This paper contributes to the investigation of the first two of these premises. Information provision constitutes one of the basic functions of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). With their vast capabilities, IGOs can play the role of knowledge hubs filtering and channeling climate knowledge from various sources to member states. Naturally, IGOs with environmental policy mandates (i.e. UNEP, UNFCCC, IPCC) should be the foremost knowledge hubs for policymakers. Do other IGOs repeat and convey their messages to policymakers? Which climate knowledge do they disseminate? This paper examines the climate message of international financial institutions (IFIs) whose economic mandates may come to contradict scientific climate policy recommendations. We compare the most widely circulated publications of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in terms of their sources and content: World Development Report (WDR) and the World Economic Outlook (WEO). We use bibliometric and content analysis to investigate the differences and similarities between the two IFIs’ climate discourses. Our preliminary analysis shows that both organizations have increased their coverage of the issue since the 2010s and draw information primarily from western mainstream journals of economics. The WB’s WDR has a wider citational range across disciplines than the IMF’s WEO. On the other hand, the IMF report cites IPCC and the UNEP documents more than the WB does. We argue that despite these subtle differences both IFIs have so far implemented discriminatory knowledge dissemination practices.