Assessing the Nexus Between Authorship Diversity and Knowledge Representation in Global Environmental Assessments

Global environmental assessments (GEA) have been established to provide governments with a sound knowledge base they can use to develop policies that tackle environmental problems. To fulfill their mandate, international secretariats of these GEA have set diversity objectives and implemented new regulation to ensure 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. Following a constructivist approach, diversity in authorship is considered to contribute to comprehensive knowledge in the GEA. Yet, the direct link between the diversity of participating authors and the balanced assessment of relevant knowledge types is not self-evident. Taking the contested interrelationship between authorship and scientific content of GEA as a starting point, we study the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO), which is one of the main global environmental assessments organized by the United Nations Environmental Programme that not only shapes the science-policy interface in environmental governance but also the work of environmental scholars. We focus on the GEO reports published over the last two decades, analyzing these reports through content and bibliometric analyses by using the MAXQDA 2020 software package. In doing so, we provide a meta-analysis of the information provided by the GEO reports over time. In a second step, we contextualize these findings with authorship data to shed light on the authorship-content connection and to identify knowledge gaps. Herby, we respond to calls for a more nuanced approach to the study of practices in GEA.