Abstract
How can a diversity of perspectives be accommodated in scientific and political consensus on environmental issues? This paper adopts a science and technology studies (STS) approach to examine how the pursuit of consensus-based knowledge and diverse participation, as seemingly contradictory commitments, have been converted into practice in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Through a series of negotiations, these commitments have been translated into a set of situated practices that now dominate this expert panel. Consensus has been achieved through the pursuit of closure, in which meetings of expert and administrator groups produce texts, tables and images that stabilise ostensibly collective decisions. Within this framework, diverse perspectives have been accommodated through the production of typologies, such as lists of comparable options, which allow for the coexistence and commensurability of a range of knowledges and experts. However there is a politics to typologies, which requires specific attention to how decisions are made (deliberation), who participates in them (participation), and the extent to which these participants are representative of broader knowledge and policy communities (representation). While the potential of typologies to accommodate consensus and diversity offers the hope of realising ‘unity in diversity’ for both environmental knowledge and policy, recognising the politics of their production is important for more equitable processes of environmental governance.
Highlights
In environmental governance, there is a growing tension between the pursuit of scientific and political consensus, and the recognised need to open up governance processes to diverse participants and worldviews
This paper examines the case of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which is an international expert panel for
In Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the pursuit of closure became a collective venture that was underpinned by a lively operational discourse: consensus was described as a problem to be ‘solved’; expert groups were given ‘marching orders’; ‘time-bound’ activities were delegated to ‘task forces’; and the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel was ‘mandated’ to complete ‘work programme deliverables’
Summary
There is a growing tension between the pursuit of scientific and political consensus, and the recognised need to open up governance processes to diverse participants and worldviews. The need to account for the rights and agency of indigenous peoples and local communities, which had been raised in the Convention on Biological Diversity (see for example, Reimerson, 2013), prefigured new approaches to knowledge production (Turnhout et al, 2012) These emergent perspectives were by no means universally held amongst the architects of IPBES, but were none the less integral to a call for greater inclusivity, in which a wider group of voices were to be welcomed into the process. To examine how the pursuit of consensus and diversity were converted into practice in the case of IPBES, this paper draws on theoretical and methodological approaches from science and technology studies (STS) This field of scholarship has drawn attention to how science shapes, and is shaped by, the settings in which it is produced (Jasanoff, 2004). When inclusion in a typology is dependent on being involved in their negotiation, the questions of who participates and how in environmental knowledge production becomes increasingly important
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