Relevant But Not Prescriptive

Abstract

Founded by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is engaged in a unique scientific assessment process. Not only is the IPCC explicitly tied to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as its policy audience, but it also incorporates political delegations from the UNFCCC into its internal assessment structure. Over the course of producing three multi-year assessment reports between 1988 and 2002, the IPCC has developed several innovative approaches to the science-policy interface, including the production of a summary for policymakers (SPM) and the use of policy relevant scientific questions (PRSQ) to structure the final Synthesis Report in the 2001 assessment. These are intended to facilitate interaction between science and policy communities and thus contribute to situating the IPCC scientific assessment process within an intergovernmental framework. However, over the past decade, the sciencepolicy nexus internal to the IPCC has sparked significant controversy and criticism with regard to the credibility of IPCC interpretations and products. The purpose of this paper is to examine these two innovations with respect to the way the interaction between science and policy is managed, in the expectation that such an analysis might shed light on what may be fruitful ways to think about the role and status of scientific information used for policy purposes and how the scientific and political communities can operate together to produce information that remains credible to both communities. The IPCC as a Science Policy Forum The creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 constituted a watershed in the scale and scope of international science assessment. Since then, the IPCC has issued three Assessment Reports (1991, 1996, and 2001) each consisting of three volumes, amounting to thousands of pages, and involving the participation of thousands of experts around the world as authors and reviewers in the assessment process. The three volumes of the 2001 Third Assessment Report, and the Synthesis Report, have been published by Cambridge University Press, under the title Climate Change 2001. (The full text of each report and the various special reports can be found on the IPCC website at www.ipcc.ch.) The mandate of the IPCC has been to produce "policy relevant" but not "policy prescriptive" assessments of the science of climate change, including physical, technical, and social scientific knowledge. The existence and development of the IPCC in its three iterations since 1988 provides a powerful case study of the way science has been used in support of the policy process. While much work has been conducted on substantive climate research and its use (Schneider, 1989; Shackley and Wynne, 1995, and 1996; Shackley et al., 1998; van der Sluijs et al., 1998; Sarewitz and Pielke Jr., 2000) little analysis has been done on what constitutes "policy relevant scientific information," the processes that create it, and the implications of this overarching type of mandate for understanding science in the international policy sphere. The role that science has played in society has been influential and dominant in social and institutional decision-making structures (Gieryn, 1999; Jasanoff, 1990, and 1991; Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998), due to the prevalence of what might be called a "truth speaks to power" view of the science-policy relationship. Public issues regarded as controversial or problematic in politics are often put into what is perceived as the objective and rational hands of scientists and scientific inquiry. Indeed the phrase "truth speaks to power" was coined (by Price, 1965) to indicate unidirectional flow of information from the autonomous scientific community or "truth" through to the political or "power" communities. However, in scientific disputes "a fundamental dichotomy [exists] between the potential dispute resolution objectives of 'truth' and 'justice'" (Salter, 1988). …