The Politics of Global Environmental Expertise: The Case of the IPCC and IPBES

We explore the epistemic and political authority of international expert bodies and the democratic challenges they pose by focusing on the role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in global governance. Even if both boundary organizations claim to be neutral and non-prescriptive and they are granted any formal authority, they act as a powerful ‘non-state’ players in global governance. We will demonstrate that global environmental assessments such as the IPCC and IPBES have turned as important sites of co-production, where knowledge about the natural world is made within, and reinforces, visions of social needs and responses. Additionally, we draw attention to their performance and performativity in global governance. Finally, we argue that it is time to rethink the future role of IPCC and IPBES to discover novel forms of epistemic subsidiarity in time when UN multilateralism has lost momentum.