The legitimacy of the UNFCCC: Rethinking the relationship between climate science, non-epistemic values and democracy

Addressing global problems such as climate change requires important international collaboration. The United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was created with the aim to organize international response to climate change. However, it is not clear when the UNFCCC, as an international institution, enjoys the necessary legitimacy to demand compliance from its member states. Initially, one might think that such an institution derives its legitimacy from the epistemic authority of well-established climate science. This view would be in alignment with a belief-based account of the grounds of political legitimacy. However, the ubiquity of non-epistemic values in climate science undermines grounding the UNFCCC legitimacy purely on a belief-based account. Thus, an alternative source of legitimacy needs to be found. In this paper, we argue that an adequacy-for-purpose framework can partly explain the UNFCCC’s legitimacy in the presence of non-epistemic values in climate science. However, the uses of non-epistemic values in climate science also means that we need to rethink the relationship between science and politics for the legitimacy of political institutions and political climate institutions, such as the UNFCCC in particular.