Beyond ‘Best Available Science’?: Comparing the Paris Agreements Global Stocktake with COP30s Global Ethical Stocktake

Global environmental governance increasingly relies on large-scale review mechanisms to assess collective progress and steer policy. Yet these mechanisms often reproduce technocratic logics that privilege positivist, quantifiable forms of knowledge while sidelining experiential, ethical, and place-based understandings of socio-ecological realities. This paper interrogates these politics of knowledge through a comparative analysis of two emerging review mechanisms within the UN climate regime: the Global Stocktake (GST) of the Paris Agreement and the Global Ethical Stocktake (GES) initiated by the COP 30 Presidency. Grounded in Science and Technology Studies, political ecology, and postcolonial theory, the study conceptualises review mechanisms as co-production arenas where knowledge and authority are jointly constructed. While the GST is institutionally anchored in the “best available science”, the GES explicitly expands the epistemic boundaries of climate governance by involving philosophers, Indigenous leaders, artists, and civil-society actors in ethical reflection on climate responsibility. Drawing on collaborative event ethnography and interviews conducted during COP 30, the paper analyses how each mechanism defines legitimate knowledge, who is authorised to speak, and how epistemic diversity is institutionalised—or constrained. Initial findings show that although the GES offers a powerful counterpoint to technocratic governance, its integration into formal decision-making remains limited, raising questions about how plural epistemologies can meaningfully reshape global climate assessments. The paper contributes to broader debates on how power relations structure knowledge inclusion in conservation and climate governance, and what it would take to move beyond technocratic review systems toward more pluralistic and just knowledge practices.