IPBES and Biodiversity Expertise: Regional, Gender, and Disciplinary Balance in the Composition of the Interim and 2015 Multidisciplinary Expert Panel

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/conl.12192The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an expert institution set to transform the governance of biodiversity and ecosystem services. IPBES expands on previous initiatives and positions itself as a knowledge-policy interface open to different ways of knowing biodiversity. In this contribution, we analyse how the principles of regional, gender and disciplinary balance that were adopted by IPBES have been applied to the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP): the body of experts responsible for the scientific and technical function of IPBES and embedded in its knowledge-making practices. In doing so, we compare the selection of the interim MEP in 2013 with the new MEP in 2015 and find a small improvement in gender and disciplinary balance that varies across the United Nations regional groupings. According to the ambition of IPBES there is significant room for improvement, but ‘opening-up’ expertise in an intergovernmental setting proves challenging.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK [Montana, PhD Studentship Award] and the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences, UK [Borie, PhD Studentship Award]

The Whole of Culture Approach: A Research Agenda to Support Transition From Risk Management to Risk Sensitive Development

Managing disaster risk is about a good deal more than disaster risk management. Risk and loss arise from the accumulated legacy of decision-making and decision-making contexts that enmesh the environmental, technological and human to go far beyond the purview of risk managers, humanitarian agencies and first responders. How then to orient disasters research to better open development processes and attendant governance as central components for risk reduction? The whole of culture approach offers one response to this challenge. Influence over disaster risk and loss outcomes is shaped by the intersection of individual decision-making processes with informal and formal norms, organisational structures and tools. Human behaviour as part of development does not have a linear association with policy, norms or capacity but brings multiple, often hidden and open-ended, interactions between identity, behaviour, framing systems of legislation and social norms cross-cut by knowledge. Knowledge is always contested and contextual. Science methodologies attempt to make their social framing and underlying assumptions transparent, but are not always successful in communicating these. Once in the public domain even the most transparent and careful science products become part of a knowledge ecosystem including local knowledge, personal experience, social media and the vested communications of government, civil society and private sector interests (Nalau et al 2018). We argue that amongst this complexity, knowledge production, control, interpretation and use offers a key to understanding action within development that influences risk. This view holds for individuals at risk and also for planners, investors, managers and politicians holding influential decision-making positions. The perspective offered derives from contemporary work on social theory including assemblage theory and science and technology studies and from methodological experience, especially in coproduction, interdisciplinarity and action research. The whole of culture approach is proposed not only because of recent innovations but also in response to a renewed sense of urgency around the need for joined up action on the root causes of risk. Risk root causes are embedded in ongoing and everyday development vision and actions, yet risk management finds it difficult to be a central concern for development actors. This is a longstanding challenge. In 1983, James Hewitt observed that disaster risk management was an archipelago to development – connected but at the same time held at distance, informing but marginal to development vision and outcomes. This characterisation of a disaster risk science and management toolkit somehow removed from the levers of decision-making continues today. Lewis and Kelman (2007) capture the current concern by calling for an extension in the focus of risk reduction to confront also risk creation – the knowing or accidental creation of vulnerability and hazard exposure through development decisions from the household to the international. This concern is heightened as processes of globalisation and interdependent infrastructure systems (including those of the informal sector) mean that risk and loss can cascade across places with impacts moving across sectors (UNDRR 2013). Already heightened by the observed effects of climate change as an impact multiplier on development failure, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this concern. The impacts of COVID-19 and management responses have demonstrated how many of the root causes of vulnerability to natural hazards (overcrowded dwellings, inadequate access to clean water, limited primary health care, educational inequality, social marginalisation, exposure to violence, distrust of official agencies) are made worse by the predominant economic and social structures at the heart of development. These inequalities have long been recorded, the association with disaster risk long known, but development practice has been consistently ineffective in taking action. The paper first accounts for the ways in which culture has been brought into risk and disaster studies and then describes the long-standing desire from researchers and practitioners to better understand and act on risk creation as a development, not a risk management concern. The whole of culture approach is built from innovation across assemblage thinking, science and technology studies, interdisciplinarity and coproduction which are presented and then summarised before being applied to an urban research programme to test the relevance of the approach

Towards a reflexive turn in the governance of global environmental expertise the cases of the IPCC and the IPBES

The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise as a matter of political contestation

Building back better from COVID-19: Knowledge, emergence and social contracts.

COVID-19 recovery is an opportunity to enhance life chances by Building Back Better, an objective promoted by the UN and deployed politically at national level. To help understand emergent and intentional opportunities to Build Back Better, we propose a research agenda drawing from geographical thinking on social contracts, assemblage theory and the politics of knowledge. This points research towards the ways in which everyday and professional knowledge cocreation constrains vision and action. Whose knowledge is legitimate, how legitimacy is ascribed and the place of science, the media and government in these processes become sites for progressive Building Back Better.ER

An agenda for ethics and justice in adaptation to climate change

As experts predict that at least some irreversible climate change will occur with potentially disastrous effects on the lives and well-being of vulnerable communities around the world, it is paramount to ensure that these communities are resilient and have adaptive capacity to withstand the consequences. Adaptation and resilience planning present several ethical issues that need to be resolved if we are to achieve successful adaptation and resilience to climate change, taking into consideration vulnerabilities and inequalities in terms of power, income, gender, age, sexuality, race, culture, religion, and spatiality. Sustainable adaptation and resilience planning that addresses these ethical issues requires interdisciplinary dialogues between the natural sciences, social sciences, and philosophy, in order to integrate empirical insights on socioeconomic inequality and climate vulnerability with ethical analysis of the underlying causes and consequences of injustice in adaptation and resilience. In this paper, we set out an interdisciplinary research agenda for the inclusion of ethics and justice theories in adaptation and resilience planning, particularly into the Sixth Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6). We present six core discussions that we believe should be an integral part of these interdisciplinary dialogues on adaptation and resilience as part of IPCC AR6, especially Chapters 2 (“Terrestial and freshwater ecosystems and their services”), 6 (“Cities, settlements and key infrastructure”), 7 (“Health, wellbeing and the changing structure of communities”), 8 (“Poverty, livelihoods and sustainable development”), 16 “Key risks across sectors and regions”), 17 (“Decision-making options for managing risk”), and 18 (“Climate resilient development pathways”).: (i) Where does ‘justice’ feature in resilience and adaptation planning and what does it require in that regard?; (ii) How can it be ensured that adaptation and resilience strategies protect and take into consideration and represent the interest of the most vulnerable women and men, and communities?; (iii) How can different forms of knowledge be integrated within adaptation and resilience planning?; (iv) What trade-offs need to be made when focusing on resilience and adaptation and how can they be resolved?; (v) What roles and responsibilities do different actors have to build resilience and achieve adaptation?; (vi) Finally, what does the focus on ethics imply for the practice of adaptation and resilience planning

Between Everywhere and Nowhere: the Challenges of Placing the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem services

Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) have become influential processes in environmental governance, with the objective to gather policy-relevant knowledge on environmental issues for decision-makers. This thesis offers the first ethnographic account of the nascent Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) which, in contrast to earlier GEAs, aims to implement an inclusive model of expertise. Underlying this move are concerns regarding both the effectiveness of GEAs and their democratization. GEAs have also faced numerous criticisms for being dominated by the global North and for failing to consider the diversity of ways of making sense of global environmental change. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and on the emerging literature on geographies of science, I view science and policy as being mutually entangled, rather than as two separate domains, and conceptualise GEAs as sites of co-production. It is important therefore to study how categories such as ‘science’, ‘policy’, ‘local’ and ‘global’ are produced and to investigate the practices and places through which knowledge is constructed as policy-relevant. I argue that, despite the aspiration to be global institutions that transcend specific national and cultural contexts and interests, GEAs themselves are situated initiatives which produce a ‘view from somewhere’. Using qualitative methods, I examine three processes within IPBES: (1) the choice of location for its Secretariat; (2) the development of its conceptual framework; and (3) the constitution of the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel. Results confirm that IPBES presents a number of innovative features but also reveal significant ambiguities as to whether IPBES is actually ‘opening-up’ its frame of reference and embracing multiple forms of knowledges and expertise. While IPBES aspires to provide the inclusive ‘view from everywhere’, the narrative of science as providing the disinterested ‘view from nowhere’ and the interest-riven context in which it operates undermines its ambitions

The politics of expertise in building back better: Contrasting the coproduction of reconstruction post-Irma in the Dutch and French Caribbean

Reconstruction processes in post-disaster contexts are both technical and political. In the face of growing losses from disasters to human development, we question how the call to Build Back Better (BBB) is rendered authoritative in different governance settings through the mobilisation of expertise and knowledge. Bringing the idea of knowledge co-production from Science and Technology Studies into critical studies of post-disaster politics, we contrast the politics of expertise emergent after Hurricane Irma in French St Martin and Dutch St Maarten. Although they share a common geography, reconstruction processes unfolded very differently across these two island settings. Governance arrangements contributed to the delineation of different ‘recovery spaces’, i.e. the actors, their resources, relationships and visions as constituted by and through different forms of post-disaster knowledge and expertise. Comparative analysis of these spaces shows how highly differential knowledge outcomes emerged out of common processes on both sides of crafting multiple forms of political legitimacy in order to undertake reconstruction activities. Through the notion of interactional coproduction we illustrate how such processes both drew on established historical repertoires as well as containing co-evolution, which cautions against deterministic views of the relationship between reconstruction actors, their interests, and knowledge claims. Mobilising the contrast between two differing governance regimes that nevertheless share common histories of colonial and post-colonial development as well as environmental hazard, we argue that knowledge coproduction needs to be understood in order to take advantage of the emergence in post-disaster policy regimes of possibilities for progressive transformation, but that these are ambiguous and contingent moments in which expertise becomes a flexible political resource through which to both delimit and enable Building Back Better