英文摘要: | The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has completed its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Here, we explore the social scientific networks informing Working Group III (WGIII) assessment of mitigation for the AR5. Identifying authors’ institutional pathways, we highlight the persistence and extent of North–South inequalities in the authorship of the report, revealing the dominance of US and UK institutions as training sites for WGIII authors. Examining patterns of co-authorship between WGIII authors, we identify the unevenness in co-authoring relations, with a small number of authors co-writing regularly and indicative of an epistemic community’s influence over the IPCC’s definition of mitigation. These co-authoring networks follow regional patterns, with significant EU–BRICS collaboration and authors from the US relatively insular. From a disciplinary perspective, economists, engineers, physicists and natural scientists remain central to the process, with insignificant participation of scholars from the humanities. The shared training and career paths made apparent through our analysis suggest that the idea that broader geographic participation may lead to a wider range of viewpoints and cultural understandings of climate change mitigation may not be as sound as previously thought.
The IPCC is widely accepted as the authoritative voice of scientific knowledge on climate change. However, what is often missing in the popular depiction of the IPCC as a scientific collaborative endeavour is a reflection on the array of social processes involved in its assessments. Thus, alongside the institutionalized scientific practices for writing, reviewing and revising the reports, there are social processes and scientific conventions for selecting authors and recognizing authoritative knowledge. These social conventions privilege certain institutional affiliations and pre-existing patterns of scientific collaboration and are tightly coupled with economic resources and political power. Twenty years of social science research into the IPCC has identified two ongoing biases within the organization and its assessment reports: the disparity in participation between Northern countries and the global South, and a hierarchy in disciplinary knowledge1. As the organization recognized during its First Assessment Report (FAR), unequal participation impacts the legitimacy of the IPCC process and the authority of its assessment products, with countries reluctant to accept assessments of climate change when their expert involvement is limited2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Disciplinary biases, on the other hand, constrain how climate change is known and acted on, with only certain forms of knowledge and expertise authorized to construct a problem with global implications7, 8. Given the hegemonic status of the IPCC within the production of climate change knowledge, exploring questions of participation and scientific legitimacy remains an important task. Earlier insights on these issues have been largely qualitative in nature, providing detailed descriptions of the establishment of the organization and identifying the North–South divide structuring the Panel and authorship of IPCC assessments2, 3, 9, 10, 11. Further research identified the scientific interests shaping the construction of climate change as a global political issue, highlighting the dominance of global climate models in Working Group I’s (WGI) conceptualization of climate change, and the natural sciences more broadly across the three WGs (refs 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15). More recently, a variety of statistical techniques have been employed to quantify the disciplinary and geographic bias within the IPCC and environmental science research more broadly16, 17, 18, 19. The paucity of the social sciences has been of particular concern to those critical of the IPCC’s technical and managerial framings of the issue and seeking to broaden social understandings of the climate change problem7, 8, 20. Here we contribute to these studies by applying for the first time social network analysis to the writing team of WGIII’s contribution (that is, Mitigation of Climate Change) to the AR5. Although previous studies have illuminated the disciplinary biases within WGIII, there has been no detailed analysis of the actors authoring the report—the patterns of training, disciplinary backgrounds and institutions connecting this group of actors. Exploring these patterns provides evidence on how disparities between Northern countries and the global South structure the authorship of WGIII’s assessment, and may facilitate a deepened understanding of the controversy surrounding governments’ acceptance and approval of the final reports21.
Figure 1 represents the network of countries involved in the WGIII AR5 writing process, showing the patterns of connection between countries through the key moments in an author’s career trajectory, including the country they undertook their PhD and current country of work. These patterns reveal a more complex picture than a simple North–South divide. The figure indicates the existence of a US- and UK-based dominance in authors’ careers, identifying them as principal training sites for scientists involved in the production of the WGIII AR5. Previous studies have highlighted the US and UK dominance in the authorship of the report and identified statistically significant drivers of this, including per capita GDP (gross domestic product), English-speaking status, and levels of tertiary education17. The historic role these countries had in the development of early scientific interest in climate change and the establishment of the IPCC is also likely to be a factor12, 13, 22, 23.
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