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.
A growing number of expert organizations aim to provide knowledge for global environmental policy-making. Recently, there have also been explicit calls for stakeholder engagement at the global level to make scientific knowledge relevant and usable on the ground. The newly established Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is one of the first international expert organizations to have systematically developed a strategy for stakeholder engagement in its own right. In this article, we analyze the emergence of this strategy. Employing the concept "politics of legitimation," we examine how and for what reasons stakeholder engagement was introduced, justified, and finally endorsed, as well as its effects. The article explores the process of institutionalizing stakeholder engagement, as well as reconstructing the contestation of the operative norms (membership, tasks, and accountability) regulating the rules for this engagement. We conclude by discussing the broader importance of the findings for IPBES, as well as for international expert organizations in general.
This paper advances current scholarship on future practices and anticipation arguing that the ways in which we engage in future making not only rely on distinct practices but also on objects, future objects. Future objects are defined as an array of socio-material entities that underpin future practices. In drawing on science studies, this paper develops a typology of future objects that takes as its ordering mechanism the political work future objects perform. Type one future objects are solid and ready to use. Their political work is to secure the present by allowing for political agreements that concern the future. Based on a linear model of expertise, this type of future object provides answers in speaking truth to power. Bodies and instruments, databases and power points are involved when producing, as well as performing, type one objects. Type two future objects are about the experimental infrastructure for creating futures. Foresight conferences organize space with the aim in mind to come up with novel visions of sustainable futures in the Anthropocene. Finally, type three future objects are more fluid and still in the making. They are collectively worked on in iterative cycles. Examples range from prototypes of climate engineering to negotiation texts of global environmental agreements. They operate as a centering device and materialize in artifacts integrating participants contributions. In outlining the difference between the three object types, the paper elaborates on the sociomaterial politics of anticipation especially with regard to science policy interaction.
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