Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance

Pia M. Kohler

Description

An examination of expert committees advising multilateral environmental agreements

“Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” examines expert committees established to provide science advice to multilateral environmental agreements. By focusing on how these institutions are sites of coproduction of knowledge and policy, this work brings to light the politics of science advice and details how these committees are contributing to an emerging global environmental constitutionalism.

Grounded in participant observation, elite interviews and document analysis, “Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance” uses the lenses of the body of experts, body of knowledge, and institutional body to focus on three features of design. Who are the experts being asked to provide advice? What types of knowledge are considered beyond the bounds of the committee and how is this determined? What rules and norms are developed to govern how the committee carries out its work?

The empirical chapters lay out three illustrations: controversy over the continued use of methyl bromide despite it being scheduled for a ban under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, a series of votes by the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Review Committee when determining whether the pesticide endosulfan should be banned under the Stockholm Convention on POPs and a decade of institutional innovation in an effort to revamp the provision of science advice to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

List of Tables; Preface; List of Abbreviations; 1. Introduction; 2. Science and Global Environmental Governance; 3. Balancing Expertise: Critical Use and the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer; 4. “Should We Be Voting on Science?”: Endosulfan and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants; 5. Getting the Science (Committee) Right: Knowledge and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification; 6. Institutionalizing Norms of Global Science Advice; Epilogue; Appendix: Methods; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sciences et techniques
• International relations
• Treaty
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785271489
• Langue: English

Extrait

Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance
Anthem Environment and Sustainability Initiative (AESI)
The Anthem Environment and Sustainability Initiative (AESI) seeks to push the frontiers of scholarship while simultaneously offering prescriptive and programmatic advice to policymakers and practitioners around the world. The programme publishes research monographs, professional and major reference works, upper-level textbooks and general interest titles. Professor Lawrence Susskind, as General Editor of AESI, oversees the below book series, each with its own series editor and an editorial board featuring scholars, practitioners and business experts keen to link theory and practice.

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Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance
Expert Institutions and the Implementation of International Environmental Treaties
Pia M. Kohler
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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Copyright © Pia M. Kohler 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019913389
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-146-5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-146-6 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
For three grand ladies
Virginia Leary (1926–2009)
Mary Scotti (1917–2011)
and
Del Kohler (1921–2014)
CONTENTS
List of Tables
Preface
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Science and Global Environmental Governance
3. Balancing Expertise: Critical Use and the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer
4. “Should We Be Voting on Science?”: Endosulfan and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants
5. Getting the Science (Committee) Right: Knowledge and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
6. Institutionalizing Norms of Global Science Advice
Epilogue
Appendix: Methods
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
TABLES
3.1 Approved exemptions and limits on production agreed to at ExMOP-1 for 2005
3.2 Composition and membership of the Methyl Bromide Technical Options Committee, 2004–15
5.1 Frequency of key phrases at the Conference of the Parties meetings based on Summary Report by Earth Negotiations Bulletin , 2005–17
A.1 Relevant universe of cases from which the three illustrations in this book are drawn
PREFACE
[(Scientific Research) – (Political Bias)] =

—Seen on a sign at a London “March for Science,” April 22, 2017 1
This mathematical formula can be translated as follows: at the root of good policy, we find scientific research free from political bias. It was displayed on a home-made sign deployed at one of over six hundred events held worldwide to mark the inaugural “March for Science” in 2017, just a few months after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The “March for Science” was envisioned as a counterpart to our “post-truth” era of “alternative facts.” It is telling that April 22, celebrated as Earth Day since 1970, was selected as the day for these coordinated rallies. The environment, and the threats it faces, is a particularly rich ground for calls for evidence-based decision making. And indeed, in the opening years of this new administration, it is routinely the US Environmental Protection Agency that has been the focal point of what have broadly been termed “attacks on science.” 2
During the same period as these calls for the protection and primacy of science as an endeavor to be protected from political views or biases, there have also been numerous efforts to draw attention to personal characteristics of the individuals conducting science within US-centered communities of scientists. Such a shift goes against one of the long-standing Mertonian norms of science: universalism, which decouples the outcome of the scientific process from the attributes of any one scientist. And indeed, collectives such as “Women Also Know Stuff,” which was established to “promote and publicize the work and expertise of scholars in political science who identify as women” during the 2016 election season, have been emulated across constituencies (e.g., “People of Color Also Know Stuff”—also political science focused) and across disciplines ranging from history to sociology. There have also been counterpart efforts in science, technology, engineering and math, such as STEMwomen and LGBTStem, and in fact the organizers of the “March for Science” themselves were roiled by diversity concerns. In parallel to these efforts at increasing access for and visibility of certain groups within science, the #MeToo movement has also ushered in a new level of scrutiny on the behavior of individual scientists. In just the past few years, professional science associations have established codes of conduct for their gatherings, and there have also been some cases of societies reconsidering the conferring of awards upon eminent scholars facing allegations of harassment.
How does this particular moment within science communities in the United States relate to a book about little-known committees tasked with providing science advice to multilateral environmental agreements? These institutions have been wrestling with analog tensions for at least two decades. It is challenging to design a science advice mechanism that is at once shielded from politics and politically representative. Limited resources and logistics constrain the size of a committee and the frequency of its meetings, and complicate the application of concerns over diversity and representativeness at a global scale. In essence, the science advice committees examined in this project arise from a similar intuition to that driving those who marched “for science” in 2017: that science matters as a foundation for policy outcomes.
Of course, concerns over attacks on science are not new. This book project stems from a doctoral dissertation begun in the early years of the George W. Bush administration, a period similarly marked by concerns over politicized science. My interest in science advisory committees established under multilateral environmental agreements dates back to my first opportunity to attend a multilateral environmental negotiation: a meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1999 in Montreal. As someone who had studied physical sciences, yet followed international policy outcomes out of personal interest, I was mystified by how this room full of hundreds of delegates would bridge that infamous gap between science and policy.
Following extensive fieldwork, and having benefitted from insightful feedback as I presented components of this project in varied settings over the years, this book could have taken many forms. My goal has been to craft an engaging introduction to the subsidiary science advice committees that remain, from both a scholarship and a practice standpoint, in the shadows of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). I wrote this book with two key audiences in mind: scholars interested in science in global environmental governance (whether from an international relations perspective or from a science and technology studies standpoint), and practitioners. Among these practitioners, I include, among others, experts who have been called upon to serve on a science advice committee, delegates who are receiving the committee’s advice and the staff members who execute the parties’ requests, including by facilitating the convening of a science advice committee. Many of these practitioners gener