Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance: Expert Institutions and the Implementation of International Environmental Treaties

By Pia M. Kohler

“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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785271489

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Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance

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Science Advice and Global Environmental Governance

Expert Institutions and the Implementation of International Environmental Treaties

Pia M. Kohler

Anthem Press

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Copyright © Pia M. Kohler 2020

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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, 2017¹

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 generously shared their time and insights in interviews. I must express my thanks to all my interviewees, and I hope that they will find this book a useful resource as they continue their essential work. The writing of this book also unfolded in parallel to years of teaching—working with my students made me a better communicator, and I anticipate that this book will prove of interest to students interested in global environmental politics and in science–policy interfaces. I expect readers may find themselves following different paths as they make their way through the book. To that end I have strived to make each chapter relatively self-contained, even though that might require some repetition. There is also a glossary for those that are new to some of the international law terms encountered in the book. Except for the Introduction, each chapter begins with a short vignette intended to evoke impressions from my fieldwork and draw you into the chapter.

I am thankful to the institutions that have supported my work over the years: at MIT, the Presidential Fellowship and the Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability; at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, NSF’s EPSCoR program; and at Williams College the Hellman Fellowship, as well as the Class of 1945 World Fellowship, the Lehman Fellowship, the Adsit Fellowship, the Class of 1963 Sustainability Development Fund and the Oakley Center. I also benefitted from taking part in the NSF-funded DISCCRS III Symposium and in the Fulbright German Studies seminar on Science and Society: The Impact of Science on Policy Formulation. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) not only facilitated my participation in meetings, but in my ENB teammates I have found a worldwide network of colleagues, mentors and friends—a community with whom I know I can always excitedly engage in a dynamic conversation on some finer points of global environmental politics. Even as the book before you bears little resemblance to my dissertation defended in 2006, I remain grateful for, and still carry with me, the support and guidance of my committee members: Larry Susskind, Bill Moomaw, and Sheila Jasanoff. Together, they provided complementary insights through what was then, and is still, a project that frustratingly, but excitingly, did not fit in any neat disciplinary boxes.

My work became stronger as I shared it in a variety of settings, including at annual meetings of the International Studies Association and the Science and Democracy Network. The Social Science Research Group at Fairbanks, the Oakley Center at Williams and the STS Fellows group at Harvard each provided venues for fruitful conversations. Rashida Braggs, Annelle Curulla and Nimu Njoya were supportive partners in our regular writing group. I am grateful to all the generous interlocutors who enriched my work, in particular Silke Beck, Maria Ivanova, Sheila Jasanoff, Noelle Eckley Selin, Jonathan Rosenberg, Jessica Templeton, Henrik Selin, Yulia Yamineva, Pam Chasek, Lynn Wagner, Jen Allan, Mel Ashton, Tim Forsyth, Paul Steinberg, Roopali Phadke, Chanda Meek, Kate Neville, Monamie Bhadra and Natalie Vena. My thanks go out to Larry Susskind, Saleem Ali, Megan Greiving and the Anthem Press production team for shepherding this book to its release. I am also thankful to the anonymous peer reviewers who thoughtfully engaged with my work. This manuscript has also been strengthened and clarified by skillful editing at varied stages in its life—I thank Tallash Kantai, Deborah Jones and Tanya Corbin for their careful reading, though of course all mistakes remain mine.

As I wrap up this book project, it is impossible not to look back upon what has unfolded in the 20 years since I attended that first SBSTTA in 1999. While the different home institutions stand out, so too do the communities of which I’ve been blessed to be a part. To my family, I realize that this may have seemed at times like an unending project. I want to especially thank Annika and Mike, and the Kohlers, the Scottis and Pizzagallis, who always asked after the project and were keen to celebrate even small milestones along the way. The term friendship does not do justice to the bonds I’ve been able to forge wherever I’ve lived. This all started with my Geneva family while I was raised in Switzerland—a disparate cluster of households grew to be a real family, sharing grandparents and growing up as cousins. This is a tradition I’ve been able to take with me with every move, and I’m therefore indebted to my Geneva family, and also to my Montreal, New Haven, Boston, Fairbanks and Williamstown families.

These two decades have also been marked by a chronic illness, which was, at times, debilitating. Finally receiving, two years ago, a diagnosis for my condition has been life-altering to say the least. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my medical team, from near and far, who have been instrumental in allowing me to better manage my condition but also in enabling me to finally reach the finish line of this book project.

Last, a few inadequate words about my parents, Larry and Carol. Not only did they believe me as I went all those years without a diagnosis, but as my health worsened, they put their own lives on hold so that I could seek the specialist care I needed. Thank you for the steady encouragement, the meals, the walks, the cards, the conversations and the laughter.

Pia M. Kohler

Williamstown, MA

June 20, 2019

Notes

1You can see a picture of this sign in a CNN story outlining events around the world to mark the 2017 March for Science: Laura Smith-Park and Jason Hanna, March for Science: Protesters Gather Worldwide to Support ‘Evidence,’ CNN, April 22, 2017; available at: https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/22/health/global-march-for-science/index.html .

2For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose tagline is Science for a Healthy Planet and Safer World, keeps a running list of efforts at dismantling science-based health and safety protections under the heading Attacks on Science. Available at: https://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/attacks-on-science (accessed June 20, 2019).

ABBREVIATIONS

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Unprecedented climate change. Far-reaching chemical pollution. Accelerating species loss. These are just a few of the global environmental challenges we face today. The international community has sought to develop coordinated responses to these threats, including through the myriad multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) that have been signed over the past half-century.¹ And, as the international community has increasingly turned to environmental treaties to address this accelerating cascade of global challenges, it has also become common to institutionalize the provision of science advice at a global scale through the establishment of dedicated science committees. These science committees are commonly cast as technical bodies whose task is constrained to assessing existing knowledge, often already validated through processes such as peer review. Such a representation of their work is also used in service of arguments that justify black-boxing, or insulating and removing from public scrutiny, their proceedings. Indeed, their output is routinely considered just an apolitical contribution to a complex decision-making process.

In contrast, this book centers on these science committees established to guide parties to an MEA. How are scientists and other knowledge holders called upon to contribute as experts? How do they organize their work, and to what effect? Opening up the proceedings of these committees demonstrates that these technical fora are a significant setting for the shaping of global environmental governance once treaties enter their implementation phase. These specialized committees are sites where participants are simultaneously working out understandings of global earth systems as well as how to govern them.

Expert institutions that are asked to provide advice for the implementation of international environmental treaties are understudied. The provision of science advice for policymaking at the national and regional levels has, in contrast, been the focus of myriad in-depth research efforts. These latter studies have yielded insights into the importance of varied aspects of the design and operation of science advice institutions. These findings include, to name but a few, a recognition of how science advisers shape policymaking outcomes (Jasanoff 1990), explorations of how strategic choices about transparency influence uptake of advice (Hilgartner 2000) and myriad examinations of the promise, and pitfalls, of broadening participation (Chilvers and Kearnes 2015). Yet, there have been limited applications of such scholarship to science advice committees operating at the global scale. What combination of experts, disciplinary specializations and range of procedures can be understood as being sufficiently comprehensive and representative so as to generate advice suitable for the planet as a whole?

Beyond Assessment

The bulk of the scholarship on the role of science in global environmental governance has focused on assessments carried out by an international collective of scientists brought together expressly to take stock of the state-of-the-art knowledge on an issue in advance of any coordinated policy response. Thus the role of science has been commonly cast as constrained to the agenda-setting stage. Such research on stand-alone assessments often examines how consensus emerges on dominant framings of the problem at hand and their ensuing impact on eventual treaty formation, or lack thereof (Social Learning Group 2001; Farrell and Jäger 2005; Dimitrov 2006; Mitchell et al. 2006). Whether through analysis of social learning or of the formation of epistemic communities, researchers have often asked how, and which, characteristics of the resulting science advice are correlated with eventual action on the global scale.

In contrast, this project focuses on how scientists and other knowledge holders are called upon to contribute to the implementation of regimes, and to what effect. Bringing attention to the work of committees shaping ongoing implementation counters the linear model of decision making in which science is envisioned as constrained to raising awareness and putting issues on the agenda. Scholars and practitioners alike do regularly and explicitly question this simplistic model (e.g., Jasanoff 1990; Lidskog and Sundqvist 2002; Morin and Oberthür in Morin et al. 2013). Nonetheless, the simple, linear and unidirectional model from science to policy has proven enduring. In contrast, this project emphasizes the ongoing regime formation that occurs as subsidiary science advice committees pursue their mandate. This is not a one-way relationship; rather the examples explored in this book shed light on how the science advice they co-produce shapes, and is shaped by, the ongoing implementation of global environmental agreements. The processes unfolding in these science advice committees in turn influence the outcomes of the policymaking bodies of these global treaties, as well as the proceedings of other committees. Through their work, members of these committees are even generating norms that get taken up, sometimes with little scrutiny, in other institutional settings.

Across these committees, we find a common emphasis on carefully delineating, and even restricting, the scope of their activities to assessing, reviewing and examining existing research. While the institutional features and operating procedures of these panels and committees have increasingly become the focus of policy negotiations, these institutions are expected to be neutral, objective, entrusted, transparent, balanced and independent. Indeed, those contributing to, negotiating and administering these institutions often emphasize this carefully bounded mandate, commonly asserting that what they are doing is merely assessing existing knowledge that has, itself, been rigorously peer reviewed. This claim often goes hand in hand with arguments dismissing the need to open this contained process to additional scrutiny. This book presents a competing framing of what is playing out within the expert institutions examined here. These committees are sites where participants are co-producing knowledge and social order (Jasanoff and Wynne 1998; Jasanoff 2001, 2004; Miller 2001a, 2004). Attending to this co-production, and the inevitable intertwining of science and politics it implies, requires paying close attention to who is involved in the work of these science advice committees, how they carry out their work and on the basis of what knowledge.

Co-production: Inherent or by Design?

Several fields have employed the term co-production, a commonality which can at times yield confusion. A comprehensive consideration of co-production requires taking stock of these competing understandings. While Clark Miller and Carina Wyborn (2018) document near parallel evolutions within public administration and science and technology studies (STS), they also point to a somewhat dual emergence of the concept of co-production within sustainability science. On the one hand, they point to how Gary Kofinas builds on Elinor Ostrom’s work on co-production in public administration to explore how local communities engage in joint knowledge production for the co-management of caribou herds (1998, cited in Miller and Wyborn 2018), an avenue complemented by Fikret Berkes’ consideration of the ‘weaving’ of indigenous knowledge with science (2009, cited in Miller and Wyborn 2018). Building on this latter work, sustainability science more broadly has invoked co-production as a strategy for socially and politically relevant research. Multistakeholder engagement is harnessed, under the label of co-production, as a means of framing of problems and in conceiving of the audiences for research. As Miller and Wyborn (2018) warn, In turning co-production into an aspiration, sustainability science risks missing the inevitable politics of configuring knowledges and societies. This project is precisely concerned with bringing to light the inherent co-production at play in these committees (co-production in the STS sense). As detailed in Chapter 2, it is important to identify the mechanisms through which committees, even though they are cast as mere assessors of knowledge, are shaping, and being shaped by, political forces. This in turn requires paying attention to how power differentials and conflicting interests are manifested within these committees or in their design.

Recognizing this co-production is at odds with the prominence, notably among practitioners, given the need to insulate advisory proceedings from politics. Of course, this emphasis may be in part for show; practitioners are quite aware of the political stakes of their work. In effect, this inclination for insulation has furthered the assumption that it is appropriate for the inner-working of these expert institutions to be shielded and in effect black-boxed so that only the outcome is visible: the proceedings of science advice committees are often hidden from public view, be it by limiting reporting or by literally holding deliberations behind closed doors. This book contests the idea that consensus accompanied by strong insulation will yield better advice—often understood to mean more influence on the separate realm of policy outcomes. It is not only practitioners that hold this view: Haas and Stevens (2011) also contend that greater insulation from politics, combined with a consensus on the science, yields more influence.

This work is not intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy or usefulness of science, or science advice committees (Forsyth 2012). Rather, in drawing attention to how subsidiary committees act as sites of co-production of knowledge and social order, the aim is to illuminate how these institutions are designed and governed and begin to answer some overarching questions: how is global knowledge constituted? What does it mean to be democratic at a planetary scale?

The Three-Body Framework

In her chapter on Judgment under Siege, Sheila Jasanoff (2005c, 211) details what she terms the three-body problem of expert legitimacy commonly encountered by science advice committees. She documents how, in some settings, calls to democratize science have led to an emphasis on diversifying the experts called to serve on committees, while in other contexts the push for democratization is reflected in an effort to broaden the knowledge being brought to bear on a question. Yet, institutional design choices affect committee balance. Thus, she concludes, in order to attain expert legitimacy it is important to attend to all three bodies of a science advice committee, namely:

the bodies of knowledge that experts represent (good science); the bodies of the experts themselves (unbiased experts); and the bodies through which experts offer judgment in policy domains (balanced committees). (211)

This project adapts this three-body framework as a lens for examining global science advice committees, turning to the body of experts, the body of knowledge and the institutional body. The global scale at which these committees operate brings to light different dimensions of each of these bodies than those encountered in domestic applications of this framework (Keller 2009; Elliott 2011).

First, concerns over the relevant body of knowledge translate into paying attention to the diversity of disciplines being called upon; disciplinary breadth can be closely connected to how questions and the mandate of the committee are framed in the first place (Schön and Rein 1994; Templeton 2011). Attending to the body of knowledge also raises questions about the ways of knowing to be taken into consideration. For example, there is a long-standing tradition among some MEAs to provide entry points for holders of traditional and local knowledge. In practice these entry points are more commonly within policymaking bodies, and this raises questions of how these contributions are to be validated in light of the absence of mechanisms such as peer review. Second, in their quest for balanced or inclusive committees, jurisdictions have valued different