Environmental expertise: conditions and challenges

What kinds of expertise is needed to facilitate and guide the work to meet current global environmental challenges? The context is the growing severity of the current situation where the environmental problems have increased not only in scope (global problems) and breadth (including all sectors) but also in depth (concerns fundamental societal structures).

This means that environmental expertise gets a much broader and complex task, where it must navigate – and sometimes also challenge – disciplinary and institutional boundaries. This raises fundamental epistemic and normative questions on credibility, relevance, and legitimacy.

This project will use empirical materials from two recently conducted studies to investigate and compare conditions and challenges in developing an environmental expertise that is scientifically sound and policy relevant. The empirical material consists of already collected material, mainly in form of two recently conducted interview studies of scientific experts in the IPCC and IPBES.

By focusing on two of the most current environmental problems (climate change and biodiversity loss) and two of the most well-known and institutionalized form of environmental expertise (IPBES and IPCC), the project aims to give substantial contributions to current discussions on how to create social robust expertise, that both is scientific legitimate and policy relevant.