Epistemic Exclusion in Climate Science: Why We Grow the Wrong Trees

• In Event: International Environmental Action

Abstract

In political science, the conventional wisdom is that international experts such as climate scientists play an important role in facilitating international cooperation on global issues such as climate change. They do so by “teaching” states what their interests are or by providing their authoritative knowledge that informs states’ policies. But experts can be wrong, to the detriment of fighting climate change at both the global and local levels. For example, the REDD+ initiatives under the UNFCCC advocated for planting trees in developing countries to cool down our global temperature, for which mainstream climate science was used as justification. Yet, this is not always the case. As biologists point out, in some geographical contexts, trees emit gases – known as BVOCs – that can further exacerbate global warming. In other words, planting an enormous number of inappropriate species of trees can even hurt rather than help the earth.

This paper thus asks: why, given the espoused scientific commitment to pluralism as well as the interdisciplinary and global nature of climate change, are some scientific perspectives – especially biologists from the Global South – not well integrated into mainstream climate science? In contrast to the common understanding that science is apolitical, in this paper, I draw from theories of Science Technology and Society to argue that “credibility capitalism” poses a structural impediment to incorporating certain kinds of knowledge – such as BVOCs, the gas that plants can emit that worsen global warming and other findings by ecologists from the Global South – into what gets considered as legitimate “climate science” in the first place. Based on interviews with climate scientists in Thailand and their interlocutors in the Global North, I identify important sources of credibility capital in climate science, including the idea that one is producing “universal knowledge” as embodied in climate models or the claim to having reached a scientific consensus – a way of knowing that aspires to study the earth as an objective and universal system. I then show how these epistemic exclusions can have tangible effects, particularly their plausible adverse impact on countries in the Global South, where integrating knowledge into mainstream science is challenging.

My paper makes several contributions. While the literature in political science tends to black-box the process of knowledge construction and treats knowledge as an exogenous product, this paper unpacks the politics of knowledge construction on climate, and how treating scientific knowledge as an apolitical product ready to be used can be counterproductive. The paper also provides a critique on the effort to diversify the IPCC by including more representatives from different countries. Credibility capitalism limits the kind of diversity possible in the global climate governance – diversity can at best be justified as “fairness” based on country representatives, but not for the sake of diversifying epistemological perspectives to knowledge production. In the long term, this not only narrows knowledge production, but may only undermine their legitimacy.

Author

• Jittip Mongkolnchaiarunya, George Washington University