Justice as an ideal for climate assessment

Abstract

Confronting a series of planetary crises, the international community has established a complex regime of global environmental assessments. The most prominent of these remains the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose climate assessments have decisively shaped the politics of climate change and, more broadly, social conceptions of the climate crisis – the terms in which it is framed and debated, and the range of conceivable responses to it. Yet, despite their influence, and the attention they have received in scholarship, two fundamental questions regarding climate assessments remain open. The first concerns the analysis of assessment: What distinguishes the work of ‘assessment’ from other forms of scientific inquiry? What distinctive epistemic value do assessments have that would account for their privileged role at the science-policy interface? The second question concerns the morality of assessment: Given the value-ladenness of assessment – the range of contingent choices authors of assessment must make, which have significant moral and political consequences – what normative framework should guide their practices? My aim in this dissertation is to answer both of these connected questions. In answering the first, I argue that the epistemic practices of assessment can be fruitfully modelled on the curatorial labour that takes place in museums, developing the idea of ‘epistemic curation’ to account for the distinctive epistemic value of assessment and to reveal the coherence of its diverse practices. The ‘curatorial view of assessment’, developed in the early part of this dissertation, makes salient the depth of value-laden judgements necessary for the production of usable assessments for policy. The dissertation then turns to answer the second, normative question, regarding the moral conduct of assessment. I argue for an ideal of justice in climate assessment, grounded in a novel framework of distributive epistemic justice. When confronting value-laden choices, assessments should resolve those choices in a manner that promotes a fair distribution of epistemic goods among stakeholders with an objective interest in them and provides policymakers with the knowledge necessary for the pursuit of climate justice. The chapters of this dissertation build towards this ideal in a systematic fashion and, through a set of case studies, draw out its implications for the practice of the IPCC.