Taking responsibility for climate knowledge in a warming world: Exploring responsibility assembled in and around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Abstract

This thesis interrogates what it means for expert climate knowledge holders to take responsibility for what they know in a warming world. ‘Responsibility’ in the context of climate change is often invoked around historical responsibility for emissions and cause-effect relations. However, conceptual and empirical engagement with relational and practice-based notions and geographies of responsibility in the assessment, but also the production, communication and enactment of climate knowledge has been limited. Centred around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I address this gap by exploring various senses of responsibility, lived responsibilities and affective experiences held by a particular set of expert climate knowledge holders: IPCC participants across all IPCC assessment cycles and Working Groups. For this informed grounded theory study, I conducted 77 semi-structured expert interviews with IPCC participants and observations at the 26th and 27th Conferences of the Parties (COPs) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Drawing on geographical assemblage thinking, the first empirical chapter proposes a new relational ontology through which to approach the IPCC as a more-than-institutional assemblage of bodies, objects, actions, ideas and affects resonating and be/un-coming together. Focussing in on the role of relationality, identity and agency in heterogenous assemblages, the second empirical chapter examines why and under what circumstances expert climate knowledge holders may (not) feel compelled to take responsibility for climate knowledge in and around the IPCC. The third empirical chapter analyses how and with what consequences expert climate knowledge holders take responsibility for climate knowledge, exploring the already lived responsibilities and affective experiences of IPCC participants across today’s production, assessment, communication and/or enactment of climate knowledge. This thesis not only contributes novel empirical and conceptual insights to IPCC studies as well as to geographies of knowledge and responsibility literature. It also supports cross-disciplinary efforts toward a better understanding of how relations, identities, affects and emotions feature into the wider climate knowledge assemblage(s) in a rapidly warming world.