Institutions for Climate Knowledge Governance:
Building on WCC-3
The project “Institutions for Climate Knowledge Governance: Building on WCC-3” proposes to explore the nexus between climate science, policy and adaptation to climate change from political and practical perspectives. It focuses on the international and national processes and institutions that broker the transfer of scientific knowledge to political decision-makers and more generally to stakeholders at the international and national levels.
This proposal echoes the WCC-3 Declaration and the development of a Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) . The project’s overarching goal is to provide a deliberative forum and a multi-disciplinary analysis on climate services and institutions that can support the design of a robust GFCS. This proposal is also in line with the general evolution of climate change governance. The latter is shifting from devising schemes to mitigate climate change to schemes to adapt to climate change as well as shifting from negotiation to implementation of treaties and protocols. This proposal hence suggests to further research the science / policy nexus focusing on its impact on the design of an effective Global Framework for Climate Services.
A pilot-project was implemented in 2009 in preparation for the World Climate Conference 3 (WCC-3) that took place in Geneva from 31 August to 4 September 2009. The Centre for International Governance, in collaboration with the Graduate Institute’s Department of Political Science, launched a one-year project on the relations between climate services providers and climate services users. More specifically, the project questioned whether climate products and services offered by providers were actually in line with needs expressed by users.
Some of the operational conclusions of the pilot-project - i.e. the need for the creation or reinforcement of organizations to channel climate information from providers to users and offer a platform for users to express their needs- have opened new avenues for research and created demand on the part of the Geneva-based international organizations and civil society. Therefore, this new project will further explore the role and nature of ‘boundary organizations’ in bridging the space between science and policy and in facilitating the negotiations, provision and delivery of climate services across levels of governance from the international to the local levels of decision-making. It will examine institutional schemes that facilitate definition of objectives, authority and accountability along the science-policy boundary. It will examine the environment in which those organizations will function and underline power dynamics among stakeholders from the public and the private sectors. Lastly, building on the Graduate Institute’s comparative advantage of trans-disciplinary research, the project will study the integration of economic and social data in climate services and suggests avenues for integrating both sets of data into comprehensive climate products.
* WCC 3 High Level Declaration, OP1, OP 2, 2 September 2009. Global Framework for Climate Information, Concept Note Ver. 10, 27 August 2009, 31 p. Global Framework for Climate Information, Brief Note, 2 September 2009, 6 p.
