In this paper we draw on Science and Technology (STS) approaches to develop a comparative analytical account of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The establishment of both of these organizations, in 1988 and 2012 respectively, represented important ‘constitutional moments’ in the global arrangement of scientific assessment and its relationship to environmental policymaking. Global environmental assessments all share some similarities, operating at the articulation between science and policy and pursuing explicit societal goals. Although the IPCC and IPBES have different objectives, they are both intergovernmental processes geared towards the provision of knowledge to inform political debates about, respectively, climate change and biodiversity loss. In spite of these similarities, we show that there are significant differences in their knowledge practices and these differences have implications for environmental governance. We do this by comparing the IPCC and IPBES across three dimensions: conceptual frameworks, scenarios and consensus .

We argue that, broadly speaking, the IPCC has produced a ‘view from nowhere’, through a reliance on mathematical modelling to produce a consensual picture of global climate change, which is then ‘downscaled’ to considerations of local impacts and responses. By contrast IPBES, through its contrasting conceptual frameworks and practices of argumentation, appears to seek a ‘view from everywhere’, inclusive of epistemic plurality, and through which a global picture emerges through an aggregation of more placed-based knowledges. We conclude that, despite these aspirations, both organizations in fact offer ‘views from somewhere’: situated sets of knowledge marked by politico-epistemic struggles and shaped by the interests, priorities and voices of certain powerful actors. Characterizing this ‘somewhere’ might be aided by the concept of institutional epistemology, a term we propose to capture how particular knowledge practices become stabilized within international expert organizations. We suggest that such a concept, by drawing attention to the institutions’ knowledge practices, helps reveal their world-making effects and, by doing so, enables more reflexive governance of both expert organizations and of global environmental change in general.

在本文中，我们将利用科学技术（STS）方法来开发政府间气候变化专门委员会（IPCC）和政府间生物多样性和生态系统服务科学政策平台（IPBES）的比较分析报告。这两个组织分别于1988年和2012年成立，代表了全球科学评估及其与环境政策制定的关系中的重要“宪法时刻”。全球环境评估在科学与政策之间的衔接和追求明确的社会目标上都具有一些相似之处。尽管IPCC和IPBES具有不同的目标，但它们都是政府间的进程，旨在提供知识，以分别为有关以下方面的政治辩论提供信息：气候变化和生物多样性丧失。尽管存在这些相似之处，但我们表明，他们的知识实践存在显着差异，并且这些差异对环境治理具有影响。为此，我们通过在三个方面对IPCC和IPBES进行比较：概念框架，方案和共识。

我们认为，从广义上讲，IPCC通过依靠数学模型得出了全球气候变化的共识图景，从而产生了“无处可见”的观点，然后将其“缩小”到对本地影响和响应的考虑。相比之下，生物多样性平台通过其对比性的概念框架和论证实践，似乎寻求一种“无处不在的观点”，包括认识论的多元性，并通过聚集更多基于知识的知识而形成全球图景。我们得出的结论是，尽管有这些愿望，但两个组织实际上都提供了“从某个地方来看”的观点：以政治-流行主义斗争为标志，并由某些有力的行为者的利益，优先事项和声音所塑造的知识集。表征“某个地方”的概念可能会有所帮助机构认识论，我们建议用这个术语来描述国际专家组织中特定的知识实践是如何稳定下来的。我们建议，通过提请各机构的知识实践，这一概念有助于揭示它们在世界范围内产生的影响，并通过这样做，使专家组织和总体上对全球环境变化的治理更具反思性。