In environmental governance, the role of expertise is regarded as a crucial support to decision-making. Yet, in intergovernmental settings, studies aimed at understanding the relation between science and policy have predominantly focused on the fields of climate change and biodiversity. Through a fieldwork-based study of the Science-Policy Interface (SPI) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (ITPS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this paper investigates the role of scientific expertise in the global governance of soil and land degradation. Drawing upon the concepts of boundary organization and hybrid management, the study shows that analytical tools deriving from the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition provide valuable understandings of science-policy dynamics at the intergovernmental level. The results of the analysis reveal that science-policy organizations match the definition of boundary organization to different degrees and that hybrid management strategies occur with different magnitudes, with significant implications for each organization's capacity to bridge science and policy. This implies that such STS concepts should not be regarded as purely descriptive labels, but as resources that can serve broad analytical purposes in the study of global environmental governance. In this respect, the study contributes to an on-going theoretical dialogue between STS and International Relations (IR), claiming that IR scholars should consider the adoption of relevant STS theoretical tools for the analysis of global environmental institutions.

在环境治理中，专业知识的作用被认为是决策的重要支持。但是，在政府间环境中，旨在了解科学与政策之间关系的研究主要集中在气候变化和生物多样性领域。通过对《联合国防治荒漠化公约》（UNCCD）的科学政策政策（SPI）和粮食及农业组织（FAO）政府间土壤技术小组（ITPS）进行基于实地调查的研究，本文对科学专门知识在全球土壤和土地退化治理中的作用。借鉴边界组织和混合管理的概念，研究表明，源于科学技术研究（STS）传统的分析工具可为政府间层面的科学政策动态提供有价值的理解。分析结果表明，科学政策组织在不同程度上匹配了边界组织的定义，并且混合管理战略的出现幅度各不相同，这对每个组织桥接科学与政策的能力都具有重要意义。这意味着，不应将此类STS概念视为纯粹的描述性标签，而应将其视为可在全球环境治理研究中提供广泛分析目的的资源。在这方面，本研究为STS与国际关系（IR）之间正在进行的理论对话做出了贡献，声称IR学者应考虑采用相关的STS理论工具来分析全球环境机构。