Climate services are intended to improve climate-sensitive decisions by making climate information ‘useful, useable and used’. Here, we analyse 27 expert interviews to evaluate whether this user-driven model of climate science has been successfully implemented in the public sector. We show that, although climate services promise better decision-making, they mainly focus on delivering better data. The norms and institutions of climate science produce three key tensions in operationalizing climate services: a focus on products rather than processes, services based on broad assumptions about demand rather than being demand-driven, and the narrow economic valuation of products rather than evaluation of improvements in decision-making. These tensions help explain why climate services often generate nominal changes in climate science where transformations are promised. Transformational change requires that climate services account for diverse social structures, behaviours and contexts. Integrating social science is no panacea for demand-driven climate services, but it is certainly a prerequisite.

气候服务旨在通过使气候信息“有用、可用和使用”来改进对气候敏感的决策。在这里，我们分析了 27 位专家访谈，以评估这种用户驱动的气候科学模型是否已在公共部门成功实施。我们表明，尽管气候服务承诺做出更好的决策，但它们主要侧重于提供更好的数据。气候科学的规范和制度在实施气候服务方面产生了三个关键矛盾：关注产品而不是过程，服务基于对需求的广泛假设而不是需求驱动，以及对产品的狭隘经济估值而不是对改进的评估在决策中。这些紧张关系有助于解释为什么气候服务经常在承诺转变的气候科学中产生名义上的变化。转型变化要求气候服务考虑到不同的社会结构、行为和背景。整合社会科学并不是需求驱动型气候服务的灵丹妙药，但它无疑是一个先决条件。