This chapter aims to redescribe the IPCC through the analytical framework of the book by identifying the actors, activities and forms of authority that shape the organisation and its assessment practice. Reviewing existing studies of the IPCC, the chapter begins by identifying two central concerns within this scholarship: first, the relationship between science and politics and second, the asymmetries between developed and developing country participation. The chapter contributes to this literature by using the framework of the book to identify the IPCC as five distinct units: the panel, the bureau, the technical support units (TSUs), the secretariat and the authors. This identifies other forms of authority that matter alongside scientific and political forms, most importantly the administrative, as found within the TSUs. Describing the historical emergence of the social order over thirty years and six assessment cycles reveals the relationship between economic capital and meaningful participation. It requires economic and human resources to undertake IPCC activities, and it through this investment individual actors and member government becomes meaningful and authoritative participants, with knowledge of and the symbolic power to write the meaning of climate change.

The most widely read and influential component of the IPCC’s practice of writing is the summary for policymakers (SPM), where the key messages of the underlying report are presented in short sentences and figures to facilitate travel into the media, ministers’ speeches and UNFCCC negotiations. The aim of this chapter is to describe the politics of approval. The chapter begins the historical emergence of this practice and documents the tactics and strategies available to co-chairs, authors and delegates to influence the final outcome. Documenting participation in the authorship and approval of the SPM again illuminates the asymmetries revealed in previous chapters, but also highlights the growing presence of some developing countries in the process. This is evident in the content that has initiated some of the greatest struggle – the categorisation of developing versus developed countries. This account reveals that the forces structuring the final stage of the IPCC’s practice of writing originate in the broader global struggle to determine the meaning of climate change and continue after the approval, only now with a new SPM to substantiate national positions in the negotiation of the collective response.

I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.

This chapter sets out to identify key conceptual resources available for exploring power in the social construction of global environmental degradation for collective response. The chapter begins with the epistemic community model, which illuminates the role that transnational communities of scientists have in identifying issues like climate change and informing political action. This approach has been important for documenting the origins and establishment of the IPCC in 1988. However, empirical accounts informed by discursive and normative frameworks in other issue areas challenge the centrality of scientists in treaty formation. The studies reviewed identify the emergence of environmental issues as the source of new institutions; however, they also highlight how problem diagnosis has to converge with prevailing political and economic orders. Revisiting the IPCC’s emergence through the idiom of co-production at the end of the chapter, reveals how climate change had to be transformed into a global problem to fit with the existing remit of international organisation.

In the concluding chapter, I look back at the question I began with and the answer I found in the practice of writing. I re-visit accounts of science and politics and describe the three sides to this relationship that I observed in the IPCC. I identify sites within the UNFCCC that have been designed to bring climate science and climate politics closer together, such as in the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement. While this brings accountability against the approved knowledge base, it is likely to further increase the political pressure on the IPCC as an organisation and as a practice for writing climate change. From the IPCC’s location in global climate politics, I move inward to the actors, activities and forms of authority that constitute and shape this practice of writing. The book reveals the importance of looking beyond scientific and political forms of authority and describes why the TSUs matter as actors that have the potential to uphold or challenge the scientific order of relations. I explore the implications of science as a site of politics, the global asymmetries in the knowledge economy, and their effects on participation for the design of new intergovernmental assessment bodies, which from the outset must design for meaningful participation by all in these critical sites of agreement-making.

This chapter describes the initiation of a new assessment cycle and identifies two events as central components of the IPCC’s practice of writing: the bureau election and the approval of the outline. In describing the steps informing the panel’s decision to repeat the assessment cycle, it becomes apparent that the content of the next assessment is in formation before the new bureau is elected and scoping and outlining begin. Once the formal decision to repeat the assessment is adopted by the panel, it is not just a new report that begins to take shape, the organisation itself undergoes a process of renewal as the leadership of the next assessment is elected and the technical and administrative units that will support its production are put in place. The bureau election has a considerable impact on the distribution of symbolic power in the panel and Wikileaks reveals the extent of backstage manoeuvring by countries to get their preferred candidate elected. Member government’s stakes in the newly emerging assessment increase further with the approval of the outline. The outline provides a guide to the authors in the form of titles and bullets that identify the topics to be assessed and governments are attentive to the language used in anticipation for the potential impact the final contents will have on how climate change is negotiated within the UNFCCC.

The aim of this chapter is to reconceptualise climate politics as a struggle to name the problem and thereby determine how it is known and acted upon. I suggest that underpinning the visible elements of contestation over the reality of climate change, who is responsible and by how much, is a struggle over order – the distribution of economic, social and political resources and the values that organise it as such. Describing the politics of climate change as a field of activity orientated around determining the meaning of the problem enables me to situate the IPCC centrally within this struggle as the key site in producing international assessments of the issue. The IPCC’s role in establishing collective interest in climate change and the knowledge base for action has generated the structures and forces in which the IPCC as an organisation and method for producing authoritative ways to know climate change has emerged, which in the book, I identify as the IPCC’s practice of and for writing climate change.

This chapter describes the journey that the scientific assessment travels from author nomination through to the drafting and reviewing of the emerging report, and explores the social scientific order that structures and imprints on the IPCC’s writing of climate change through the process. It is in the initial stages of the scientific assessment, in the government nomination and author selection processes, that asymmetries in global knowledge of climate change and their effects become apparent. While developed countries have institutionalised processes for identifying and nominating experts, the majority of developing countries do not submit any author nominations. Once compiled, it is scientific conventions and measures of authority that are used to select and appoint the expertise necessary to fulfil the government approved outline of the report. However, when these activities are situated in broader patterns and practices of knowledge production, it becomes apparent that these reproduce the structures and exclusions of the existing global knowledge economy. These asymmetries are also apparent in the order of relations in the author teams and the submission of government review comments, which reduces the space for more diverse understandings and knowledges of climate change that are relevant to and reflect the interests and needs of all IPCC member governments. The IPCC has attempted to address these asymmetries through selection criteria and other mechanisms to shape the social order of authorship, which to date have proven more successful in broadening gender representation than ensuring the full participation of developing country authors in the assessment.