From negotiators to scientists: Designing incubators of authoritative knowledge

More than 2800 environmental treaties have been signed since 1945. The scientific uncertainty underlying several environmental issues explains that many of these treaties establish an international scientific committee to advise policy makers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the best known of these committees, but it is far from the only one. Numerous scientific committees are specifically created by environmental treaties. Each has a different design, including in their membership and their function. International scientific committees must generate authoritative knowledge to favor international cooperation. This is particularly true at a time when populist discourses openly question the authority of scientific knowledge. This raises the following research question: How does the design of international scientific committees increases the epistemic authority of scientific knowledge ? Combining literatures on institutional design and the sociological studies of science and technology, this project will verify the following hypothesis: International scientific committees whose institutional design is characterized by a heterogeneity of actors and an interactivity between science and politics will produce the knowledge with the highest epistemic authority.