The Brazilian Panel on Climate Change: Integration with Global North Science or a Source of Counter-Expertise?

• In Event: How Has Climate Change Reshaped Scientific Expertise and the Expert? - III

Abstract

In this paper I argue that because climate change is at the same time a scientific, political, and geopolitical issue, it may lead to very distinct ways of conceiving and deploying scientific expertise within national contexts. To do so I examine two different efforts towards creating in the late 2000s a Brazilian Panel on Climate Change (BPCC). The first one, which effectively came into reality, and was conceived by Brazilian scientists, consisted of mirroring the IPCC in Brazil. In other words, it is an expert panel that reviews the Brazilian climate literature and produce reports aiming to inform policy-making at the national level. The other version of the BPCC, conceived by an important Brazilian policy-maker, and which never materialised, intended to bring together some of the most prestigious Brazilian climate experts so as to respond to supposed scientific inaccuracies about Brazil in the IPCC reports. These inaccuracies would be particularly problematic as they would imply that Brazil emitted more greenhouse gases that it actually does. In both cases, scientific expertise was expected to be politically useful, either as a resource for internal policy-making or as counter-expertise to be mobilised by Brazilian negotiators within the international climate regime. However, they were based on different relations of (dis)trust when it comes to Global North climate experts and sought to interact with them in distinct ways: in one case, through integration, in the other, through controversy. This paper is based on interviews with climate scientists and policy-makers as well as on documentary analysis.

Author

• Tiago Ribeiro Duarte, University of Brasília