“We are not droids”– IPCC participants’ senses of responsibility and affective experiences across the production, assessment, communication and enactment of climate science

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank all research participants for their time and insights. The author is also grateful to Kari De Pryck, Abbie Greig, Maximilian Gregor Hepach and Mike Hulme as well as the participants of the CCLAD workshop at UCL for their helpful comments. Finally, the author thanks the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editors for their critical engagement with the manuscript and their important feedback. ; The growing understanding of how and why the climate is changing has led to mounting calls on climate scientists to take on more responsibility in the context of climate science. While an increasing responsibilisation takes place in the academic literature, asking scientists to “do more”, there is limited engagement with the responsibilities that scientists already assume in practice. Drawing on novel empirical insights from 77 semi-structured interviews with participants of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I take the increasing ‘peer-to-peer responsibilisation’ as a point of departure to contextualise such calls, asking what scientists themselves already feel and assume responsibility for at both the personal and professional level. I find that climate experts participating in the IPCC not only assume increasing responsibility across different stages of the IPCC process but also beyond. As my data analysis demonstrates, IPCC participants increasingly feel and take on responsibility not only for producing and assessing climate science but also for communicating and/or enacting it (PACE). The contribution of the article is threefold. Firstly, it makes sense of the mounting peer-to-peer responsibilisation by surfacing and contextualising how, why and with what consequences particular climate knowledge holders already assume responsibility for climate science at four key moments (PACE). Secondly, conceiving of the IPCC as a community of practice, the article provides novel insights into the work of IPCC participants and their individual experiences with ...