Ecologies of Integrated Modeling : Configuring Policy-Relevance in Swedish Climate Governance

Linköpings universitet, Tema teknik och social förändring Linköpings universitet, Filosofiska fakulteten Linköpings universitet, Centrum för klimatpolitisk forskning, CSPR Lausanne 2023

Andersson, Daniel

Due to the long timescales and deep uncertainties involved, comprehensive model-building has played a pivotal role in creating shared expectations about future trajectories for addressing climate change processes, mobilizing a network of knowledge-based experts who assist in defining common problems, identifying policy solutions, and assessing the policy outcomes. At the intersection between climate change science and climate governance, where wholly empirical methods are infeasible, numerical simulations have become the central practice for evaluating truth claims, and the key medium for the transport and translation of data, methods, and guiding principles among the actors involved. What makes integrated assessment unique as a comprehensive modeling-effort is that it is explicitly policy-oriented, justified by its policy-relevance. Although recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as invaluable to their review assessments, the role of integrated modeling in implementations of the Paris Agreement, such as in impact assessments of climate legislation on the national level, is far less known. Taking as its starting-point the boundary-work carried out in public administration, this paper examines how foresight knowledge produced with the help of model-based scenario analysis has been made relevant in Swedish climate policymaking, focusing on the processes by which key indicators for political action become institutionalized through the choice and use of model parameters. It concludes by arguing for an expanded understanding of policy-relevance, beyond institutional approaches and toward a process-based point of view, treating relevance as something in-the-making.
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas) under Grant 2019-01973.

Climate mitigation; integrated assessment; model-based forecast; scenario analysis; science-policy interface; policy-relevance; Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology); Sociologi (exklusive socialt arbete, socialpsykologi och socialantropologi); Social Sciences Interdisciplinary; Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap; Article in journal; info:eu-repo/semantics/article; text

10.3389.fclim.2023.1159860

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