Controversial Practices: Tracing the Proceduralization of the IPCC in Time and Space
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Kari De Pryck |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12910 |
Controversial Practices: Tracing the
Proceduralization of the IPCC in Time and Space
Kari De Pryck
Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS)
Abstract
This paper starts from the premise that international practices are neither stable nor universal but are in fact the product of
time and space. It analyzes the processes of formalization and change in international practices using the case of the Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an intergovernmental institution producing regular assessment of the state of the
knowledge on climate change. The IPCC is particularly interesting because of the numerous external and internal controversies
that it has faced since its establishment in 1988 and the institutional and organizational changes that they triggered. The
paper highlights the potential of controversies as methodological occasions to observe the situatedness of international prac-
tices and trace change over time. Controversies represent moments of contention in which the normalizing and universalistic
effect of routines and procedures is momentarily suspended, thus facilitating the investigation of the particular space and time
in which practices evolve.
Policy Implications
•While international organizations often seek to minimize controversies, they should use these moments to reflect on their
practices and procedures and open up deliberative processes.
•International organizations should avoid imposing procedures and guidelines that poorly represent individual practices
and situational experiences. They should involve a greater number of participants in their production to increase their
legitimacy.
•The history of the IPCC shows that the introduction of procedures has not protected the organization from controversies
and has instead made the assessment process more cumbersome. The IPCC should take these historical developments
into account when thinking about introducing new rules of procedure.
1. The practices and procedures of international
organizations
In international relations (IR), the interest in the practices of
international organizations (IOs) has emerged with the
increased attention paid to their agency. While the early
‘principal-agent approach’(Hawkins and Jacoby, 2006)
emphasized the strategies used by states to control them,
recent works have shifted the focus from the structural fac-
tors that constrain them to the micro-practices that IOs and
their staff employ to gain independence and authority.
While their autonomy varies from one organization to the
other and from one period to the other, IOs find room for
maneuver, produce and reinterpret rules, cooperate with
third parties and manage to escape states’control. IOs also
use their resources to create categories of problems, stabi-
lize meanings and diffuse norms (Barnett and Finnemore,
2004; Biermann and Siebenh€
uner, 2009).
In this context, IOs are seen as ‘bundles of individual and
collective practices woven together and producing specific
outcomes’(Cornut, 2018, p. 713). The focus on practices,
encouraged by the practice turn in international relations
(PTIR), has contributed to a better understanding of IOs’
day-to-day activities both at the headquarters and in the
field (Græger, 2017; M€
uller, 2018; Niezen and Sapignoli,
2017). It helped reconstruct the production and diffusion of
international documents and artefacts (Adler-Nissen and Dri-
eschova 2020; Dimitrov, 2016; Fresia, 2014; Maertens and
Parizet, 2017; Siroux, 2008); following the strategies of
marginalized actors to internationalize their voices (Suiseeya
and Zanotti, 2019); and exploring IOs as sites of knowledge
generation (Bueger, 2015). The PTIR has also contributed to
open up the debate about change in the practices of IOs
following constraints and opportunities that are both
endogenous and exogenous, cultural and material (Bode,
2018; Hopf, 2018).
In this article, I draw on insights from PTIR and science
and technology studies (STS) to explore IOs as "a dense
space which hosts practices, maintains and sustains old
ones, or invents new ones" (Bueger, 2015, p. 5). I investigate
how IOs seek to organize and routinize practices through
procedures and how those same procedures are diffused,
transformed and contested in time and space (for a general
discussion of time and space in the study of IOs see Maer-
tens et al., this issue). The contribution of this article is two-
fold. First, it reveals the situatedness of international
©2020 Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Global Policy (2022) 12:Suppl.7 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12910
Global Policy Volume 12 . Supplement 7 . December 2021
80
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