Responsible Research and Governance at the Science-Policy Nexus of Climate Change: New Discourses, Epistemic Communities and Climate Policy Regimes through Climate Engineering?

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Climate engineering (CE) is an emerging field of research and technology development at the intersection of climate science and climate policy, potentially dislocating the established boundaries between them by adding large-scale climate intervention to the predominant portfolio of mitigation and adaptation policies. The proposed project aims at better understanding if, how, and to what extent CE has played a role in the ways that the global challenge of climate change has been addressed both scientifically and politically. CE-SciPol2 will build on the research conducted in the first phase of SPP 1689, expanding both its empirical focus and analytical perspectives. CE-SciPol2 will (1) examine how notions of responsible research and governance of CE have been shaped within and across multiple arenas of science, policy-making and civil society. Applying both quantitative and qualitative methods of discourse analysis, we will further investigate how actors concerned with CE define problems and approach solutions in climate change research and governance, and how they position themselves to the various issues at stake, such as knowledge quality, risk management, acceptability, legitimacy, and climate policy design. In addition to the comprehensive corpus of documents from the natural sciences, we will systematically consider documents from the social sciences, law, and humanities, examining the distinct views on CE-related controversies they provide together with the argumentative dynamics across arenas. On this basis, we will (2) identify distinct epistemic communities with respect to how they assess the acceptability of CE-related research, technology development, and governance approaches, along with the credibility and legitimacy of climate policy, including the established international climate change regime. The project will explore, also through expert interviews and participant observation, the contested articulations and valuations of CE approaches against the background of different disciplines of science and engineering and of different institutional domains. We will (3) also observe the extent to which the established climate change regime has come under pressure in the aftermath of COP21, leading either to its weakening or strengthening. Hereby, we will pay particular attention to how the IPCC has been assessing the risks, challenges, and opportunities of CE approaches, and how such assessments have been taken up and implemented in regulatory and policy frameworks dedicated to govern CE research, experimentation, technology deployment, as well as climate change mitigation. Ongoing developments in climate policy will be considered to better understand whether or not CE will further gain acknowledgement as a "third option" of climate policy.