The legitimacy political climate institutions: Rethinking the relationship between climate science, non-epistemic values and democracy 

Abstract

Addressing global problems such as climate change requires national action and international collaboration. However, it is not clear under which circumstances national and international institution, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), that aim to politically regulate climate change, enjoy the necessary legitimacy to demand compliance from individuals and states. Initially, one might think that such institutions derive their legitimacy from the epistemic authority of well-established climate science. This view would be in alignment with a belief-based account of the grounds of political legitimacy.

However, the ubiquity of non-epistemic values in climate science undermines grounding the UNFCCC’s legitimacy purely on a belief-based account. Thus, an alternative source of legitimacy needs to be found. In this paper, we argue that an adequacy-for-purpose framework can partly explain the UNFCCC’s legitimacy in the presence of non-epistemic values in climate science. However, the use of non-epistemic values in climate science also means that we need to rethink the relationship between science and politics for the legitimacy of political institutions and political climate institutions globally.
 
Co-authored with Laura Garcia-Portela, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Technology Assessment and System Analysis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology