ABSTRACT
This book shows how biodiversity policy and science have emerged as mutually constituted fields of societal action. In this final chapter, I will analyse the dynamics leading to the establishment of the IPBES and address the question of how knowledge enables institutional change within highly controversial political settings. The focus on knowledge, rather than on Hajer’s discourses, rests on the assumption that knowledge production processes themselves are selectively structured, as is the policy and politics context within which knowledge emerges. Policy knowledge and politics knowledge – and this is what my analysis reveals – are congruent and strategically bound. This insight helps us to understand how and why institutions emerge within relative stable socio-economic environments and patterns. In what follows, I will link the empirical material to the theoretical assumptions. To this end, I will run through the events leading to the establishment of the IPBES, connecting its institutional configuration to related narratives, dynamics, strategies and interests. In doing so I will reveal the spatio-temporal patterns involved in the constitution of the IPBES; I will also systemise the epistemic selectivity approach, in particular its application to the case study and the politics of knowledge of global biodiversity.
