‘Getting the Science Right’? Epistemic Framings of Global Soil and Land Degradation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Brief summary

This manuscript proposes  a theoretical and methodological approach to investigate the link between the 'type of knowledge' produced by an international advi-sory body and the institutional features of its 'policy side', focusing on soil and land degradation. This manuscript is suitable for publication in “Land”.  

Broad comments

The manuscript is worthy, in general is well written.

The title is OK. 

Keywords: OK.

The introduction is straightforward, with a complete review of the existing literature.

Last paragraph of sub-section 2.1 repeated information presented early in the manuscript.

I think that the author should discuss more on the profile of ITPS and SPI members. The first ones, soil scientists, are more naturally biassed to environmental issues. The second ones, with different disciplines as land degradation is a broader concept,  are exposed to more interdisciplinary approaches and higher spatial scales of studies (e.g. regions), in which the weight of social science is more important.

Author Response

Thank you for your positive feedback on my manuscript. I am pleased that you consider it a valuable contribution to Land.

I agree with you that the information included in the last paragraph sub-section 2.1. is redundant. I therefore removed it to avoid repetition.

I am grateful for your suggestion to address in more detail the role of SPI and ITPS memberships, since this is an important element to be considered when discussing the institutional design of international scientific advisory bodies. Thus, I first included additional information regarding the diverse membership of the SPI, highlighting its broad regional focus as well as the presence of an observer that represents civil society (lines 219-221). Subsequently, I revised parts of the discussion to include a more explicit treatment of this aspect. In particular, I indicated that the diverse and interdisciplinary membership of the SPI is likely to have contributed to a broader and socio-economic framing of land degradation (lines 716-718), mirroring the opposite consideration pertaining to the ITPS ("a consequence of the absence of social scientists in the body's membership", line 720). Furthermore, in order to emphasize that membership is an important feature of institutional design, I added a mention to this policy-mandated aspect (along with 'policy-defined tasks') in line 727-728.

Reviewer 2 Report

 

This paper aims at assessing “how knowledge outcomes relate to institutional settings: in fact, not even work analyzing the 'type of knowledge' produced by international scientific advisory bodies”. It introduces the concept of epistemic framings to define the outcomes of the knowledge synthesis and production processes. It uses Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) (and the software Nvivo). The paper focusses on the Science-Policy Interface (SPI) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (ITPS) of the FAO Global Soil Partnership (GSP). The analysis was applied to all empirical material : both documents and interviews.

My own expert does not allow me to review the QCA methodology and the associated results.

I would have thought that Epistemic framings would be related to the reconstruction of the “socio-political processes” leading to the analyzed documents, which is not addressed in this paper (as mentioned by the author). It is not surprising to me that to that these adopted documents are very much related to the mandate of their parent organizations (the UNCCD and the GSP FAO, respectively), since they have been negotiated by Parties (e.g. for SPI-UNCCD documents).

This is my main concern and the main flaw of the paper in my view.

Moreover the results provided by this paper could not conclude;

- 'Getting the science right' remains an unattainable goal, as epistemic framings uphold the centrality of value choices in scientific advice

- Instead of 'getting the science right', scientific advisory bodies that are not institutionally independent may rather opt for 'avoiding trespassing the boundary of what is politically acceptable' within a given policy regime

Others authors have specifically addressed the  issue of science in Policy and Politics see

(Pielke, 2007)

(Crouzat et al., 2018)

Crouzat, E., Arpin, I., Brunet, L., Colloff, M.J., Turkelboom, F., Lavorel, S., 2018. Researchers must be aware of their roles at the interface of ecosystem services science and policy. Ambio 47, 97–105. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-017-0939-1

Pielke, J., Roger A., 2007. The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511818110

 

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable feedback. Your comments gave me the opportunity to adopt a self-reflexive approach to my study with a view to making my research design clearer and my findings more easily accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. Furthermore, they led me to the realization that some of the terminology and jargon that I use in the manuscript (especially the motto 'getting the science right') may not be straightforward, warranting clarification.

As I claim in the paper (and as you rightly mention), the study is not intended to reconstruct the socio-political processes leading to specific epistemic outcomes. These issues are outside the scope of the paper, as the empirical focus of the study is on the 'type of knowledge' (what? question) produced by the SPI and ITPS rather than on the processes (how? question) which led to its production (this is essentially what I describe in lines 279-286). In other words, while epistemic framings provide a hint of the socio-political dynamics at hand, they cannot map them out thoroughly. This is the reason why the findings of the study enable me to formulate only a hypothesis about the role of institutional design in shaping epistemic framings. In order to engage in depth with the influence of socio-political dynamics on epistemic framings, a different research design and methodological approach (ideally, a long-term ethnographic engagement) would have been needed. Therefore, recognizing the importance of the matter you raised, I added a sentence at the end of the paper inviting future research to build on epistemic framings as a way to open up the black box of international scientific advisory processes.

I agree with you that UN member states' influence on the work of scientific advisory bodies should not come as a surprise. However, I argue that this conclusion is not straightforward if one thinks about the rationale which led to the establishment of bodies such as the UNCCD SPI, which was set up especially to tackle the excessive politicization of the Committee on Science and Technology (CST). From a body significantly composed of "independent scientists" and tasked to "facilitate a two-way science-policy dialogue" [36], it would not be unrealistic to expect scientific assessments that are not fully aligned with the preferences of the policy side. This is precisely why I make my point about institutional design: in institutional arrangements such as those characterizing the SPI and the ITPS, there is likely to be limited room for science 'to get its space' and to 'escape' the influence of policy (I made this clear in lines 729-730, also adding the word 'direct' to underscore the dependence of SPI and ITPS to their principals in line 726).

Regarding your concerns about the two implications deriving from the study, I think there may be a misunderstanding surrounding the idea of 'getting the science right'. In fact, this motto refers here to the ideal of providing a universal, definitive and neutral scientific view on a particular environmental challenge. Therefore, claiming that it is not possible (or that it is unrealistic) 'to get the science right' does not mean pointing to alleged epistemological shortcomings of science or the scientific method. This claim rather pertains to the fact that scientific advice is a social practice that is inextricably intertwined with policy and politics (i.e., thus problematizing the ideal of a univocal and neutral scientific advice). I added two footnotes (1 and 8) to clarify this in the manuscript. I also amended the wording in lines 737, 740, 753, 753 in order to convey this message more clearly.

Finally, I thank you for the literature suggestions, which corroborate the argument about the key role of values in scientific advice. I am familiar with Pielke's conceptual framework (and the 'honest broker' ideal-type) and find it useful to theorize about the agency and positionality of scientific advisors. However, I think it has limited applicability to the scope of my research design. In fact, my study is primarily concerned with providing a starting point to map out the factors and power relations that influence international scientific advice.

Reviewer 3 Report

Review comments on land-1839464

'Getting the science right'? Epistemic framings of global soil and land degradation

 

Dear Editor,

I Found the subject of prime interest and I can not hide I was very exited after reading the title and the first sentence of the abstract “International environmental advisory bodies are tasked with the daunting challenge of collecting and synthesizing knowledge about a specific is-sue-area by speaking.

Indeed, Lynas stating in his 2021 study (environmental research letters) that since 2012, 88,125 scientific articles have dealt with climate change and that among the 3,000 analyzed by this author, 2,972 confirmed the global consensus of a human impact on climate change, while 28 invalidated the hypothesis. It is on the basis of this consensus built for several decades now and reported per see by IPCC to policy makers that a coordinated fight against greenhouse gas emissions is taking shape. Descartes in the discourse on the “Method” warned however that in matters of Science “The unanimity of opinions is not valid proof”. Concerning climate change and its human impact, many scientists claim that there is an absence of experimental proof of a link between CO2 content and air warming but yet IPCC, based on theoretical studies from the 60s claims that there is a consensus on the link between atmospheric GES concentration and Earth warming. The same applies with land degradation were the “consensus” is that soil tillage, lack of cover crops or trees, pesticides and inorganic fertilizers lead to soil degradation while all meta studies on the subject point to a lack of impact of these factors while large exports of nutrients by agricultural products seems the main reason (Chaplot and Smith, Pedosphere 2022). If the Science claimed by these international institutions was right, how can we explain that land degradation still continues, including where the international community intervened/acted the most?

This is where I was expecting the paper to lead us and in this context to suggest ways to get the Science right! However, the author made me lost with the rest of the abstract, the introduction with terminologies such as “epistemic framings”, while the author could have used examples such as stated above to get a clearer message.

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback. I am pleased to see that this topic is attracting the interest of members of the scientific community engaged in making sense of the global challenges of soil and land degradation.

You touch upon important questions in both the philosophy and sociology of science (such as the matter of scientific 'consensus') in which I am eager to engage, although it is not possible to address them comprehensively in the scope of the paper. However, I hope my paper can contribute to these debates, including the idea of scientific advice as a practice that can hardly be insulated from socio-political dynamics and considerations.

In my response to the comments made by Reviewer 2, I clarified that­ ­— within the framework of the paper — the motto 'getting the science right' pertains to the ideal of achieving a universal and absolute scientific truth about an environmental issue. I specified that a key difficulty in putting this motto into practice is not related to alleged epistemological shortcomings of science, but to the inevitable interconnection between science and politics. Your feedback gives me the opportunity to improve this characterization by clarifying that 'getting the science right' is not about matters of 'closure' and 'scientific consensus'. While the latter may not be immune from the influence of social processes, they are more associated with internal scientific debates (e.g., about the biophysical drivers of land degradation) rather than with the broader 'framing' of an environmental issue. I included a sentence in footnote 8 to specify this.

In light of the above, the results of my study do not put me in a position to make normative claims about 'how' to get the science right. As I argue in the discussion, blindly following this mantra is actually misleading. Nevertheless, I hope my contribution has given an appreciation of the weight of 'framing' in international scientific advice on soil and land degradation. Thus, in the conclusion, I now suggest that building on the concept of epistemic framings may open new avenues to investigate not only the power relations surrounding international scientific advice, but also the persistence of global environmental challenges, including soil and land degradation.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Author,

 

Thank you for the revised manuscript. To me you have not addressed in this revised version the fact that your analysis seems to be performed on adopted document after negotiation. Scientific technical background papers issued, prior to negotiation, would have provided with material closer to the science perspective. To me this point needs to be raised in your paper.

Author Response

Thank you for further highlighting this aspect, which – I agree – deserves to be addressed explicitly in the paper. I have included a mention to this issue in the research design section (footnote 7), specifying that official documents are usually adopted after close interaction with secretariats and that, often, formal political negotiation processes are also involved.