A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

38 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingresearch as a promising enterprise for their institutions. Threequartershailed from the North, and even more worked at Northerninstitutions. Over half of the authors and editors of the chapter examiningthe technical possibility of countries’ claiming carbon credit for‘additional land and forest activities’ within their borders were fromthe US, Canada or Australia – the three countries most active in demandingcredit for wooded land. 21At the same time, the panel included no representatives of indigenouspeoples who live in or depend on forests, or of communities directlyaffected by plantation projects. It included no representatives of communitiesdamaged by fossil-fuel pollution that would be licensed by‘forestry offset’ projects, who also would have had incentives to insiston better science. To the middle-class natural scientists and economistswho dominated the panel, it was likely to be simply a given thatthere were vast ‘degraded lands’ in the South (but not the North) thatcould be taken over for carbon projects without land or forests beingdegraded elsewhere as a result; that project development agenciescould do what they promised; and that it would be easy to determinefrom a distant office whether projects actually ‘saved’ carbon. Thepanel’s membership was largely mismatched with the problem it investigated.So you’re saying that offi cial climate-mitigation science is contaminated withpolitics?No. To say the science is ‘contaminated’ would imply that it’s an abnormalsituation for science to be enabled, constrained and motivatedby politics.But it’s not abnormal. It’s unavoidable. No world can exist in whichpolicy can be ‘science-led’ without science being ‘policy-led’ at thesame time. Nor would such a world be desirable. Nor would it be desirableto live in a world in which people believed such a world waspossible or desirable.What are you suggesting?Just that it would be constructive for scientists and policy makers toface the reality that ‘modern science both constitutes and is constitutedby particular forms of politics’, as Sheila Jasanoff, Professor ofScience and Public Policy at Harvard, puts it. 22 It would be helpful foreveryone simply to admit that both the answers scientists give and thequestions they ask and the way they work are influenced by funding,by policy makers’ and journalists’ questions, by market ideologies, bycultural background, by friends, by schooling and all the rest.