A media storm in the world risk society: enacting scientific authority in the IPCC controversy ( )

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1 Critical Policy Studies ISSN: (Print) X (Online) Journal homepage: A media storm in the world risk society: enacting scientific authority in the IPCC controversy ( ) Maarten A. Hajer To cite this article: Maarten A. Hajer (2012) A media storm in the world risk society: enacting scientific authority in the IPCC controversy ( ), Critical Policy Studies, 6:4, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 03 Jan Submit your article to this journal Article views: 178 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [University of Groningen] Date: 04 October 2016, At: 05:39

2 Critical Policy Studies Vol. 6, No. 4, December 2012, FORUM A media storm in the world risk society: enacting scientific authority in the IPCC controversy ( ) Maarten A. Hajer* University of Amsterdam and Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), Amsterdam, Netherlands The reports on errors in the IPCC assessment reports on climate change caused a media storm in the winter of At the time Maarten Hajer was, as he still is, Director of Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which was responsible for one of the mistakes. The PBL was subsequently asked by the Dutch parliament to investigate the likelihood of there being more mistakes in the IPCC reports. In this article he reflects on the uses of deliberative theories of governance in handling this crisis in the authority of science. Keywords: science policy interface; IPCC; climate change; assessment; deliberative governance; authority; PBL : The winter of discontent When it comes to the science and politics of climate change, the winter of may well go down as the winter of discontent. First there was the news of the s from the University of East Anglia (either hacked or leaked, it is still unclear) in November 2009, which suggested unethical behavior among climate scientists; then the failure to make serious political progress at the COP15 at Copenhagen in December 2009; and finally the news of errors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on the melting glaciers in the Himalayas. In this winter of discontent a 20-year span of focused international environmental diplomacy was interrupted. In the late 1980s political concern over climate change had led to new institutional arrangements to facilitate concerted action on climate change, most notably the creation of the IPCC and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Now this arrangement was, quite unexpectedly, challenged. The question was, whether the very set up of global science (IPCC) for policy (UNFCCC) was still credible. What was at stake was the authority of the IPCC as an institutional interface between science and politics. Then, on 4 February 2010, the international press reported another error in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of It followed the error in the meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers (that were reported as likely to melt away by 2035 instead of around 2350). The new error concerned the percentage of the Netherlands that was below sea level. The crucial sentence read: * m.a.hajer@uva.nl ISSN print/issn X online 2012 Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham

3 Critical Policy Studies 453 The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55% of its territory is below sea level where 60% of its population lives and 65% of its Gross National Product (GNP) is produced. (Alcamo et al. 2007, p. 547) This was not correct: only 26% of the Netherlands is below sea level (c.f. Figure 1). On the other hand: 55% of the country is at risk of flooding through its proximity to the 26% of the country that is below sea level, and there is another 29% which is susceptible to river flooding. In the Low Countries the water comes from above and below, from the north, the east, the south and the west. 1 A trivial error? Perhaps, but a media storm was the result. It was another error that had made it into the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (2007) and now this had been spotted. Only a few hours later I learned that it was the agency I had headed since 2008, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), which had been responsible for this particular section of the text of the IPCC report. Here was a case in which expert authority was problematized, directly, and with major reporting in the media. Being the director of the PBL I suddenly found myself in the midst of a political controversy. Rather than studying environmental politics and policymaking from a comfortable academic armchair in the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam, I was now in the eye of the storm, answering questions from radio stations, newspapers and weeklies both domestic and foreign and explaining what had happened on the Figure 1. Flood prone areas in the Netherlands. Source: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency / Rijkswaterstaat-Waterdienst (2010b), PBL website,

4 454 M.A. Hajer news programs of competing television channels, as well as being the object of sardonic criticism in the blogosphere. Things became even more complicated as Jacqueline Cramer, then Dutch minister for the environment, publicly declared she would not tolerate any further mistakes from the climate scientists. Under heavy fire from a right wing opposition in parliament she argued she would commission an investigation to see if there were more errors in the IPCC report: Politics has to know if it can still rely on the science. Through an ironic twist, the PBL, as an independent assessment agency working for the government, was called on to conduct this investigation for the cabinet and the Dutch parliament in February It was published in July 2010 (PBL 2010b, Strengers et al. in press). Being in the media storm, and subsequently being in charge of the research that was to help parliament to assess the seriousness of the crisis of authority at the IPCC, provided me with insights into the dynamics surrounding the authority of science in the world risk society a community of which I was happily a part. The account below is a reflection on this period, hopefully avoiding any misguided self-aggrandizement, but in a way that is helpful for thinking about how we employ scientific expertise in dealing with climate change, and, more particularly, in assessing the value of the practices of deliberative governance. The uses of deliberative theory The PBL, the Netherlands Assessment Agency, is a research institute that functions as an interface between science and policy. The PBL works for the cabinet and parliament of the Netherlands (cf. Pesch et al. 2012). Its director sits in on cabinet meetings and presents evaluations and evidence to parliament. When I took up the job, an academic colleague said: Now practice what you preach! Now, the question was whether my own and my colleagues academic writing on deliberative governance (Dryzek 1990, Hajer and Wagenaar 2003, Hajer 2009) could provide me with a useful approach to being a scientific advisor. And with the IPCC crisis, the question was whether it could also suggest an effective way to deal with this crisis of authority. In the steering committee that I set up at the PBL following the incident of the error we decided to develop and employ a deliberative or reflexive repertoire of governance in our investigation. It thus became a test of whether such practices could be drawn on to respond to the sudden challenge to our institutional authority. Deliberative democracy is a normative political theory. But would a deliberative repertoire prove itself as useful for restoring and extending the authority of science and expertise in the midst of a mediatized crisis? Coming from a background as a scholar of public policy, I wondered if the work on discursive democracy (e.g. Dryzek 1990), deliberative policy analysis (e.g. Hajer and Wagenaar 2003), frame-reflective policy discourse (Rein and Schon 1993), transparency (Fung et al. 2007), science and technology studies (STS, e.g. Jasanoff 1990, 2005) or deliberative democracy, trust and authority (e.g. Warren 1996) could provide guidance as to how to handle our role in the midst of a fierce debate over the authority of climate science and the IPCC. What is more, my own analysis of authoritative governance, published only half a year earlier (Hajer 2009), was to be put to the test. Authoritative Governance tries to answer the question of how authoritative governance is possible in our day and age. It highlights the central role of the media as a challenge to authority. Central to the argument of the book is that the media reinforce the idea of a centre of decision-making, an idea that elected politicians help to reproduce only too happily ( I just decided that... ). Yet at the same time sociology points to the emergence of a sub politics since the 1980s (Beck

5 Critical Policy Studies ); and empirical work in the field of public policy and government keeps finding that government has been taking place in shifting networks, often with no obvious center to decision-making, since the 1990s (e.g. Kickert et al. 1997). Instead, policymaking is conceptualized as a range of interconnected places and situations in which a range of decisions is made. The book approaches this by reconstructing two dimensions: firstly discourse (what is being said, what vocabularies are employed and to what effect, etc.) and secondly dramaturgy (how it is being said, where and to whom). Taken together these constitute a theory of policymaking as performance. This theory of governance can also be applied to understanding the way in which the authority of the IPCC or indeed the PBL was put to the test. Authority is not something one can possess. It is not a feature or by-product of a particular function or institutional role. In our mediatized world, hierarchy is cancelled out. A variety of opinions is easily accessible, critique is easily presented, and authority is more easily lost than gained. In Hajer (2009) I go back to Carl Friedrich, who recaptured a sense of authority that is interesting to consider in this context. He spoke of authority that rests on the ability to issue communications which are capable of reasoned elaboration (Friedrich 1958, p. 29). Friedrich starts from authority s etymological origins (auctoritas, augere), which stress the importance of reasoning for authority (Friedrich 1958, cf. Friedrich 1972, pp ). So, a piece of advice is authoritative if it cannot be disregarded. I use the example of the expert and the layman. Is it impossible to disregard expert advice because an expert is speaking to a layman? Is it the arguments and reasons that the expert can give that make the layman accept his claim? Or is it something in the way that an expert speaks to a layman that lends authority to this communication? Or is it a combination of these? (Hajer 2009, p. 20) This communication is of course about more than just arguments. There is a performative element to authority (Friedman 1990, p. 79). So even if the IPPC was given the status of being in authority when the UN General Assembly decided to establish it, it is not enough to be authoritative in our mediatized age. The de jure authority needs to be supported by a de facto authority which comes from acting out their role in a sequence of concrete situations. If authority is achieved through communication, it can be won or lost. Warren (1996) suggested we need a discursive model of authority; I suggest we need to elaborate this further and use a performative model of authority based on what is said, to whom and how. If authority can be performed, there may be repertoires of how to do this well. In the media storm of the question was whether a deliberative repertoire could help in coming up with an authoritative assessment. Handling a crisis deliberatively Between February and July 2010 some 35 researchers of the PBL contributed to an investigation of the IPCC s fourth assessment report, checking the text for more errors. This assignment nearly split the institute (in total some 250 full-time equivalent (FTE), of which approximately 200 FTE researchers) in two. About half the academic staff were convinced this was an assignment that could only do damage to the IPCC and would lead to the demise of the PBL as an internationally respected research institute; the other half argued there was no choice and we should act on the parliamentary request in a responsible way. A small subsection of the latter half saw it as a challenge and regarded it as an important experiment in an attempt to find a new form of scientific governance. There was no lack of attention for our investigation. We found ourselves in the line of fire between the climate science community on the one hand and the skeptics on the

6 456 M.A. Hajer other. For both we could do no good. The international scientific community that had all been involved in the IPCC assessments was deeply suspicious of the PBL investigation and accused us of being irresponsible by taking this on (that there had not been much of a choice once we were mentioned in parliament, was quickly forgotten). The skeptics, on the other hand, saw us as a clear part of the climate science community: the PBL had been involved in the fourth assessment itself! They coined two effective phrases: here was a case of a butcher testing his own meat, and, locally more effective, they spoke of WC-eend onderzoek, or Toilet Duck research, after a well-known Dutch commercial for a lavatory cleaner in which a would be laboratory scientist says: We from Toilet Duck, recommend Toilet Duck! Taking representations in the media seriously, our strategy was to avoid this Toilet Duck effect from the outset. The crucial thing here was to create what we called a third space : to avoid using any terms that would place us in either camp. Secondly, we aimed to make the investigation an example of how to conduct further climate assessment work: not only being open and transparent, but also making every effort to engage the interested actors in a deliberation on what should be investigated, and on how to make sense of our results. A classic take on this sort of investigation might have been to focus on control, on containment of information, and to use the press conference on the report as a first media moment. We decided otherwise. As part of our deliberative approach we sought to create a public sphere for the debate. We invited some of the most eloquent international critics of the IPCC to a seminar at the PBL. For these seminars we also invited the skeptic bloggers and scientists who had been alienated by the IPCC climate community. Hans von Storch, Mike Hulme and Steve Rayner had each in their own particular way been very critical and agreed to come and speak on the topic of academic quality in IPCC assessment work. It was a stunning experience. Some of the critical voices from within the scientific community were emotional about the fact that they were now finally heard and had their say in an official government exercise. An indication of the extent to which the climate science debate had become politicized and the communities split. Another action spoke to the fact that the media framed the IPCC as being a closed community, an ivory tower, a castle. To avoid the PBL itself being accused of being elitist and arrogant, I announced in a televised news program that the agency would open a public website where everybody could report instances of possible errors in the IPCC report. While the critical half of the PBL researchers nearly had a fit, and others frantically set about thinking how the PBL could deliver on this promise, this communicative act had much bigger effects that we either anticipated or could have hoped for. The website became the symbol of the PBL s open assessment procedure. Journalists would always refer to it in their communications ( any news from the website? How many people have responded? Any useful contributions on the website? ). It suggested that it was the alleged arrogance of scientists that enraged the media and the public, while the new commitment to openness at least intrigued (for a timeline of events, see Figure 2). Blogging as a deliberative tool In all of this we profited from an initiative we had taken just months before the investigation started. In the lead up to the Copenhagen climate conference (2009), we had agreed to a blog on the website of the 8 o clock news. In this blog one of our climate researchers had a weekly exchange with one of the leading and most vocal Dutch climate skeptics, Hans Labohm. Although we had no idea how this would work, it had an important effect. The

7 Critical Policy Studies 457 January/February February March March / April May June 4 July Errors found Minister commissions PBL to examine IPCC reports; Various appearances in radio and television talk shows; Announcement of public website to help find errors Organization external review; Seminars with major critics from climate community; Skeptic bloggers invited to PBL Interaction with IPCC authors; Parliamentary hearings Internal and external reviews Preparing the political ground Publication of report in Dutch and English press conference Figure 2. Basic timeline of the PBL investigation of the IPCC s Fourth Assessment Report (2010). idea of the blog was that the two protagonists would constantly respond to each other. This led to a deliberative format which cancelled out one feature of the traditional way in which the skeptics communicate: they tend to repeat the same arguments time and again, often for different audiences. This allows skeptics to keep making arguments that have long been refuted by scientists (like the urban heat island effect, or the frequent employment of 1998 a particularly hot year as a base year). The format of a dialogue exposed this as claims were refuted: Hey Hans, I noticed you used this graph again in your presentation to parliament. But I had shown you this was wrong, so why did you use it again?. The format also led to different types of exchanges and irony and even humor slipped in as the two contestants quarreled on a bet as to whether 2011 would be hotter than average or not, and what would be a fair way to measure that. The fact that we had agreed to this blog was first of all seen as a sign of recognition of the skeptics who, more than anything else, felt excluded. The irony was that both parties once involved were very happy: Labohm with his recognition; and the PBL as it allowed us to communicate the state of climate science to a different audience, one that was not reached at all by our formal reports to the cabinet and parliament. IPCC and deliberation Over the 20 years of its existence, the IPCC had developed its own repertoire. It is a strange mix of positivist speaking truth to power elements ( science is now 90% certain that... ) and deliberative elements, as represented by the way in which it reaches agreement on the crucial Summary for Policy Makers. The IPCC reports are 3000-plus pages of summaries of the state of knowledge on selected topics. They are often referred to as the bricks. The summary for policymakers is the digest of the most relevant findings, and therefore by far the most important mechanism linking science to politics. The photo below (Figure 3), taken by Gerbrand Komen, who was a member of the Dutch delegation in 2007, shows how the IPCC uses the MS Word track changes technique in a plenary meeting in which policymakers and scientists agree on the text. The crucial point is that they have two competing interests: scientists want a fair representation of the science, policymakers want a statement that their politicians can live with.

8 458 M.A. Hajer Figure 3. The use of MS Word track changes by the IPCC at the Paris meeting in February Photo credit: Gerbrand Komen. This sort of boundary work is crucial for the policy process, but at the same time easily misunderstood. The IPCC is often criticized for not being purely scientific but that is missing the point. To judge the IPCC by scientific criteria is to miss the essence of its organizational practice which is, indeed, a political framing in itself. After all, the IPCC is an example of assessment work. It does not do research itself but rather works with selected scientists who, together, are expected to cover a certain theme / knowledge area. The goal is to supply the best available knowledge in support of good political and administrative decision-making. This is not at all easy, as science chooses its own issues for investigation, and its own case studies, which means that the available scientific evidence may differ from policy issue to policy issue. In the case of the IPCC, it meant that the effects of climate change were far less well-researched in some parts of the world (e.g. Africa) than others (North America in particular). Assessment should therefore be seen as a specific institutional practice, with its own rules, its own do s and don ts. One of our tasks was to explain what the IPCC really was. Part of the trouble was, after all, that the IPCC was judged by a standard that was not applicable to its work as assessment panel. How facts travel As it was impossible to reassess 3000 pages of the IPCC s Fourth Assessment Report in three months, we decided to focus on the regional chapters of Working Group II, this being the place where the reported errors had been found. Inspired by Mary Morgan (2010) we looked how facts travelled from academic research to the crucial Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). After all, these were the most important, selected facts that were used to underpin the case for action. Starting in the SPM we traced the origin of particular claims all the way to the original reference (Figure 4).

9 Critical Policy Studies 459 Figure 4. Regional chapter analysis pyramid. Source: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (2010b). It quickly became obvious that the climate science community was not amused by this undertaking. Questions about the origin of claims in the IPCC report were met with outright hostility. Defending the institutional take of the IPCC, Joe Alcamo, the Chief Scientist of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), let me know in no uncertain terms that this whole investigation was a disaster and that it could only lead to further damage to the case for acting on climate change. He was not the only one. Communication with key players in the fourth assessment was difficult. Partly this was due to the fact that we did control their findings and in that sense appeared as forensic researchers reexamining their work. It was difficult if not impossible to convince them of the value of our investigation. This was only made worse by our deliberative format, which required us to share our findings at several moments in the process. As we found many instances in which it was unclear how the IPCC had arrived at its conclusions, we approached them to get their views. Indeed, insisting on a deliberative format we approached all relevant IPCC authors and lead authors to get their feedback on our queries before drawing any conclusions. Interestingly, it was because of this interaction that we came to a subtle understanding of one of the key practices of the IPCC assessment exercise. Expert judgment The assessments of the IPCC are primarily based on an analysis of many thousands of scientific articles. On many policy relevant issues there is no academic work that deals with these issues in a direct way; yet the IPCC working groups have to weigh the existing scientific evidence and come to statements that are meaningful for policymakers. Here the key practice is that of expert judgment. It was through the interaction with the IPCC authors that we came to probe this notion of expert judgment. It was constantly referred to as a magical formula. In many cases, the IPCC had come to judgments in the cause of its proceedings without spelling out the reasoning that led to a particular stance. Our insistence

10 460 M.A. Hajer Figure 5. Structure of the fourth assessment report. Source: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (2010b). on a deliberative format brought out a crucial feature of the IPCC s work, in particular of the work of Working Group II, which focused on the effects of climate change (Working Group I focused on the climate system, Working Group III was devoted to possible policy measures): in cases where the existing literature was inconclusive, it employed expert judgment to fill gaps (Figure 5). Interestingly, this approach turned out to be controversial within the IPCC itself. Some of the scientists active in Working Group I (often physicists, meteorologists and climatologists) looked down on the work of Working Group II. Here epistemological differences mattered. The investigation of the possible effects of climate change was taken on mainly by ecologists, biologists, agricultural scientists. They worked with a very different epistemology, relying less on experiments or theoretical models than on field data and observation. This had been a long smoldering controversy within the IPCC, with little appreciation of the difficulty of making regionally specific assessments of what environmental changes might have been caused by, or relate to, climate change. Implicit here was the question of what sort of science was needed for good policymaking. Crucially, our very understanding of the way in which we should read the IPCC reports came from direct engagement with the authors. Of particular value here were in vivo seminars to discuss our preliminary findings. These meetings were, once again, very emotional as some of the scientists perceived the PBL investigation as an attack on their academic integrity. The deep engagement in these exchanges created the basis for a good reception of the report, as we made sure that whatever we wrote, it would take into account the arguments made, even if we ourselves were often were not persuaded by the arguments. Errors as a frame-up The very notion of errors was, of course, not innocent in itself. That there would be some mistakes in a three volume, 3000-page-long, assessment report is not in itself necessarily a reason to problematize the quality of the science. But there was also the question of what the IPCC assessment was for. Implicit in the media outrage was the accusation that climate scientists were stealth issue advocates (Piehlke 2007): scientist working for a political cause but using science as a fig leaf. For some errors were an inherent and necessary

11 Critical Policy Studies 461 Figure 6. PBL typology of errors and qualifications. part of scientific practice but for others they a clear sign of cheating and interest-based reasoning. The recognition that errors could be seen as a frame-up implied that we needed to come up with our own idea about the quality of the assessment work and then use our own system of classification in order to be able to complete the investigation in a responsible manner. It had to be a system that would do justice to the work of the scientists, speak to the worries of the politicians and, at the same time, help make a persuasive differentiation between sloppiness and unfounded claims. What is more, it needed to help illuminate where the IPCC procedures needed to be reconsidered and redesigned. The authors of the report, led by Leo Meyer and Arthur Petersen, came up with a classification in which errors were redefined and became a subcategory in the overview of findings (see Figure 6). Drawing on the information we had got from our interaction with the IPCC scientists involved, we could be much more precise and effectively reduce the deeply problematic category of inaccurate statement. The classification did more justice to the work of the authors of the IPCC assessment and was not problematized by journalists or skeptics. Assessments as a deliberative practice? The above shows how a deliberative approach, with ample emphasis on the value of engaging different parties in a dialogue of interpretation, helped to combine (1) investigating the quality of the IPCC report with (2) demonstrating that this investigation itself a legitimate investigation done in a responsible manner. In all, the experience illustrated how science and expertise will have to acquire their authority in new ways in our mediatized age. Public performances in times of crisis and incidents may play an important role in this. First of all, this is the moment at which people are interested in learning something. Hence this particular crisis was a chance to explain something about what the IPCC actually is. For example, in a talk radio show in the midst of the first news about the new errors, I effectively spoke for perhaps three minutes and knocked down by two percentage points the number of people who no longer trusted the science in this area. The point is: why assume that people know what the IPCC is about in the first place? Perform when it matters. Secondly, the idea that scientists can judge for themselves what is the case does not speak to the new reality in which there is a larger group of actors contesting scientific

12 462 M.A. Hajer claims. To be sure, expert judgments are crucial in deeply complex issues like climate change. But by making expert judgments more transparent, the reasoning of science can be better understood and questioned. Thirdly, the very idea of making periodic assessment reports may no longer be the single best way to make sure political debates are fact-regarding. At the PBL we introduced the practice of what we call hoovering the public debate: actively responding to false claims made in public debate so as to prevent them lingering in the public consciousness and become more influential than they should be. Fourthly, science should take up a role in public debates. This goes two ways. We allowed the public in, using a public forum to help spot group think, and gained credit for our work. On the other hand, we recommended to the IPCC that they introduce a practice of working with living documents. By creating a website for errata, you state that science and scientific assessments are not infallible and you show your anticipation of (smaller) errors. You step down one step and you gain a lot of credibility. Fifthly, there is more to a good performance than a good argument. Over the course of this case study we saw many cases in which scientists showed their inability to communicate to non-scientists in a persuasive and credible manner. While it is not at all clear what makes for the most formidable performance (an authentic but perhaps flat performance of a scientist might communicate much better the values of impartiality and commitment to knowledge than scientists who have undergone media training, for instance) it was clear here that experts were outflanked in mediatized exchanges with other protagonists. The worst performances were those where the scientists from the Netherlands meteorological institute (KNMI) had been provided with speaking notes, which worked as a straightjacket in their exchanges with aggressive journalists and bloggers, and hindered them in their exchanges with journalists who raised unexpected questions. Sixthly, there is a politics of science. Pesch et al. (2007, p. 487) describe the PBL as a boundary organization that has to facilitate the transfer of knowledge to policy. This implies boundary work which means that they must address the malleable, always provisional, and somewhat ambiguous character of the boundaries between the domains of politics and science and that they have to work on the definition and redefinition of the roles of politics and science in resolving social problems. In the IPCC crisis this came out in the fact that the PBL needed to develop its own take on the situation. There is no way to avoid developing story lines yourself, creating meaning, excluding other readings. When it comes to the current climate debate, to confine oneself to the facts of whether or not climate change is a reality, is itself a choice. There is a lot of value in giving free rein to good, open assessment science, science that focuses on trying to mobilize the information needed for public policy responses to urgent challenges. Sticking to pure science is not a preferred model but a political choice, given its consequences. There is serious evidence that this line of action is promoted precisely for these purposes. Obviously, this domain of boundary work is a risky zone of action. It would be totally irresponsible without a keen eye for the ethical and moral dimensions and a commitment to openness and accountability. Finally, while I have reported on a Dutch investigation that was necessary to rescue a Dutch minister, this account illustrates how the authority of science can be affected by very local events. Looking back we can safely say it did not aggravate the crisis of credibility; and, arguably, it informed the reform agenda for the IPCC itself. Had we conducted it differently it could have put the IPCC and climate politics in jeopardy. That in itself is a reason to carefully reflect on the sort of pressure field that you have to operate in once you get into a media storm in the global risk society.

13 Critical Policy Studies 463 Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the intellectual stimulus of the researchers at PBL working on the project described, most notably the editors of the study, Leo Meyer and Arthur Petersen. A first version of this paper was presented as the keynote lecture at the Sixth Annual IPA Conference in Cardiff (23 25 June 2011). I should like to thank Patsy Healey who acted as respondent for her initial reflections. Notes on contributor Maarten A. Hajer is currently Director of PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency ( Planbureau voor de leefomgeving ) and Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of over ten books and numerous journal articles. His most recent publication is an essay published by the PBL, The Energetic Society (see Note 1. Ironically, the error came to light through the work of a journalist, Tomas van Heste. Van Heste, a graduate of the UvA s STS programme, had simply run a Google search on the Netherlands in the IPCC s fourth assessment report and this was his first hit. He thought: This cannot be true and suddenly he had a scoop that made it to the global media (Tomas van Heste, personal communication). References Alcamo, J. et al., Europe. In: M.L.Parry et al.,eds, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Beck, U., Risk society towards a new modernity. London: Sage. Beck, U., World risk society. Cambridge: Polity Press Dryzek, J., Discursive democracy: politics, policy, and political science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, R., On the concept of authority in political philosophy. In: J. Raz, ed. Authority. New York: New York University Press, Friedrich, C., Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friedrich, C.,1972. Tradition and authority. London: Pall Mall. Fung, A., Weil, M., and Graham, D., Full disclosure: the perils and promise of transparency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hajer, M.A., Authoritative governance: policy making in an age of mediatization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hajer, M.A. and Wagenaar, H., eds, Deliberative policy analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jasanoff, S., The fifth branch: science advisers and policy makers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jasanoff, S., Designs on nature: science and democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kickert, W.J.M. et al., eds, Managing complex networks. London: Sage. Morgan, M., Traveling facts. In: P. Howlett and M. Morgan, eds. How well do facts travel? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parry, M.L. et al., eds Climate change 2007: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Working Group II contribution to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 2010a. Wetenschapper versus Skepticus. Working paper. The Hague; Bilthoven: PBL. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 2010b. Assessing an IPCC assessment an analysis of statements on projected regional impacts in the 2007 report. The Hague; Bilthoven: PBL.

14 464 M.A. Hajer Pesch, U. et al., A boundary organization and its changing environment: the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the MNP. Environment and planning C: government and policy, 30, Piehlke, R., The honest broker: making sense of science in policy and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rein, M. and Schon, D., Frame-reflective policy discourse. In: F. Fischer and J. Forester, eds. The argumentative turn in policy and planning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strengers, B. et al., in press. Opening up scientific assessments for policy: the importance of transparency in expert judgments. Science and public policy. Warren, M., Deliberative democracy and authority, American political science review, 90(1),