Social Learning in the Field of Climate Change

Climate change poses a significant threat to almost all humans. The combat against it and the provision of measures to ameliorate the most dramatic impacts from climate change contribute to the provision of a global public good. Its complexity implies manifold uncertainties from scientific as well as policy-making points of view. Nether do we exactly know how and when climate change will cause damaging impacts nor can we predict future consequences of our actual choices. Preference formation is thereby heavily biased far from perfect. This paper, therefore, discusses social learning as an approach to reduce these uncertainties and to facilitate the policy process by allowing actors to form their preferences on a better knowledge base. It first develops a conceptual approach to the study of social learning phenomena on the basis of contributions from economics, political science and management studies. Second, this framework will be applied to a case study of one particular social actor in the field of international climate policy, namely the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This scientific assessment body will be analyzed with regard to its learning processes and the implications for the policy process at large. Findings show that moments of crisis as well as the existence of a small network of highly committed individuals in the core functions, functioning communication structures, and the existence of mechanisms for reflection helped the social learning processes to emerge.