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Our understanding of climate change is dominated by quantified scientific knowledge, with science and politics usually seen as operating separately and autonomously from one another. By investigating a particular fact box in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), this paper challenges the assumption that science and policy can be clearly delineated. The so-called "Bali Box" gained a prominent role in negotiations leading up to the Copenhagen Conference in 2009, as it was widely seen as providing a "fixed point" – a quantified scientific answer to the question of equitable effort-sharing between North and South. This understanding of the Bali Box triggered a backlash, however, when the hybrid character of the box as an assemblage of science, political considerations and moral judgements became evident to actors in the negotiations. The paper employs the notion of boundary objects to analyse the history of the Bali Box, and argues that climate politics will benefit from a richer understanding of the interplay between science and policy. Moving beyond characterizations that place the Bali Box on either side of a clear boundary between the scientific and the political, we suggest focusing instead on what the Box as a hybrid product is doing, i.e. how it simplifies and quantifies, what it covers and what it leaves outside. ; acceptedVersion

Under what conditions does science influence environmental policy? International Relations (IR) scholars, such as Peter M Haas, have argued that to gain political influence, science should not connect to policy before scientific consensus has been reached. We take this suggestion as a point of departure for investigating how science is and should be connected to policy in international environmental governance. Using insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the contribution of IR is critically discussed, both to present its limitations and, primarily, to further develop the understanding of scientific consensus within IR and the need for separation and connections between science and policy. The organization and performance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the various assessments made by scholars from IR and STS, is used as an illustrative case. From the discussion of IR and STS and the role of the IPCC in climate policy, we conclude that the focus within STS on contextual and informal factors could shed light on how science and technology are understood by IR scholars, who focus more on the formal organizational design of the interplay between science and policy.