International Science,Domestic Politics: Russian Reception of International Climate-Change Assessments

After Russia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2004 the domestic debate over climate science cooled and the official discourse on the causes of climate change came somewhat closer to international consensus. This paper seeks to examine how these changes in Russian policy makers' publicly communicated understandings of climate science have been brought about by analyzing the reception of international scientific assessments of climate change in Russian domestic debate. The paper takes as its analytical point of departure the literature on epistemic communities, which suggests that scientists involved in assessment processes may act as agents of diffusion of international expert consensus in their ‘home’ states. The analytical heart of the paper is a case-study analysis based on interviews with Russian scientists who have participated in international climate assessment exercises. Findings indicate that Russian participants in the International Panel on Climate Change and the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment did not play a role as ‘informational entrepreneurs’ in deliberative processes leading to key decision-making moments, although they fulfilled other important functions at the national level. The paper concludes by arguing that stronger Russian adherence to international expert consensus was part of a ‘package deal’ of already well-established international-level political and ideational positions that Russia adopted after deciding to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Consequently, conceptualizations of expert knowledge diffusion need to account for a temporal dimension, as the mechanisms of diffusion and the nature of reception of international expert knowledge may vary according to whether the country in question has been at the vanguard of a policy issue (‘policy leader’) or somewhat more of a laggard (‘policy follower’).