Global Environmental Change 11 (2001) 297–309 Big science, small impactsFin the South? The influence of global environmental assessments on expert communities in India Frank Biermann* Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, 14412 Potsdam, Germany Received 8 February 2000; received in revised form 20 March 2001 Abstract To help decision-makers cope with the uncertainty of global environmental change, transnational networks of experts have offered numerous assessments of the state of knowledge, often advertised as consensus of ‘‘international science’’. Substantial social science research has already analysed the effects of such global environmental assessments on industrialized countries; this study explores their influence in India as a pivotal developing country. It appears that although global environmental assessments did not remain without any influence in India, their effect is still small. These limitations could be addressed, it is argued, by increasing the usefulness and legitimacy of global environmental assessments in the South through stronger consideration of the socio-economic context of developing countries and other Southern concerns and interests, by raising the participation of Southern experts, by enhancing research capacities in and communication links to the South, and by ensuring that global environmental assessments are organized as self-adaptive processes, such as IPCC, and not as one-shot effort, such as the Global Biodiversity Assessment. r 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Global environmental assessments; India; Global change research; Climate change; Biodiversity; Stakeholder participation 1. Introduction Many global environmental problems have sparked off formidable increases in scientific research, as well as in international scientific cooperation for assessing the accumulated knowledge and for synthesizing it in a form accessible and useful to decision-makers. About 2500 scientists, for example, have been working with the UN- sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its three-volume report Climate Change1995 (IPCC, 1996a–c). The Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA, 1995) involved participation of roughly 1500 experts in its field, and hundreds of experts took part in the compilation of the assessments on the state of the stratospheric ozone layer, such as the reports of the Co- ordinating Committee on the Ozone Layer, the ‘‘Blue Books’’ of 1986 and the reports of assessment panels under the UN Environment Programme, which acts as secretariat of the ozone treaties (Benedick, 1998; Jung, 1999; Litfin, 1994; Social Learning Group, 2001b,c). Despite all these efforts, the question arises: do such assessments really matter in the course of policy- making, and if so, for whom do they matter? This question is not newFsubstantial research has already been directed to the influences of global environmental assessments in industrialized countries, in particular in the areas of climate change and regional air pollution (e.g., Cash, 1998; Farrell and Keating, 1998; Fisher- Vanden, 1997; Global Environmental Assessment Pro- ject, 1997; Keating and Farrell, 1998; Moser, 1998; Social Learning Group, 2001a). Here, it could be shown that global environmental assessments clearly make a difference in national environmental politics. This research has also indicated that the influence of global assessments varies significantly between Western indus- trialized countries and the countries in transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe (Botcheva, 1998; VanDeveer, 1998). Less research, however, has been done on the influence of global environmental assessments in the South. This will thus be the focus of this study: How does information flow from global to local, from global environmental assessments compiled by transnational scientific networks to national decision-making in the *Tel.: +49-331-288-2572; fax: +49-331-288-2600. E-mail address: biermann@pik-potsdam.de (F. Biermann). 0959-3780/01/$-see front matter r 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0959-3780(01)00008-5