In_equality Podcast

What is the Link between Conflict and Inequality? with Halvard Buhaug

• Universität Konstanz - Exzellenzcluster "The Politics of Inequality" • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Hosts:
Marius R. Busemeyer – Professor of Comparative Political Economy at the University of Konstanz and Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.

Gabriele Spilker – Professor of „International Politics - Global Inequality“ at the University of Konstanz and Co-Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.

Guest:
Halvard Buhaug – Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

®    Expert in civil wars, group-based inequality, climate-conflict interactions

®    Lead author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report


Episode Overview:
In the 5th episode of the In_equality Podcast, hosts Gabriele Spilker and Marius R. Busemeyer speak with conflict researcher Halvard Buhaug about the links between inequality, political violence, and climate change. The conversation explores different types of inequality, how they affect the risk of conflict, and the role of institutions, education, and global cooperation in preventing violent escalation.

 

Key Topics Discussed:

1. What Is Conflict?

2. How Inequality Fuels Conflict

3. The Role of Democracy, Wealth, and Education

4. Climate Change as a Conflict Driver

5. What Can Be Done?

6. Inside the IPCC Process


Links & Ressources:

Mehr über den Exzellenzcluster „The Politics of Inequality“.

More about the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”

Kontakt: cluster.inequality@uni-konstanz.de

Contact: cluster.inequality@uni-konstanz.de

Transcript Episode 5: What is the Link between Conflict and Inequality?” with Halvard Buhaug

GABRIELE SPILKER: Welcome to a new episode of the Inequality Podcast. My name is Gabriele Spilker and I'm a professor for Global Inequality. Next to me sits ...

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: Marius Busemeyer, I am a professor of comparative political economy here at the Cluster of Politics of Inequality.

GABRIELE SPILKER: And our guest today is Halvard Buhaug. Halvard is a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and the professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Peace Research, and he is a chapter lead author in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, something we will return to later in the podcast. Most importantly, however, at least for us, Halvard is currently a senior fellow at our Cluster of Excellence, the Politics of Inequality. Welcome, Halvard.

HALVARD BUHAUG: Thanks so much.

GABRIELE SPILKER: In his research, Halvard focuses on conflict and important for us on inequality. And this is what we would like to talk with him today in our Inequality podcast. In addition, much of his more recent research investigates the security dimensions of climate change and therefore we will also discuss how the security implications of climate change might affect the relationship between inequality and conflict. So, let's go.

Halvard, maybe before we start talking directly about your research, a pretty basic question. What is conflict for you? What do you do research about when you investigate conflict? How do political scientists think about measure-defying conflict?

HALVARD BUHAUG: Yeah, that's a good question and I think it's good that we have that clarification from the outset. At least for me, when I say conflict and when I think about conflict, I think about organized political and deadly violence. I come from the quantitative peace and conflict research tradition, where we're using statistical methods, we compare countries over time, and we try to identify what explains why some countries have conflicts and others do not. And when we do that kind of research, we need data sets with more specific definitions of conflict. And what most researchers use, including myself in my own work, is to rely on data from Uppsala University and they define armed conflict as deadly conflict between organized parties that cause at least 25 deaths in a year.

So, these are not conflicts of interest. These are not quarrels between individuals. These are pretty bad, pretty severe armed conflict between organized groups. If a state or a state actor is involved, then we typically call it a civil conflict. If it's a state between a non-state actor. If it's between states, we call it interstate, or you may also refer to it as an international conflict. But you can also have conflict between organized non-state groups and those we typically call non-state conflicts.

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: Now, it already sounds pretty serious. So, if you have organized groups basically fighting each other for life and death, so I'm coming more from the welfare state perspective and the sociological perspective, so to speak. And of course, there is also the term conflict, right? And so, if you look at this from this more sociological perspective, how the societal conflict connects to inequality, usually we don't, even in like the United States today where there's a lot of conflict and polarization, people not yet engage in armed conflict. So how do you draw the boundary there? I mean, is it just a definitional issue? You have to have so many dead people to be able that you guys are interested in it and if it's below a certain number of dead people, welfare state guys are doing, oh, I'm joking wrong and with a serious matter that I should do, but anyway, so how do you draw the boundary here with different definitions? When is a societal conflict turned into a violent conflict?

HALVARD BUHAUG: Right. So, I think there is a lot of commonalities between the kinds of conflict that you do in your research and the sociologists are interested in and the more severe kinds of armed and deadly conflicts that we focus on. So, you may think of the types of conflict that we focus on as kind of the tip of the iceberg, the most severe subset of conflicts.

Now the reason why, for example, Uppsala University that provides the industry standard when it comes to statistics on armed conflict, why they have chosen this minimum or lower-level severity threshold of 25 deaths in a year, it's maybe a little bit arbitrary. They could have chosen 24, they could have chosen 10, they could have chosen 100. But in their view, 25 represents some kind of a balance between inclusivity and completeness. They want to make sure that their statistics are as inclusive as possible, that they are able to capture and to code events all across the world that satisfy their criteria, but at the same time, not limited to the only the big wars, the Ukraine or the Israel gas or whatever.

So, it's that kind of trade-off and in my research, of course, I do depend on having data that are reasonable representations of what is going on in the world. If I were to study what goes on in the world across 50 years with interest conflicts, it would be very hard, I think, to have data on those kinds of conflict across all countries of the world. So again, you have this trade-off, I think, between inclusivity and being able to make some meaningful analysis.

GABRIELE SPILKER: So, if we now focus on these really severe types of conflict, what do you think you can synthesize on what we know about very generally how inequality affects conflict? And is that the same for all types of conflict? But maybe that's already a too big of a question.

HALVARD BUHAUG: Yeah, no, these are big questions. And I'm sure that if you have interviewed some other or spoken with some other experts in this studio, you might have received somewhat different responses. Let me give you my understanding of the literature and my knowledge, of course, also informed by my own research.

Of course, first of all, if you think of theories and intuition about why inequality or should inequality be associated with conflict, I think most people would agree, yeah, sure. I mean, inequality, if perceived, and if pronounced, leads to frustration, especially, of course, if that inequality is felt to be unfair, right? Some people unfairly have privileges that others unfairly miss, right? That leads to frustration, which could potentially lead to anger. And anger, of course, obviously is a step towards conflict. So, I think in terms of intuition, I think it makes a lot of sense that inequality should be linked to conflict.

If you look at some of the older classical theories of civil war, of revolution, they also very often refer to frustration, to grievances, to relative deprivation, meaning, again, that subgroups of the population are either marginalized or they are lagging behind, whereas an elite, then gaining more right over time, such that inequality increases. And if peaceful ways of trying to protest against and changing the situation, if those attempts fail, well, what are we left with? Maybe mobilization and the use of violent force. So, from the theoretical side, I think there are strong arguments. Why prevalent and strong inequalities in the society should increase the likelihood that that society experiences several conflicts or violent conflict.

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: I think I totally agree with you, and it seems very plausible, but maybe also, again, bringing in this more sociological perspective on conflict, there we often, also we in our cluster research, often find the opposite, right? I mean, that inequality, yeah, it might increase some sort of conflict about values or conflict about resources, but often actually it doesn't automatically lead to political mobilization because those people with less resources, they also don't have the necessary resources to become politically active. And I don't know, I mean, that's the question to you. Is there maybe a threshold effect if the grievances become so large that, as you said indirectly before, there's no other way of turning to weapons, I guess, in the end, or to actually go on the street and protest? Is it a matter of how big the inequalities are, or is it maybe also to some extent related to different types of inequality?

HALVARD BUHAUG: I would definitely say the latter much more so than the former. And this is where I think the distinction between what we refer to as a vertical inequality or inequality between individuals in a society, between the richest and the poorest, for example, and horizontal inequality, which is inequality between groups in society, that distinction is crucial. Because if you look at the empirical research and the empirical evidence on how inequality is linked to violent conflict, there is much stronger evidence for horizontal inequality or systematic differences in privileges, in income levels, in political rights between some groups and other groups. The evidence for that type of inequality leading to conflict is much stronger than for a Gini coefficient for those of the listeners being familiar with data on inequality is being linked to conflict. Because that is actually not particularly strong, that connection. And you're right. If you are sufficiently marginalized, and maybe if you don't have other ways of mobilizing, the result may be apathy more than mobilization and conflict.

GABRIELE SPILKER: I have a follow-up question on that. You just said if the context is right or if groups cannot somehow rectify the situation by other means, does that not already hint towards certain context conditions? So, do these findings depend on the country context, are all countries in which there are marginalized groups or some groups who earn much less than others, equally likely to go to war? Or do we see here systematic differences between different countries?

HALVARD BUHAUG: Absolutely. Context matters a lot here. And again, referring to the empirical evidence, what we can see is that when there are overlaps between different types of horizontal inequality, then conflict is much more likely than if there is only inequality in one dimension.

So, to give one example, if you have groups of society where some groups are really rich and others are really poor, but all groups enjoy the same political privileges, all group enjoy the rights to practice their religion, to practice their language, etc., the risk of conflict may not necessarily be that high. But if you see another society where the same groups are both marginalized in economic sense, they may lack political privileges relative to the lead, they may not be able to or allow to practice a religion, their language, etc. Maybe they have different skin colour, different historical origin. If there is an overlap between these different identity dimensions, then we really, really start to see conflict risk rising.

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: But maybe we can talk a little bit more about the concrete examples, maybe even talk about individual countries to make it a little bit more tangible, so to speak. Because this with about the horizontal inequalities is an argument that applies to multiethnic societies to some extent, I guess, right, where you have lots of different ethnicities. And, you know, if you look at European countries, Switzerland, just around the corner here in Constance, they had deep divides or still have to some extent the “Rösti Graben” is still alive. Belgium is another case. Germany maybe to some extent, but with the advent of democracy, what happened then is exactly what you described, that you have the same political rights across these different groups. So that would also suggest if you look at other countries, and maybe you have also some concrete examples there, where you have a basically a correlation between your ethnicity and different types of political rights, which can by definition only happen in countries that are not full democracies. So obviously there is a connection to democratic political decision making there as well, right?

HALVARD BUHAUG: Absolutely. And I don't know if you're going to talk about, you know, potential solutions, and I would not necessarily be the right person to speak at length about that either. But obviously, given that a democracy is so strongly linked to, by definition, to insuring equal political rights to everybody, transferring from an exclusionary or discriminatory political system to a democratic system, even with other prevalent inequalities, would by itself, I think, significantly lower the risk of seeing violent conflict.

GABRIELE SPILKER: Yet, the countries Marius just referred to, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany have something else in common other than being a democracy. They're also pretty rich, right? And this is often what our quantitative research is plagued with them. Good or bad things come in bundles, so they come together. So how do we know that it's democracy in contrast to, for instance, being rich or geographical location that no neighbouring country has conflict and these kinds of things? Maybe you can tell our listeners how research can distinguish here and how we can know later to recommend, for instance, policymakers that they should really strive for democracy.

HALVARD BUHAUG: I mean, what a quantitative scholar like me would do would, of course, be to try to estimate this in statistical models and to account for some of these factors, you know, income level, level of democracy, population size, and all the factors that we know or believe would be relevant, to compare them in the same model and to basically see what does the data tell us, what does the statistical model tell us in terms of which of these variables seem to be more important. But you are right, they tend to go together, right?

If you look at the countries of the world, those who tend to be more democratic also tend to be richer. It's not without exception, but these variables tend to go together. And there are good reasons for that because with better economic performance, there tends to be more political stability, and democratic governance also inspires more stable, long term economic growth. So, these are not only correlated, they're also to some extent, causally related.

But, you know, I mentioned this with another exception, and I could also, of course, give exception of countries that are pretty rich, but which still have seen violent conflict. I mean, Northern Ireland conflict is not all that many years ago, and the UK, of course, is one of the richer countries of the world. To the extent that you would consider the ongoing conflict in Gaza as part of Israel, you know, Israel is also a high-income country, right? So even high-income levels certainly is no remedy against any form of violent conflict.

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: Speaking of maybe other public policies besides democracy or contextual variables, because if there's a connection between inequality and conflict, you might also want to do something about the prevailing level of inequality. And this is not just about democratic decision-making, but you could just imagine welfare state policies, social policies, education policies that might also reduce some of the inequality independent to some extent of political citizenship rights. Do you see that this might also have an effect, or is it in the end still more effective to work with democracy, so to speak?

HALVARD BUHAUG: No, I definitely believe there is more to be done than just look at democratic system or elections, for that matter. And education certainly is very important. Now I'm moving myself towards area research that I haven't contributed to myself. So maybe my knowledge of the field is somewhat less exhaustive, but definitely there is a lot of research showing that investments in education in otherwise low-income contexts can have a very important effect on reducing levels of violence but also reducing the risk of new violence erupting. And education certainly can be an important policy and instrument to try to lessen inequalities in the society.

GABRIELE SPILKER: But here I have a follow-up question. I fully agree with this finding and also with the policy recommendation of having more education. Having more education is typically always good and helps for almost everything. However, is that really independent of whether a country is a democracy or not? Because if we are in a country that is a non-democracy, maybe those in government just don't want to increase education because it might not all types of education, because at the end of the day, that might be challenging towards the government itself. So, might there still be incentives built in within a specific type of country, being as a democracy or an autocracy, that then let them not choose specific policies to combat inequality?

HALVARD BUHAUG: No, definitely. I think you could see that already ongoing in the world. And maybe we could even see that as one reason why women and girls in Afghanistan, for example, are denied the ability to take education because that's seen as a potential future threat to the existence of the current society. So definitely you see that. And those are challenges that need to be overcome in order to invest in education. But obviously, conflict can be another barrier also. So, education is good in preventing conflict, but where there is already conflict going on, it's also very hard, I think, to ensure that the education system continues to work.

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: Maybe we can move on to the next big question in the room, namely the question about climate change and how that might matter in all of this. So, this is yet another big factor that can influence not only pervading levels of inequality, but also conflict, I guess. How does climate change matter in that context of your research?

HALVARD BUHAUG: So, I've contributed to research on the extent to which climate change can affect peace and conflict without reflecting really on inequality for a number of years. And there's a large and really rapidly expanding literature on that. And what most scholars seem to agree on is that to the extent that climate change will have an influence and already maybe has an influence on conflict dynamics, it is really in the most vulnerable parts of the world. And what characterizes those areas?

Well, typically, these are areas that are low in income, where much of the economic activity and much of the livelihoods depend on agriculture, on living off the land, right? And we also know that with climate change, temperatures will change, typically they will increase, the extremes will be more severe, rainfall patterns may change. And it's going to be harder in many areas, not everywhere necessarily, but in many areas, it's going to be really, really hard to live off the land. And if that affects the communities that do farming and husbandry or raising cattle more, than it'll affect the more educated urban citizens, of course, inequality will increase as a consequence of that. And for reasons we've already touched on a little bit in this conversation, the risk of political conflict at some level, I think also could increase.

GABRIELE SPILKER: Here, I have a question that we already discussed a few episodes back and one that always makes our lives as researchers on inequality slightly difficult. And that is, is it indeed this relative deprivation that matters? So, is it really inequality? Or is it more poverty per se? So, is it or maybe it's both? So, is it that climate change makes some people poorer than others? And it's this relative change in a situation that matters for conflict? Or is it that just some people are so poor that they have nothing left to lose and take up arms? Or is it both?

HALVARD BUHAUG: Definitely it's both. I mean, it is very hard, if not impossible, to fully isolate between the two. And I think when we talk about poverty, I often also tend to see that as very closely linked with low level of development and poor macroeconomic performance. And that has implications beyond just low level of income among individuals. It also reflects a poor ability, maybe even willingness, but certainly poor ability of a central government to provide services to the local population. And those services can be anything from education that we touched on to healthcare to assistance during crises such as droughts and floods. So, lack of income or low levels of income and low levels of development certainly make a society very vulnerable to climate hazards.

Increasing inequalities can also make levels of frustration higher because they feel that we are treated poorly, we are treated unfairly. And the central government, they do not protect us as much as they protect their own co-ethnics or the urban population, right? And of course, that resentment can matter. So, inequality probably would also matter, but I would not rule out the low development / poverty effect, of course. 

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: But maybe, I mean, if you think about this from another perspective, could climate change in the extreme also lead to more solidarity, at least within countries, within societies, because it's a natural catastrophe to some extent. I mean, of course, we know it's human made, but in the end, in the short term, it's more of a natural catastrophe. And if you lose fertile grounds and so on, it affects many people. And potentially, it might also lead to new waves of solidarity within countries that might actually be mitigating some of these conflict dynamics or, I mean, it's an empirical question, so could go both ways. But do you see that happening as well? 

HALVARD BUHAUG: I mean, there is a literature on what is often referred to as disaster diplomacy, where either the threat or the actual disaster event can exactly do that, bring people together. We all are victims of this external force. We need to act together. We need to help each other in order to cope with this and to overcome the suffering, right.

So, at the event level, maybe we could see that. Thinking more broadly of the challenges imposed by climate change, at the moment, I don't see very strong evidence that it'll bring countries together rich and poor, the high emitters and the highest victims. I don't really see them coming together and all feeling that we are in the same boat. I wish I could be optimistic like that. But now thinking of Hollywood movies, of disasters happening and every nationality coming together to solve this, be that asteroid or whatever hitting earth, right? I think we're not quite there yet when it comes to climate change. 

GABRIELE SPILKER: Rather the opposite, right? Then this is where I would like to go back for a moment and then also reflect on what policy makers, international organizations and the like could potentially do to help countries who are in this situation to come out. So, what you described before, it sounds like a conflict trap or a spiral that might make things worse and worse and worse. So, you have these vulnerable populations and climate change materializes in the form of a drought, a flood, another extreme event. People become even more poor relative to others or just on absolute terms. Then conflict comes. Conflict typically also means a lot of destruction, development in reverse. So, people become even more vulnerable and so on and so forth. And somehow, we need to get out or these countries need to get out of this conflict spiral or conflict trap. So, what can be done? 

HALVARD BUHAUG: I definitely think that we who belong to the privileged part of the world, the developed and the richer part of the world and who enjoy political stability and who have no immediate threat to our own lives, we bear a responsibility here in assisting the less privileged populations. Of course, there's a lot of discussion about climate finance and about how the industrialized world can transfer funds and technology, competence and really invest in poor countries and in the vulnerable countries and making them better prepared to the climate change that we cannot avoid. Because even if we invest as much as we can almost in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, there will be at least some level of future climate change because of the inertia of the climate system. 

So, we also need to adapt but we also need then to help the most vulnerable countries to adapt. And of course, that is crucially important, as they cannot do all of that on their own. No society can do that on their own. So, we need to go together. But I mean, I speak more like a politician maybe like than a researcher, but I think it's quite obvious. 

MARIUS R: BUSEMEYER: But actually, that also shows that the international relations affairs that we often think are very distant are actually quite close because they are of course inherently connected to distributional conflicts within our societies. So it's not just about potential refugees coming to Western Europe because of climate change, but it's also about, of course, development aid, defence spending, you know, and in the moment at least that's also what we have learned a little bit from our research is that when people are worried about their own future because of high inequality in their own countries, they also become less willing to make these contributions to collective goods. And we've seen of course the rise of populism in many countries, which is a way an expression of this, you know, parochial selfishness if you want to put it like that. So, would you agree with this? I mean, do you see this connection between domestic politics and international affairs? 

HALVARD BUHAUG: Absolutely. And you know, to some extent, it is fully understandable that people also vote at least partly being mindful of their own wallet, right? And in any democratic system, we need to work around that and, you know, work with that. So, I think transfers and development assistance, climate finance, we need to motivate the population of democratic systems, democratic countries to make them aware of the real benefits of providing that, right? Because you're right, there are some challenges and of course we have domestic challenges in Norway as well, you know, even if Norway is more privileged and more fortunate than many countries. So, we need to convince voters in Norway as well and why it actually pays off not only to those individuals and those societies that Norway and other countries might provide funding to, but also ultimately to a global common good. 

GABRIELE SPILKER: So, this brings us to our last question, namely one about your role as a lead or former lead author of a chapter in the IPCC report. In this role, you slightly leave your normal activity as a researcher behind and rather work as synthesizing other people's research and of course your own research. And I think this is also where politics might enter the field of climate change research and I'm really curious as regards to your experiences. 

HALVARD BUHAUG: Would have been good to have an episode on this but let me try to summarize in one minute or so. So, the IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's mandated by the UN. It was established by the World Meteorological Organization back in 1988. So, the organization is getting old. It published its first assessment report in 1990 and since then there's been five more reports. So, the sixth assessment report was published in 2021 and 2022. So, the mandate of the IPCC is to assess scientific knowledge on climate change, the extent to which it is changing, how it is changing and the key reasons for those changes, then on the implications of climate change in terms of impacts on nature and society and then thirdly on solutions in order to mitigate and to adapt to climate change. And so across these six assessment reports there have been increasing knowledge being assessed and synthesized and so the role of the authors as you mentioned is exactly to read up and to conclude based on the current state of knowledge to what extent is climate change changing, what is the evidence, how certain can we be about the quality of evidence etc. So, confidence really is crucial here. 

GABRIELE SPILKER: So, this means you have read hundreds or thousands of papers and then provide a review of what we know about the societal impact of climate change and what we potentially don't know. Is that what you do? 

HALVARD BUHAUG: Yeah, there is a lot of assessment and a lot of reading and of course we have many authors also. So, I was part of Working Group 2 which is one of three working groups that jointly produced the sixth assessment report and so in Working Group 2 we were around 200, I think, lead authors across 18 chapters and of course each of us had a lot of reading to do. We had a little bit of AI to help us with identifying studies and of course there's a lot of back-room staff also included in terms of RAs for example, RAs and contributing authors in addition to those 200+ lead authors. So, there's a lot of competence, a lot of manpower is effectively involved in producing these reports. 

GABRIELE SPILKER: And so, once you come up with your review and the conclusions based on this review, are they then taken up by policymakers and they say great thanks for putting this together and now we know everything, and we act? Or is something else happening? Are they disputing what you find? Is there something going on in the backgrounds? 

HALVARD BUHAUG: It would have been nice of course if they just shook hands and then said this is super let's act on this. 

GABRIELE SPILKER: That's what I’ve hoped for. 

HALVARD BUHAUG: Exactly, it doesn't work quite like that. So first of all, developing these reports take a number of years because these reports are massive. So, over the 18 chapters of the Working Group 2 part of the sixth assessment report you know we're talking about thousands of pages. It is impossible for policymakers and their advisors to go through those thousands of pages and make any sense of them. 

So, what the IPCC does in addition is to publish a Summary for Policymakers. That's a document of 30 to 40 pages which basically only identifies and elevates the most important insights, the most important takeaway messages where scientific confidence is sufficiently high that actual policy can and maybe should be made on the basis of this knowledge. Now, in order for the Summary for Policymakers document to be approved it basically has to be approved by every member of the IPCC, every UN country or every UN member state that is also a member of the IPCC.

And so, the approval session for this SPM, the Summary for Policymakers, is really a painstaking event. It takes 10 to 14 days where you put on a big screen, you know, line for line, you go through and countries may object to the wording, they may contest, reject to the conclusion of a particular sentence or they may request, you know, what the scientific evidence base for this particular sentence is. And then of course representatives of the authors need to get up to the podium and to explain and to refer to the underlying chapters to explain: okay so the reason why this is written in that way in the SPM is because of this chapter where we write in a longer section and we refer to this in that scientific literature. And there is a lot of background discussions also so that there's need for considerable number of breaks along the way obviously in order for author teams to get together and maybe do some negotiations also being with key countries in order to get everybody on board to approve each line one by one. 

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: But maybe a little bit of a provocative question so this is this is basically an approach that assumes that people care about science. So to speak, I mean this is the idea we bring in the best brains in the world, lots of people they read thousands of papers and then we have the few core recommendations the best evidence that you have. And in a way the of course the expectation implication is that why wouldn't policymakers listen to these guys. But as we've talked about before there's often a lot of distributional conflicts in there and there's often no scientific solution to distributional conflicts because they are distributional conflicts. So if you if one goes more to the major level of the politics of climate change maybe at some point is this approach of evidence-based policymaking so to speak is that is that turning out to be a little bit of a dead end is it maybe better for the bigger goal of doing something about climate change to resort to other forms for instance political mobilization or to focus on the local regional level rather than this big UN based events. 

HALVARDD BUHAUG: Well first of all I definitely would say that the IPCC assessments should not, and do not you know rule out or preclude the opportunities for also doing activism and you know political mobilization so that is certainly true. Second, this painstaking process that I mentioned about you know going through line by line and having all IPCC member states to basically put their stamp of approval at the end you know that does not affect what stands in the underlying chapters which actually provide the scientific evidence. But it does affect and can affect you know the wording and what actually survives from the draft so the final published version of the the Summary for Policymakers. 

And there is some, there are some risks involved here. One is of course some form of self-censoring among authors that there are certain types of information they would not dare to put in the SPM because in all some countries will not approve this, they will object to this and we have to take it out and so let's save ourselves that effort and rather not mention this in the Summary for Policymakers. Another is that findings from the underlying chapters that are judged to be important still are seen as controversial for some member states. It could refer to conflict for just to take that example since I'm a peace and conflict scholar myself and that certain countries would like not to like to see that conflict is bad for the environment and they would negotiate hard or push hard for that particular sentence to be taken out. And you're right that some of the more controversial aspects of the climate science either are self-censored out of the Summary for Policymakers or those issues would not survive the approval session. But at the end of the day, I also think the lead authors or the actual the top brass within the IPCC they deserve a lot of credit because they are really good with negotiations. They're really good with making countries and actors with very vested interests coming together at the end of the day and they have strong convincing power and actually I think they've done a tremendous job in in making the final product as strong as it is.

GABRIELE SPILKER: But is then or are then policymakers or heads of government the real audience for these IPCC reports in the sense that if they can negotiate on the final summary for policymakers and if they negotiate out certain statements there's potentially no likelihood they would, but they will change course because of what is in this report right. But that assumes that from the beginning onwards these were the right audiences but maybe the audience are more people like you and me and Marius who then read about that or our listeners hopefully read about this and then say oh we need to do something we really need to push our governments for more stringent climate actions. 

HALVARDD BUHAUG: Absolutely and of course authors who have been involved in the production of these IPCC reports they also are allowed to and maybe I should even say they have responsibility to also be active and visible in media and of course they can comment on and they can write on aspects of the bigger report that were not covered by the Summary for Policymakers and provide that information to the broader public and of course also by implication to the decision makers not directly through the SPM document but indirectly. 

GABRIELE SPILKER: Thanks, I think this is a perfect way to end this podcast. Thank you, Halvard, for talking with us. Thanks to all our listeners for listening to our podcast and we would like to remind everyone that please have a look out at every first Wednesday in the month for our inequality podcast. 

MARIUS R. BUSEMEYER: Thank you so much for your time and have a great day.

HALVARD BUHAUG: Thanks for inviting me. Great to be here. Thank you.

(This transcript was created using AI.)