Quality assurance in context: A review of standards, best practices, and guidelines for quality assurance of climate services

This deliverable presents a meta-review of standards, best practices and guidelines for quality assurance (for providing the credibility, salience and legitimacy of climate services). It focuses on the public sector as a particular form of science-policy interaction. In particular, this deliverable is based on concepts and insights from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) to understand how forms of quality assurance work in practice. We find that there is no one-size-fits- all form for quality assurance. Our preliminary findings indicate that the concept of climate services, co-production, and standards are used and interpreted differently across different communities. It is worth noting that different groups of actors use climate services for different ends, and it makes a huge difference in which decision-making context information is used – e.g. on urban planning or by economic actors for creating markets for climate services. The decision-making context/ ‘ecology’ and its logic shapes what form of knowledge is needed and what form of quality assurance is seen as salient and legitimate. STS concepts help us to understand how climate services and forms of quality control are embedded into and resonate with their political context and reflect well-established decision-making structures and local values. The salience and legitimacy of climate services cannot be taken for granted. Instead, they can get lost and have to be actively maintained. They relate to the trust and persuasive power of the institutions who provide climate services. As a result, climate services need to be translated into local contexts and fit to local practices and values. Processes of providing legitimacy and credibility become difficult to formalise without diluting local specificities and contextual nuance. Instead, climate services should be both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites and offer a means of translation. Drawing on the STS literature, we define standardization as a process of constructing uniformities across time and space, through the generation of agreed-upon rules and a script. Instead of linking standardisation to any overarching historical trajectory (such as a tendency toward global social convergence and homogeneity), we argue for a differentiated and symmetrical approach that investigates the full spectrum of choices of standardisation for providing the quality of climate services. We emphasise the variety of ways in which standards and standardisation undergird diverse social, cultural, political, and economic logics and values, as well as the equally varied implications for the well-being and suffering of individuals and social groups. In this lens, the deliverable analyses existing standards as well best practices and guidelines for providing quality assurance of climate services. These include standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and a number of European funded projects in the context of the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes. Following the seminal work in STS, we seek to reconstruct the script that brings people and things together in a world already full of competing conventions and standards. CE2 offers a great window of opportunity to reconstruct the processes of the creation of standards for climate services in an empirically sound way. We seek to identify the variety of choices available for designing standards for climate services, reflect their specific logic and set of priorities as well as their outcomes. Based on such a comparison of design choices, we explore the space for possible intervention to shape standardisation in a more responsible and sustainable way.