Expertise in transition. How inclusion of social science reshapes a global environmental assessment

Global environmental assessments (GEAs) are increasingly expected to address transformative societal change, creating a growing demand for social science expertise. While previous research has examined the inclusion of the social sciences in GEAs, less attention has been paid to how social scientists themselves experience and enact expertise within these processes. This paper examines expertise in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment, a distinctive case in which social scientists constituted the majority of the authors. Drawing on an analysis of IPBES documents and interviews with social scientists in leading authorship roles, the study explores how expertise is enacted and reshaped when social scientists occupy a more central position in a GEA. The analysis combines Collins and Evans’s distinction between contributory, interactional, and meta-expertise with Barry and Born’s typology of interdisciplinary collaboration. The findings reveal a distinction between being recognized as an expert and acting as one within the assessment process. They further show that social scientists partly assume roles that differ from those traditionally associated with natural scientists, while the assessment oscillates between different modes of interdisciplinarity. The study demonstrates how the growing prominence of social science expertise reshapes interdisciplinary relations and the distribution of expert roles within GEAs. The paper concludes that effectively addressing transformative challenges requires not only broader disciplinary inclusion but also stronger organizational support for epistemic reflexivity and critical interdisciplinary engagement.