IPBES in a Double Bind: Science, Sovereignty and the Craft of Authority

This article reframes the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a site of meta-communication within the international legal order, using Gregory Bateson’s double-bind theory to explain how the Platform manufactures authority while being structurally mandated to both stay out of politics and make a difference. The article reconstructs a constitutive sovereignty injunction, anchored in control anxieties over interstate legitimacy and the legally non-binding character of IPBES outputs, alongside a science injunction that demands policy-relevant knowledge capable of orienting conduct across a polycentric governance space. Through close readings of the shift, at IPBES, from ecosystem services to nature’s contributions to people (NCP) and the uptake of ‘transformative change’ as the new normative horizon, the article shows how the framing of choices and procedures operates to manage the science–law interface without breaching mandate boundaries. The paper’s contribution is conceptual and diagnostic: it replaces generic invocations of ‘tension’ and ‘balance’ with a double-bind account that clarifies what IPBES can do as an epistemic institution and why balancing diagnostic candour with prescriptive constraint is an ongoing craft of authority rather than a design problem that can be resolved once and for all.