Knowing and unknowing transformative change: Epistemic inequities and epistemic justice in the IPBES transformative change assessment

Calls for transformative change towards a just and sustainable world often discuss the role of paradigms and knowledge systems as levers for transformation. Yet, current knowledge practices can also obstruct transformation since research priorities reflect dominant interests in science, economy and society and dominant paradigms and knowledge systems, and marginalise alternative forms of knowledge. This situation posed a challenge for the Transformative Change Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). This article reflects on how the assessment reported on existing inequities in the knowledge that was available for the assessment and discusses whether and how it was able to mitigate these existing inequities and pursue epistemic justice in the assessment process. Our findings point to a general dominance of positivist and natural science literature and an underrepresentation of alternative, pluralist, critical, relational, and Indigenous paradigms and knowledge systems. We also show that the assessment process was limited in its ability to mitigate these epistemic inequities and was unable to prevent epistemic injustices from occurring. These findings are related to a diversity of factors including limited diversity in the assessment team, rules and procedures of IPBES, and wider structural factors, including specific dominant norms and values of what good and credible knowledge is and of how assessments should be developed. All in all, we note a persistent unknowing of transformative change through the production of ignorance. We conclude by identifying options for transforming environmental research and global environmental assessments.