Legitimacy Maintenance in Boundary Organizations: Balancing Inclusiveness and Expertise in International Climate Change Assessments

Organizations that operate at the intersection of distinct institutional constituencies – alternatively called hybrid or boundary organizations (BOs) – must frequently manage divergent institutional commitments. When commitments enter into conflict, multi-constituent organizations must find new ways of balancing contradictory imperatives or risk losing support from crucial organizational audiences. How do such organizations balance necessary and competing sources of legitimacy, particularly during moments of crisis? This paper follows one such organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose scientific assessments are crucial for the mobilization of international action on climate change. After the discovery of numerous errors in one of its major reports dealt a blow to the organization’s scientific credibility, the IPCC suffered a crisis of legitimacy as the source of these errors were linked in part to how the organization manages commitments to inclusivity in assessment making. Using counterfactual analysis, I show how the IPCC innovates with new procedures and norms to repair and maintain these twin sources of organizational legitimacy – scientific credibility and inclusive expertise. It does so by developing an approach I call calibrated flexibility. This involves adopting reforms that recalibrate global practices within the organization to ward against accusations of scientific sloppiness, while shoring-up discretionary authority at local levels of organizational decision-making to maintain the ongoing benefits of hybridity necessary for producing salient assessments. Attempting to both maintain and minimize discretionary practices, however, may lead to new legitimacy challenges that need to be monitored and rebalanced through the development of further organizational functions and channels.