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International environmental advisory bodies are tasked with the daunting challenge of collecting and synthesizing knowledge about a specific issue-area by speaking in one ‘global scientific voice’. However, the ‘type of knowledge’ issuing from these bodies can hardly meet the expectations of ‘getting the science right’, as scientific issues inevitably end up being framed in different ways. Although accounts of contestation between various knowledge claims are abundant in the literature focusing on international advisory bodies, the implications of these tensions for science–policy interplay remain poorly understood. In particular, analyses of and reflections on the relationship between knowledge outputs and particular institutional arrangements are underdeveloped. This paper attempts to address this gap, postulating a link between knowledge outcomes and institutional design. By introducing the concept of ‘epistemic framings’, it explores the different ways in which soil and land degradation issues are framed by scientific advisory bodies at the global level. The analysis, conducted through the Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) method, suggests that international scientific advisory bodies may frame epistemic issues in ways that are influenced by the policy setting to which they are institutionally bound. Further research on the dynamics of science–policy interaction at the global level could test the assumptions made in this paper and shed light on the structural (including institutional design) and agential factors influencing advisory bodies’ epistemic framings.

Although international actors operating under the United Nations umbrella put much faith in the possibility of bridging science and policy through various institutional arrangements, research in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition suggests that different civic epistemologies revolve around environmental degradation issues. Civic epistemologies , which imply peculiar understandings of knowledge across cultures, are not easily bridged. This paper contends that conflicting (civic) epistemologies inevitably emerge in epistemic debates at the intergovernmental level, with strong implications for how science and knowledge are dealt with and understood in environmental negotiations. Drawing on the experience of global soil and land governance and building on the idiom of civic epistemologies , the concept of intergovernmental epistemologies is introduced as an analytical tool to capture the diverging ways of appreciating and validating knowledge in intergovernmental settings. Placing state actors and their perspectives center stage, intergovernmental epistemologies account for the tensions, contestations and politicisation processes of international institutional settings dealing with environmental issues. The paper concludes discussing the consequences of intergovernmental epistemologies for the study of global environmental governance: it cautions about overreliance on approaches based on learning and all-encompassing discourses, emphasizing the value of using STS-derived concepts to investigate the complexity of international environmental negotiations.